Making Search During Peak Season Work Harder in 2025

The 2025 holiday season is already underway, and with Q4 in full swing, marketers are operating in a more compressed window than usual. While early testing and scenario planning may now be behind us, there remains a crucial opportunity to refine strategy and strengthen execution, ensuring search plays a decisive role in commercial performance.

 In a landscape defined by heightened price sensitivity and AI-driven change, success depends on treating search not as a siloed channel but as a connected system built to create value across every stage of the consumer journey.

With the peak shopping period already underway, the focus should shift from experimentation to execution. The most effective programmes will balance agility with structure—a principle central to how PMG helps brands stay responsive and deliberate during volatile trading cycles.

Planning must still account for the entire retail period, from the early November build-up through Boxing Day and into January clearance events. Each market has its own rhythm: while the U.S. peak may centre around Cyber Week, U.K. consumers remain highly responsive to extended promotions and post-Christmas sales. Teams should maintain a consolidated view of the trading calendar, enabling decisions that reflect the broader commercial picture rather than isolated campaign metrics. This holistic view is key to maintaining momentum, ensuring media, data, and technology work in unison to drive performance.

Google’s AI Max, AI Mode, and AI Overviews represent the most significant structural changes to paid search in recent years. While the time for deep experimentation has passed, it’s still possible to capture value through focused, well-governed pilots in November and December.

These efforts should be designed not to ‘test for testing’s sake’ but to reflect a clear point of view on how AI should advance efficiency and experience, the kind of structured experimentation PMG builds into every client partnership. Limiting spend, defining cut-off dates, and prioritising data quality will be key. The goal is to extract rapid learnings that strengthen conversion efficiency during peak weeks, especially as AI-driven placements reshape the boundaries between paid and organic discovery.

The most successful search strategies will operate as cohesive systems rather than fragmented tactics. Strong brand defences remain vital: competitive conquesting continues to rise during high-demand weeks, and brands must safeguard their presence with dynamic bidding, audience layering, and automated impression-share monitoring.

At the same time, non-brand investment early in the cycle helps build awareness and retargetable audiences, driving efficiency later in the funnel. The integrity of product feeds and organic content carries new importance as generative search begins to surface product results. Accurate, complete, and well-structured feeds can materially improve visibility and performance. When executed together, these elements form a positive feedback loop—reinforcing consideration and driving conversion. This systems-based approach mirrors how PMG connects creative, data, and media to drive measurable, sustainable growth across the full customer journey.

Consumers are behaving differently this year. With inflation and cost-of-living pressures still weighing on confidence, shoppers are spending more time comparing value before committing. This makes last-click metrics increasingly insufficient. Brands must focus on incrementality and media mix modelling to understand how search contributes across the full funnel.

PMG partners with brands to evolve measurement frameworks that reveal where media truly drives business value, bringing clarity to how search contributes to growth across the funnel. This approach aligns teams around shared outcomes and gives marketers the confidence to invest with precision, knowing how each decision influences long-term performance.

Lock the retail calendar for your brand and ensure teams are aligned on timing, budget flexibility, and escalation rules. 

Run short, governed AI pilots to capture meaningful learnings before peak concludes. 

Integrate brand defence, non-brand growth, and product feed health as one connected system that links discovery to conversion. 

Rebase success metrics on business outcomes, prioritising incrementality and long-term value over cost efficiency alone.

Taken together, these imperatives reflect PMG’s belief that search excellence is achieved through integration, where every signal, system, and decision is designed to drive growth.