Relevant, campaign-specific landing pages are no longer just a best practice in paid search —they’re a requirement.

Google is stepping up its efforts to protect the search experience with its new ad quality prediction model, designed to detect and stop serving ads that lead to poor-quality landing pages.

In its 2025 announcement, Search ads and the importance of landing page navigation, Google emphasized two indicators of landing page quality:

• Relevance: How closely the destination page aligns with search intent
• Navigation: Whether the page is easy to explore and provides clear next steps

Many marketers are undermining their own performance. More than half (52%) of B2B PPC ads still drive traffic to homepages, while many others rely on generic landing pages that aren’t tailored to the campaign or channel. In both cases, the searcher’s experience—which Google strives to protect—suffers.

If visitors bounce back to the search results, Google’s new model may flag your page, assuming it isn’t aligned with the search intent (relevance) or the information is difficult to find (navigation).

Google has always prioritized the searcher’s experience, but with generative AI now surfacing faster, more direct answers, delivering a clear and helpful path to relevant content is more critical than ever. Google’s changes and the evolution of generative AI are not so gently nudging us back to offering genuinely helpful content that aligns with what visitors are looking for.

So how can marketers adapt? Here are six ways to start Google-proofing your campaigns based on what we know so far.

1. Ensure your pages are customized for every campaign and channel

Marketers are often guilty of using the same handful of landing pages across every channel—from paid search to paid social and email—and across multiple campaigns. It’s never been optimal, but Google’s new model makes it even harder to get away with this tactic. It’s time to go back to marketing 101: know your audience. And no, it’s not just your product’s ICP.

Just like you tailor content for different social platforms, knowing each one attracts a unique audience with different goals, paid search requires the same treatment. People turn to Google with a specific goal in mind and are looking for the fastest path to information or an action they need to take.

To stay competitive, you need to think beyond the ad click. Map the entire journey—from keyword to landing page to next steps—to guide searchers toward the information they need at every stage. When visitors feel confident they’re on the right path, they’re far less likely to bounce.

2. Use behavioral data from your website to inform navigation

Google is looking for two things in your destination page navigation. First, they want to ensure that the page itself is easy to navigate. Second, they want to ensure that logical next steps or actions can be taken—and they explicitly call out having the option to login as an example.

There are lots of ways to incorporate navigation into your landing page. The most important thing to remember is that “navigation” doesn’t mean a full blown nav like your website. You need to take a unique approach that is specific to paid search. That said, your website data might come in handy.

Depending on what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign, you can learn a lot about which actions visitors may want to take based on how they interact with your website. If you’re running a campaign to a landing page about your product, take a look at the product page on your website. Do users typically navigate to the pricing page, feature comparison, etc.? If so, those are pages you should consider linking to within your landing page. Keep in mind that you can also link that content to other, search optimized landing pages, rather than sending traffic to your website.

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3. Don’t skimp on landing page content

Reducing distractions won’t help your paid search campaigns anymore. Instead of focusing on lean, conversion-focused landing pages with minimal distractions, it’s time to refocus on what this specific audience is looking for: information.

We’ve already talked about why paid search landing pages need to be different from other campaign pages, and this is a perfect example. Visitors coming from search are looking for fast, direct access to information. If your page feels like a bait and switch, with only a few vague headlines and a single call-to-action, searchers will get frustrated and bounce. Leaning into more informative, content-rich pages will help reduce that risk.

As you add more content, navigation becomes even more critical. That’s where anchor navigation shines. Think of it like an FAQ: it gives searchers a way to skim your page and find what they need in one click.

4. Improve relevancy at scale using Dynamic Text Replacement and AI

Dynamic Text Replacement (DTR) has been around for a long time, but if you’ve forgotten about it or stopped using it, Google’s update is telling us that now is the perfect time to bring it back. The whole point of DTR is to increase the relevance of your ads and landing pages based on search terms, which is what Google’s update is asking for. DTR was created to help marketers personalize keywords, headlines, and calls-to-action at scale based on search intent—without having to create dozens of versions of the same landing page just to switch out a few words. There are also AI optimization tools, like Smart Traffic by Unbounce, that you can use to help automate this and ensure traffic is sent to the page with the messaging or offer that matches their location.

5. Rethink the art of persuasion

Google’s emphasis on navigation caught many marketers off guard. For years, best practices encouraged us to build landing pages like walled gardens, attempting to hold visitors captive with a single call-to-action with no distractions or exit points. That’s made it easier to measure ROI on paid campaigns, and it’s been accepted as a best practice for driving conversions for a long time. As a content marketer, I’ve always questioned how that advice conflicts with how real persuasion works. Persuasion is all about helping visitors reduce friction in decision-making. Yes, limiting choices and distractions can accelerate decisions, but only if you have enough information and confidence to move forward.

That said, it’s possible to take persuasion too far. An overly persuasive page may come across as biased and untruthworthy—and less relevant.

6. Experiment, because nothing is guaranteed

Although Google’s overarching message is pretty clear, the details behind how the model actually works are vague. It’s likely that this is intentional because the model strives to create a better search experience, which is highly subjective. What is “effective” will vary by search query, industry, sales motion, and more.

All we know for sure is that Google is looking for relevant and easy-to-navigate destination pages, which means marketers need to experiment to get real clarity on what works. It’s important to start making changes to align with Google’s new criteria right away, but you can validate what tactics work best for different campaigns by A/B testing.

The reality is that Google is asking marketers to do more. If you want to keep Google-proofing your pages, you’ll need to scale your ability to create campaign and channel-specific landing pages and run A/B tests more often.

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About the author

Danielle Torrie, is Senior Manager of Content Marketing, Unbounce