‘No surprise to advertisers investing in Meta’: Adland reacts to Meta’s predicted overtake of Google in digital ad revenue

Emarketer’s forecast for ad spending has predicted that Meta will overtake Google in digital ad revenue this year both in the US and worldwide for the first time ever. 

Google is projected to reach $239.54bn by the end of 2026 while Meta is on track to generate $243.46bn. 

Meta is also predicted to surpass Google in terms of share, taking 26.8% of worldwide adspend compared to Google’s 26.4%, making Meta the top digital advertising engine beyond just dollars. 

Marketers have been weighing up what this says about the current state of the industry and weigh in on both companies' approach to their respective digital advertising. 

‘Meta is increasingly where demand begins’

Max von Weber, Founder and CEO at Adnomaly: “For years, Google dominated intent while Meta captured attention. Now, attention is beginning to shape intent. Social feeds and short-form video are influencing what people want before they search, turning passive scrolling into active discovery and purchase.”

“In that shift, paid search is starting to lose its grip on the centre of the funnel. Meta, meanwhile, is increasingly where demand begins, not just where it’s captured, and budgets are moving accordingly.”

‘Meta is hitting the sweet spot’ 

Tom Mullany, Director of Strategy at Incubeta: “Both Meta and Google are key to an effective digital strategy (and still growing strongly) but from our perspective Meta is certainly making it easy for businesses to invest.”

“Leveraging AI optimisations, improved formats, and dynamic creative, ‘the algorithm’ seems to have unlocked impressive performance gains. It works in econometrics and we're even seeing returns via third-party attribution.”

“In a broader context, clients are waking up to their historic over-investment in ‘last-click’.”

“Performance matters, but incrementality is driven by audience penetration and effective creative messaging. Meta hits the sweet spot of doing both pretty well, driving growth while making it easy for Finance teams to approve budgets next to a tasty ROAS.”

‘Reflective of an AI-driven retail media ecosystem’

James Taylor, Founder and CEO at Particular Audience: “On one hand, Meta overtaking Google in ad spend indicates that predictive intelligence built on implicit signals is overriding explicit search. On the other hand, it could be symptomatic of search intent spreading across non-Google AI platforms.”

“If we follow the first idea, the learning for Retail Media Networks (RMNs) is that they have a parallel, and arguably more potent, network effect rooted entirely in commercial intent rather than social engagement. Within an AI-driven retail media ecosystem, the platform fundamentally gets better for every user, with every user. Every click, browse path, and basket addition acts as a training weight for the algorithmic models.”

“As shopper volume scales, the collaborative filtering, transformer models, and prediction science become exponentially more accurate. The next shopper receives a hyper-personalised discovery experience precisely because the AI has learned from the collective intent graph of everyone before them. This creates a compounding flywheel: better density of shopper signals drives higher AI accuracy, which delivers unprecedented ROAS for advertisers, which in turn funds a more relevant, subsidised experience for the consumer. That is the true network effect of retail media.”

“If we take the second idea that discovery is fragmenting, then building MCP (Model Context Protocol) infrastructure for AI interoperability is increasingly urgent. I think both ideas have merit and both should shape RMN technology plans this year.”

‘This is no surprise to advertisers investing in Meta’

James Monaghan, Client Services Director at Kinase, said: “The fact that Meta's ad revenue is growing twice as fast as Google's – and may overtake Google this year, certainly resets old ideas of how channels split out, but is no surprise to advertisers who have been investing a lot more in Meta as the results have sharply improved post-Andromeda update.”

“Google still has time to increase growth and ad revenue this year though – and their announcement this week that old campaign types like Dynamic Search Ads will update to AI Max in September shows how they plan their own AI-supercharging of Google Ads this year.”

Read more in: Performance Marketing World