Voice Search Ads: 50% of Queries by 2028

The ad world is getting turned on its head by voice search and visual search. These aren’t future-tense technologies anymore, they’re changing how people find products right now, which means our ad targeting has to change too. This is a breakdown of how you can actually use this stuff to connect with your audience.

The Rise of Conversational Commerce Through Voice Search

Voice search isn’t a party trick anymore. It’s built into the daily routine for millions of people using smart speakers, their phones, and even their cars. We’re already at a point where a huge number of searches are spoken. A 2025 report from IAB found that about 40% of all online searches had a voice component, and that’s expected to hit 50% by 2028. This means you have to stop thinking only about short, typed keywords. People don’t type “bakery gluten-free Atlanta”. They ask their phone, “Where can I find a gluten-free bakery near Piedmont Park that’s open now?” They talk in full sentences and expect a straight answer. The intent behind a spoken query is usually way more specific, which is a goldmine for targeting. That query gives you dietary needs, a location, and urgency all at once. Old-school keyword matching can’t handle that, but newer natural language processing (NLP) algorithms are getting good at parsing these complex requests. So, your job is to start optimizing for long, question-based phrases and making sure you have a direct answer ready for a voice assistant to read out. A good starting point is making sure your Google Business Profile is carefully updated because that’s where voice assistants grab local info. We’ve seen local Atlanta businesses get a 20% lift in voice-driven traffic just by keeping their hours and services current. But the real power is in context. Assistants learn a user’s habits over time, their past searches, their calendar, their smart home routines. This makes it possible to deliver an ad based on a whole pattern of behavior, not just a single query. Sure, there are privacy concerns, and platforms are working on that, but the ability to reach someone at the exact right moment with an offer they’ll actually find useful is incredible. You have to provide value that fits into their day, not just interrupt it.

Visual Search: From Pixels to Purchases

While voice is about what people say, visual search is about what they see. Tools like Google Lens and Pinterest Lens let people use their camera as a search bar, they snap a photo of something and instantly get results for similar items, price comparisons, or where to buy it. For retail, this completely changes the game. Someone sees a pair of shoes they like on the street, takes a picture, and is on a product page in seconds. Window shopping just became an immediate purchase signal. An eMarketer report from late 2025 was already projecting visual search queries would top 20 billion a year by 2026, so this is a major channel for discovery. For us advertisers, this means the “keyword” is now an image. The quality of your product photography and the metadata attached to it are everything. You need high-res photos from multiple angles and rich descriptions that tag attributes like color, material, style, and brand. Without this data, your products simply won’t be found by these visual engines. It’s basically SEO, but for your images. Any business selling physical goods, furniture, fashion, even B2B industrial parts, needs to get serious about their visual assets and how they’re tagged. Ads in visual search pop up as shoppable pins or product carousels, targeted based on visual similarity. If a user snaps a photo of a specific armchair, ads for your visually similar (or complementary) chairs can show up. You’re capturing their intent the moment it forms, based on a real-world visual cue. The query isn’t what they can articulate. It’s the thing they just saw and wanted.

Optimizing for Voice Search Ad Campaigns

Running voice search ad campaigns is a different beast than standard text-based PPC. You have to get inside the head of someone talking to a machine. First, embrace long-tail keywords and questions. Stop bidding on “running shoes” and start thinking about “best running shoes for flat feet” or “where to buy comfortable running shoes in Buckhead.” This is how real people talk. Use search data analysis tools to find these conversational patterns. Second, local SEO is mandatory. So many voice queries are about what’s nearby, like “pizza near me.” Your Google Business Profile has to be perfect: address, phone, hours, the works. We’ve seen clients in Midtown Atlanta get a 30% jump in local voice search impressions just by fully implementing schema markup for local businesses. It tells Google exactly what you are and what you do. Third, your ad copy has to be conversational and short. Voice assistants give brief answers. Your message needs to be a direct answer or a clear call to action that sounds normal when spoken aloud. A/B test copy that answers a question directly. If the query is “Where’s the closest coffee shop?” a good ad response is “The Daily Grind is two blocks east on Peachtree Street, open now.” You also have to think about the device. A query on a smart speaker at home means the user is likely multitasking and can’t look at a screen. A query in a car is probably about directions or an immediate need. Your message has to fit that context to be effective.

Using Visual Search for Product Discovery Ads

For visual search, effective ads are built on a foundation of great images and clean data. It all starts with product feed optimization. Your product images have to be high-resolution and show the item from all sides. But the images themselves aren’t enough, they need rich metadata. Go beyond the product name. Tag the brand, model, color hex codes, material, texture, and even style descriptors (“boho chic,” “minimalist”). Platforms like Google Merchant Center let you add tons of attributes, and this is what their visual search algorithms feed on. Visual content platforms like Pinterest are a natural fit for this. You can run shoppable pins that go right to your product pages, targeting users based on what they’re pinning or what the platform thinks is visually similar. If a user is building a board full of modern farmhouse decor, your ads for similar products can get right in there. You can also think about complementary product advertising. If someone does a visual search for a specific dress, why not show them ads for shoes or a handbag that would go with it? This requires a smart, AI-driven understanding of how your products relate to each other. Finally, augmented reality (AR) is becoming a huge piece of this. Letting a user “try on” a shirt or see how a new sofa looks in their living room through their phone’s camera takes visual search from discovery to an immersive trial. Ads that link to these AR experiences see much higher engagement because they solve a real problem for the customer, will this item work for me?

The Convergence: Blended Search Experiences

The really interesting part is where voice and visual search start to work together in blended experiences. Think about someone pointing their phone at a restaurant menu (visual search) and then asking, “What’s the highest-rated dish here?” or “Do they have vegetarian options?” (voice search). The assistant has to process both the image and the spoken question to give a useful answer. This hybrid model is where ad targeting is heading. We’ll need to build campaigns that can handle both types of input, with ad creative that might have a visual and an audio component. A user could point their phone at a car on the street, ask “What’s the financing rate for this model?”, and get a personalized ad from a local dealer instantly. That’s a connection that moves from idle curiosity to a qualified lead in seconds. The tech behind this is all driven by multimodal AI, systems that can understand and connect information from different sources like text, images, and audio at the same time. This is why having clean data and consistent brand messaging across every single digital touchpoint is so important. If your data is a mess, the AI can’t work its magic. The advertisers who start building for these blended search patterns now are the ones who are going to win the next decade. This is a deep shift in digital advertising, driven by making search more like human interaction. If you can get your arms around conversational queries and rich visual data, you’ll be able to connect with customers in a way that just wasn’t possible before.