Best Google Ads Alternatives in 2026: The Complete Guide to Diversifying Your Ad Spend

Yes, Google Ads still exists. This wasn’t really the argument. The argument here is that it costs you to make it work and for many advertisers in 2026, it simply isn’t worth the price.

The search CPCs have risen for the past three years, and the biggest gains in the last year have occurred in the past year. In many commercial searches, fewer people are getting an answer before reaching the paid results, as the AI Overviews have been placed above the ads. It’s wonderful for Google’s automation, but not so much for anybody who cares about knowing where their money went, as Performance Max continues to expand into more of the account. Now, independent fraud tracking firms reckon that between one in six or so clicks on Google or Bing’s networks are not by a genuine, purchasing human.

That’s not Google Ads that’s broken. It’s no longer Google Ads as always, it’s a real question instead of a last resort for a serious number of marketers. The happy part: 2026 has far more legit answers to that question than ever before since the advent of paid search. But not just the typical suggestions you’ll see in every other roundup. Retail media networks are taking tens of billions of dollars off the open web. The personalized TV experience has become all-digital. So quietly have native platforms coalesced, rebranded and become agentic. And this is the one that most ‘alternatives’ articles haven’t caught up on, yet ads are now available within ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

Here’s everything, from the sure-fire classics to platforms that have undergone significant changes over the past year, and categories that most competing lists miss. If you’re looking for the quick and dirty version, here are some locations where most businesses begin testing first:

• Closest replacement for search intent: Microsoft Advertising
• Meta Ads are the best platform to create demand from the ground up.
• Best for selling physical products: Amazon Ads, and retail media networks that follow it:
• Best for B2B and high ticket leads: LinkedIn Ads
• Best for research-heavy, trust-driven categories: Reddit Ads
• Advertising in AI chatbots is an emerging bet that isn’t a sure thing: the best thing to watch, not to bank.

Let’s go over the details now.

Why So Many Businesses Are Rethinking Google Ads in 2026

Several things have happened at the same time and all of them helped to make “just spend more on Google” a less-than-satisfying answer.

The price of clicks increased in almost every place. Across the majority of industries, search CPCs have risen double digits year over year, and in certain cases, that was already a high cost: legal/insurance/financial services, B2B software. It’s now commonplace to pay well over the price of $5 a click, and in some cases, significantly more. However, with the myriad of new changes, the bulk of Google Ads spending has shifted to Smart Bidding and Performance Max, bringing some inefficiency and a new kind of bidding competition: advertisers against increasingly complex algorithms.

The Click of the top of the page was revolutionized by AI Overviews. The proportion of queries that don’t result in any clicks has significantly increased since Google made AI-powered answers available widely. In fact, some paid-search agencies now predict that when an AI Overview comes up on the queries it does appear on, click-through rates can drop 50% or more because the answer was there prior to anyone even getting to the bottom of the page. Google sees this as a neutral or even positive development for advertisers who are cited. For many accounts, the click math isn’t as pretty.

Automation did as much as it did to save effort, but it stole visibility. Campaign types like Performance Max and the like are indeed great at driving conversions. They are also a black box, you may not always be able to see where your money went, where your audiences were, or where your placements are, which networks were used, etc. This is a trade off for advertisers who need to know why or how something works, not just that it does work.
There is more invalid traffic than is accounted for in most budgets. Independent ad fraud experts estimate the amount of invalid clicks or fraudulent traffic on Google and Bing’s platforms to be around 18% of all click traffic tested in the first half of 2026, up from a significant increase last year. On any platform you’re on, at least some of your budget is being used for bots and clickbots and not humans. This isn’t specific to Google, but it’s a cost that most advertisers do not account for.

An important correction: the third-party cookies are about to disappear narrative, which fuelled so much marketing wisdom for the last several years, wasn’t quite what people thought. Google ended implementing its Privacy Sandbox in October 2025 after about six years of development and third-party cookies are still enabled by default in Chrome, with no expected date for their removal. But if you’ve been putting off a retargeting strategy because you thought cookies were going to die in Chrome any day now, you’ve been wrong. That doesn’t mean that Safari, Firefox, or Brave do not have first-party cookie blocking by default, and that they haven’t been doing it for years, but as a result of that, about a fifth of global browser traffic has been cookieless all along, without any Google decision. The bottom line is not as dire as the old headlines, but it’s a sounder long-term base to build upon because of the first-party data.

And there are many companies that are just plain worn out from putting all their eggs in a single basket. If one platform represents 80% of your paid budget, then an entire revenue stream can be hit hard or even permanently if a policy change or something else sudden causes your CPC to rise, or if you are suspended from an account. Diversification isn’t just about seeking out something cheaper. It’s about not being one algorithm update away from a bad quarter.

So what is a good Google Ads alternative, anyway?

Let’s get this mental shift right, because it’s not the individual platform suggestion that’s important, it’s the attention that can be purchased. Google Search offers you the people who put something into the search bar, already wanting a solution. Amazon is selling to you, consumers, with their wallet out. Meta provides you with people who were never interested in anything before you cut in on them while they were scrolling. LinkedIn sells you a job title. Pinterest sells you on planning mode weeks prior to purchase.

The biggest mistake people make when choosing a platform is assuming that a cheap click is the same as an expensive click, and treating them as such. They’re not. It’s better to have a click that costs $4 that converts than to have a click that costs $0.40 but doesn’t convert. Don’t focus on price before you consider the type of signal you’re looking for, or if the platform you’re interested in can actually provide it.

In this context, here are some things to be considered:

Is the targeting relevant, not just in terms of the demographic, but in real-life behavior of the buyer? There are plenty of examples of 45-year-old CFOs acting nothing like 22-year-olds who would watch TikTok on a Sunday night.

What happens if it’s not what its own dashboard says? All platforms assign at least part of their homework. The ones that you can trust are providing you sufficient raw data, pixel events, server side conversion APIs, and exportable reporting, so you can sanity check the story yourself.

What is the minimum amount of spending required to exit learning mode? A platform’s minimum number and the number required in order to get some data to use are often poles apart and some of these platforms admit that difference in their minimum number, while others don’t.

Are the ads the right format for your products? Purchases that are made on platforms that are text-intensive are lost to visual, inspiration-led purchases. People think that B2B purchases don’t happen on impulse, they are wrong. This may seem like common sense on paper, but it’s the number one reason for the successful on Google businesses giving up on an alternative after two weeks.

So, what is the brand-safety/content-adjacency profile? You should remember that the place where your ad is shown is a reflection of your brand, whether that is obviously the case or not. Some platforms will make more of a difference than others, so think carefully about it.

Microsoft Advertising (Bing, Copilot, MSN, and the Microsoft Audience Network)

Google had to work for them because the people typed what they wanted, and if that’s the case, then MS Advertising is the closest approximation to a real replacement. Here are the ads that appear across Bing and syndicated partners like Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, and are available on Microsoft’s owned and operated properties, MSN, Outlook.com, MS Edge’s new tab experience and now, more prominently, Microsoft Copilot itself, with sponsored results and shopping suggestions appearing in the conversational context.

There are two reasons why Microsoft is easy to try in 2026. First, it has improved its Google Import tool to include Performance Max, Shopping and Audience campaigns that you can pull in directly, without having to start from scratch. Second, the numbers actually work in favor of the underdog in this case: industry benchmark reports comparing the two platforms consistently reveal that the average CPC on Microsoft is 25-35% lower than for Google on the same keywords and that the difference is even more pronounced in more expensive verticals, such as legal and insurance, because far fewer advertisers are bidding on these keywords. No minimum spend, you pay per click as Google.

The word of caution is volume. Experts report that Bing’s worldwide search market share remains in the low single digits compared to Google’s 90%. You’ll have a real audience, a qualified audience, and frequently a less expensive audience, but a smaller audience, nonetheless. In the case of B2B, local service, and lead-gen, this trade is frequently a worthwhile one, particularly if they have definite non-brand search traffic. If you must have a business that has Google’s volume to get to your target numbers, then Microsoft works best as a supplement.

Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)

Meta is not the default “second platform” for most businesses because it’s like a search engine, it’s the best available tool to generate demand instead of trying to catch it. They are displayed on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and increasingly WhatsApp, all from one Ads Manager, with Meta spending much of 2025 streamlining cross-platform campaign management.

Meta’s automation is really quite good. A Facebook ranking model update in late January 2026 reportedly boosted ad clicks by approximately 3.5% and also helped push Instagram conversions up, and Advantage+ campaigns can also significantly reduce the manual process of creating dozens of ad sets. Here’s one wrinkle that advertisers should be aware of before ceding control to the algorithm: according to data from a number of 2026 benchmark reports, the amount of US retail ad spend on Meta’s Advantage+ format appears to have decreased from around 38% to about 20% over the last year, as brand marketers discovered that maintaining some level of manual control for their audiences or creatives alongside the automation performed better. Please remember that most automatic is not necessarily the best.

Traffic campaigns can cost you as little as a dollar per click, and for highly competitive B2B or legal businesses, they can easily surpass $4. Meta’s strongest suit is DTC and ecommerce brands, subscription offerings, leads with strong creatives, and warm retargeting audiences. If you rely on someone to actively look up your value proposition with a credit card in hand, it’s a weak fit for Meta, since that is not its usual user behavior. Whether you’re briefing a designer or just starting to test out an ad without going live, it’s good to know how to create a proper ad mockup before getting creative.

TikTok Ads

The one platform everyone who writes about social media that is an alternative to Instagram gets wrong about is TikTok, which is still viewed as a pure awareness platform for Gen Z brand building. It’s an outdated description. As of a February 2026 update, broad, phrase, and exact negative keyword matching is now available for TikTok Search Ads Campaigns, something previously only supported by traditional search engines like Google and Microsoft. Since late 2025, new campaigns have been automatically extended to search results with the standard feature of Automatic Search Placement.

TikTok is not taking any chances with the overflow of branding budgets, it’s actually developing an actual search-advertising product on top of a discovery engine. Then there’s the stability issue that lingered on the platform throughout 2025 that needs to be addressed head-on: TikTok’s ownership battle in the U.S. is over. In January 2026, a majority American-owned joint venture with Oracle and Silver Lake and other US and allied investors gained control of TikTok’s operation in the US, though the majority stake is not held by them and is legally capped at less than 50%. Ad accounts, targeting and reporting have remained unaffected by the transition.

TikTok is ideal for brands that have really great creatives, products that look good in pictures or videos, impulse-to-consideration purchase products, app installs, and brands targeting viewers under 35. Whereas Google is forgivingly unethical with mediocre creative, the same can’t be said for TikTok, where a subpar search ad can still convert, but a subpar TikTok ad gets scrolled by.

Amazon Ads

Amazon is not really an alternative to search engines. It’s an alternative for purchase context and you have to think differently about it. If someone is looking for running shoes on Amazon, they are not doing research, they are shopping, and most likely, they are shopping with the purpose of buying during that same session. That context is highly valuable, as Amazon’s ad efforts demonstrate: By most estimates, the company’s total ad revenue, measured over the past 12 months, is now larger than that of both YouTube and Microsoft’s search business, with the former reporting $17.2 billion for the first quarter of 2026 alone, which is about a 22-24% increase year over year.

Sponsored Products doesn’t have any monthly or setup costs and is based on a simple CPC bidding system, making it easy and safe to test. Amazon DSP can also be used on third-party ecommerce sites, apps and even Amazon’s streaming inventory, more on that below, equipping you with both purchase intent down the funnel and a greater audience buying from a single ecosystem. If you are managing a large catalog and have limited creative staff, you’ll want to keep an eye out for Amazon’s new AI-powered capabilities designed to generate and test different ad variations.

The obvious caveat: If a product doesn’t sell at Amazon, or it only sells through your own website, this isn’t the first place. Amazon does not create competitive advantage for brands, it builds on it when it already exists, such as brand reputation, Prime eligibility, and marketplace fundamentals.

LinkedIn Ads

The reason for using LinkedIn is that the user behind the click is more important than the keyword they entered. For on-target impressions, LinkedIn’s job title, function, seniority, industry, and company size targeting capabilities are unsurpassed and its own case studies with companies such as Salesforce and ServiceNow suggest on-target impressions are about four times those of traditional linear TV, as it now has a new on-target algorithmic audience builder, First Impression Ads now guaranteed to be top-of-feed for the first 24 hours of any campaign, and a new Connected TV product that targets professional audiences on streaming platforms, among other features, that lean into AI.

Here’s what you’re not getting in the majority of superficial guides: If you’re paying for LinkedIn, it’s not the minimum budget that is low, it’s the actual minimum. Smart Audience Builder and other algorithmic targeting tools require a sufficient amount of data to learn from and most experts suggest spending a minimum of $2,000–$3,000 a month on each active campaign before you are able to see the platform’s automation capabilities at their best. Under that, you will typically be paying overpriced traffic prices for underfuelled algorithms.

For the entire list, LinkedIn is the best B2B platform for SaaS, enterprise services, recruiting and any closed deal that costs thousands of dollars. It’s just bad for consumer products, anything below about $500 and audiences that aren’t actively using the platform in any professional capacity.

Reddit Ads

Reddit is effective when your buyer’s purchase call is trying to make a decision on a real basis of study, comparison, and skepticism, instead of an impulse response to a beautiful image. According to Reddit’s own published data, keyword targeting, which targets ads to what people are actively talking about, rather than their stated interests, reportedly achieves almost a 30% higher CTR than community and interest targeting alone, with well over 100,000 active communities.

Commerce tooling has made quick progress on the platform. Dynamic Product Ads, ads that are automatically created from your product catalog, are now available in general availability in the middle of 2025 and reportedly led to about twice as much return on ad spend as compared to standard conversion ads. That was followed by Collection Ads, an early-stage Shopify integration, and in January 2026, Reddit’s beta of Max Campaigns, an AI-powered automated campaign type that it claims reduced its cost-per-action by 17% and boosted conversions by 27% in its own trials.

The downside: Reddit penalizes any type of advertising that is not specific. Redditors tend to have a bad reaction to anything that looks like a display banner in a post, and the same goes for an ad that doesn’t use the tone of the community it’s in. It’s here that you will find that creative quality and cultural fluency are as important as targeting. Ideal categories include software, developer software, games, finance, niche items where one’s buyers spend plenty of time on long threads before buying.

Pinterest Ads

But while it may seem like a nice-to-have platform, Pinterest has more relevance in 2026 than many realize. 600 million people now visit Pinterest every month to search, save and shop, actions that are far more indicative of search intent than most people realize. That match was officially confirmed when Top of Search ads launched in January 2026, forcing brands to the top of relevant search and Related Pins results, and Pinterest says there’s a 41% CTR higher for brands using the format.

In addition, Pinterest’s Performance+ automated campaign suite reduces the number of manual inputs by about half over what it would take to build campaigns from the ground up, which can help a small team without an ad specialist.

This is the best site on this list for discovery and planning: home decor, weddings, fashion, food, travel, crafts, gifts. People find themselves on Pinterest before they know what they’re going to buy, which is why it’s ideal for people to be influenced to make a purchase weeks before. It won’t do a favour for urgent or non-visual purchases, no one goes to Pinterest for an emergency plumber.

Snapchat Ads

The list of advertisers who have already tried Snapchat goes on and on, and often it’s because they tested it once in 2021 and forgot about it. This is a wrong lesson to be revisited. The minimum price is advertised as a low $5 per day, with Snap’s minimum of $20–$50/day to launch a new campaign being a more honest minimum than most platforms.

Advertisers that used Smart Targeting experienced an average 8.8% lift in conversions, while Sponsored Snaps, which show up in Chat, are said to have about a 2x higher conversion rate when the Snap is opened. Snapchat is still optimal for younger age groups, direct-to-consumer brands, app marketers and impulse-driven offers that are truly native and vertical-first. Well, it’s a bad match for older or more traditional B2B audiences: A 50-year-old looking at enterprise procurement software isn’t really spending time on Snapchat, is she?

X (formerly Twitter) Ads

While the last few years might lead one to think otherwise, X has stabilized. The company said that monthly active users (MAUs) rose to approximately 611 million in the first quarter of 2026 and monetizable daily active users (DAUs), the number advertisers actually bid against, peaked around 251 million, the most ever. Average CPMs have also been decreasing, this will signal a healthier, more competitive auction compared to the trough that occurred in 2023.

The number of significant changes that have been made to the platform recently is that it’s integrated with X’s own AI system, Grok, which is now used in both in-app search and a growing number of ad-targeting and creative tools in Ads Manager. In fast-moving, conversation-driven brands that have topics like tech, finance, news, or trending consumer topics, real-time relevance is a true upswing that no other platform offers completely.

This is a fair thought to reflect: X’s brand safety track record has been far more volatile than other legacy platforms, such as Meta or LinkedIn, and there’s been some substantive change in content moderation since 2022. It’s not an excuse to abstain entirely, but it’s a good reason to carefully consider the level of risk your brand is willing to take on and what you are expecting from the audience before investing real money in a brand. The decision should be made with a solid brand safety framework, not on instinct.

Quora Ads

Quora’s not really at the top of any list, and nor should it be, but it is a perfectly legitimate, cheaply priced medium for a particular purpose: getting up to someone’s attention at the moment they are framing a problem before they have narrowed down their options to a solution or even the appropriate terminology for what they need. That’s a time before people make up their minds on what they’re going to search for in the first place, and it’s a pretty valuable one, earlier than a lot of search targeting by keywords can get them.

Quora is weaker on raw scale, weaker on instant transactional conversion, and has non-primitive community dynamics like Reddit. The place it earns its budget is actually retargeting: readers who arrive at your site by clicking through from a thoughtful answer typically are at least half-educated, so that they exhibit remarkably high conversion rates after they return to your funnel. Ideal for SaaS, professional services and specialty categories where helping someone think clearly is a true part of the sales process.

Apple Search Ads

Apple Search Ads is definitely worth considering if you are an iOS app developer. Otherwise, skip this part of the video completely as it will not benefit you. Over 850 million users are searching the App Store every week, and nearly 70% of all searches are done because users want to find new apps, that’s what Apple says. And nearly 65% of downloads come straight after a search is performed. The conversion rate is skewed in that the ad above the search results is said to convert at more than 60%, certainly more than any other channel on this list, according to Apple’s own year-long data till late 2025.

Because pricing is based on cost-per-tap, you’ll only pay if someone clicks. It’s a narrow, niche channel and it’s who it’s naturally fit for: Apps, subscription products, app-based signup, gaming, fintech, health apps. All other people can move on.

Taboola (Realize)

Taboola has grown beyond the native ad recommended articles widget people typically think of when they hear about Taboola. It currently operates on its own platform, Realize, which was introduced in 2025 as an overt effort to branch out in the open-web performance advertising space, offering display, vertical video, social and other creative formats, alongside the traditional native formats, at CPC or CPM. In 2026, Taboola added on agentic AI capabilities like a Budget Allocator, which reallocates the budget to more effective campaigns as they are running, and an Element Generator, which automatically retargets and reforms the ad creative to boost underperforming content over time.

Realize is a real alternative to Google, Meta, and TikTok’s walled gardens that can help you achieve more volume in the top of the funnel if you already have great landing pages and offers. The flip side is that the traffic is colder than search traffic, so your funnel must be watertight, otherwise, it simply won’t pay off.

Teads (formerly Outbrain)

That’s a correction that needs to be made clearly, even in 2026, a lot of Google Ads alternatives articles get it wrong and this is not an independent platform anymore. Back in February 2025, Outbrain acquired the premium video and branding agency Teads and as of June 2025, the company was entirely rebranded with a new name, dashboard, sales team, and new everything. If you’re looking at a guide that still has a section for Outbrain as an individual line item instead of being included as part of Taboola, it has not been updated since early 2025.
Teads now combines Outbrain’s original content-recommendation and performance technology with its own premium video and connected TV inventory, which it says has direct relationships with over 10,000 publishers and reaches about 2.2 billion consumers. It’s the superior alternative to Taboola, in fact, when brand safety and premium editorial placement CNN, The Washington Post, not a long tail is more important to you than scale, and when you’re looking for an opportunity to mix upper-funnel video with lower-funnel conversion in a single buy.

AdRoll

One of the more user-friendly retargeting platforms around is AdRoll, created specifically to reach out to those who have been on your site or app but didn’t convert. It operates on all display inventory and social placements from one single dashboard, seamlessly connects with Shopify, WooCommerce and most major ecommerce platforms, and employs AI powered bid optimization to automatically manage spend. Pay-As-You-Go and no long term agreement.

AdRoll is not a prospecting platform, but a don’t let warm traffic go cold platform, so it’s a great combination with almost any platform listed here rather than a replacement for Google Ads. It’s especially effective for ecommerce, SaaS free trial funnels and direct-to-consumer brands that have substantial enough website traffic that it’s worth putting in the effort.

BuySellAds and Direct Site Placements

In niche B2B segments, in some cases, not an algorithm is the best way to buy. Unlike an opaque auction based on BuySellAds, BuySellAds features a marketplace for direct placements on specific niche websites and newsletters with clear and published pricing, either flat rate or CPM, depending on the publisher. 0% programmatic reach at 10x the volume and 0% of people don’t trust and don’t read the person your exact buyer trusts and reads regularly is often more effective than 100% programmatic reach at 10x the volume and 100% of people don’t trust and don’t read. This is a more limited strategy than any of the ones listed above, but if you are the right niche B2B product, it can be very effective.

Retail Media Networks: The Category Most Alternatives Lists Still Ignore

This is most often the one thing that you’ve read about Google Ads alternatives that you have yet to implement if you’re selling physical products. Retail media is the fastest-growing major category of US digital advertising, and most listicles simply include a mention of Amazon and then call it a day.

According to eMarketer, US retail media spending will reach nearly $71 billion in 2026, representing nearly 18% of the same versus the previous year, and Amazon and Walmart will account for the vast majority of new dollars in the retail media category. However, the group behind those two has become a veritable ecology that needs to be understood on a separate level:

Walmart Connect, which includes search ads on Walmart.com and the Walmart app as well as the off-site programmatic component provided via a Trade Desk integration and in-store digital signage, is the obvious runner-up. Walmart’s advantage is omnichannel, exposure to ads online that drive sales in-store, which is something that few platforms can boast.

Instacart Ads took grocery delivery to a new level by becoming a powerful advertising platform, where grocery ads are shown alongside shoppable products in the display format and are directly correlated with basket-level purchase data. It’s an excellent match for high-intent grocery shoppers, particularly for the food, beverage and household CPG brands.

As well as just delivering performance, Target Roundel embraces brand storytelling with onsite placements, high-quality offsite inventory and rich Target Circle loyalty data, especially for home, beauty and fashion products in which Target has established trust and rapport among shoppers.

Kroger Precision Marketing, a business unit of Kroger’s data science arm 84.51°, has some of the most detailed grocery purchase information on the household level anywhere, which is beneficial for CPG brands that have some relationship with the Kroger loyalty program.

Outside the four, a true Tier 2 is quickly coming into existence with DoorDash Ads and Instacart Ads each on track to generate a billion dollars in US revenue this year alone, and Costco Media, Home Depot, CVS Media Exchange, and Albertsons Media Collective all building loyalty-driven, category-specific networks.

But there’s a catch, and yes, it hurts to hand: Every retail media network has its own login, its own measuring system, its own taxonomy, its own definition of basic terms, and reconciling the numbers by hand is a real time suck. It’s common for brands to now run campaigns on four to six retail media networks at a time and some analysts estimate the average will rise to a projected 11 by the end of 2026. Do not attempt to run 5 of these simultaneously from a standstill. Identify 1-2 networks where existing customers are purchasing, demonstrate the economics and grow from there.

Streaming, Connected TV and Audio Advertising

This is truly a sea change in Connected TV: It’s up to more than half of all TV viewing time in the United States, from about 30% several years ago, and, crucially, it’s no longer the domain of the six-figure media budget holder or agency partner.

Netflix Ads came on the scene in late 2022 and has been growing steadily since then, a stark turnaround from a company that for years publicly said it would never allow ads. In January 2024, Amazon Prime Video moved to an ad-supported basis, the largest change in audience for television advertising in recent history, with more than 100 million US users who prefer to watch ads occasionally, rather than paying an extra few dollars per month to avoid them, and ads are also available for buying via the same Amazon DSP platform as the company’s retail media inventory. Disney+ offers an ad-supported Basic subscription alongside Hulu’s existing ad program.

Roku has made itself self-serviced on the device side, too: An Ads Manager enables small advertisers to create and launch CTV campaigns without needing an agency, and a new open Ads API, which will be released in late 2025, will allow developers to build directly on Roku’s ad infrastructure. In a new move announced in June 2025, Roku and Amazon Ads will be partnering on advertising, offering advertisers a combined, end-to-end reach to over 80% of US connected TV households with one purchase.

If you’ve never bought television media before and find the prospect of buying streaming TV via a programmatic desk intimidating, platforms such as MNTN are available to make streaming TV as measurable and easy to buy as a Meta or Google campaign, which is a great solution if you’re looking for CTV’s reach without a full programmatic desk.

Video aside, worth briefly noting: Audio advertising, primarily via the Spotify Ad Exchange, but also as part of the broader programmatic podcast advertising market, has proven to be a viable partner for brands looking for the lean-back attention other than video, especially for brand awareness campaigns.

Programmatic Advertising: Buying Reach Across the Whole Open Internet

Technically known as demand-side platforms (DSPs), programmatic platforms allow you to purchase ad inventory from thousands of websites, apps, and streaming services from one platform, and bid for the items on-the-fly instead of negotiating them one-by-one. This is a different category than all of the above, as you’re not selecting a destination, but rather a buying process that can get you to many destinations.

Unlike Google’s own DV360, the Trade Desk is an independent DSP, which takes money directly from the media it works with, and therefore doesn’t have an incentive to favor one over another. It reportedly is used for most of the programmatic connected TV buying in the US and provides some of the most sophisticated targeting and fraud protection that are possible, but at the same time, it is built to scale there’s no actual self-serve option take rates on managed spend are typically in the high teens to low twenties as a percentage and smaller advertisers without agency support often find it more complex than it needs to be.

StackAdapt is the better option for midsize advertisers and the most ubiquitous self-serve offering native, display, connected TV, video, audio, in-game, out-of-home and even email that supports flexible CPM, CPC and engagement-based pricing. It is ideal for agencies and in-house teams looking for an enterprise-grade reach without minimum commitments or the enterprise-grade complexity of The Trade Desk.

Amazon DSP, which is not an Amazon on-site retail ads product, is worthy of special mention here because it offers access to Amazon’s first-party shopping data for targeting, even when running ads on ad inventory that’s not owned by Amazon.

Programmatic doesn’t make sense for a business starting to branch out from Google. The subsequent step after you’ve tested a channel and you’re looking to expand reach without having to upload each placement individually.

Advertising Inside AI Chatbots: The Newest, and Still Riskiest, Channel

It’s the category that actually didn’t exist a year ago and if you’re not yet ready to spend money there, it’s good to be aware of it.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT advertising, which will feature sponsored product cards, was rolled out across customers on the Free and low-cost Go tier of ChatGPT in the United States starting Feb. 9. Early estimates pegged CPM at about $60, which is about three times the standard rates at Meta, and minimum spend commitments range into the six figures hence it’s an enterprise product, not something a small business experiments with on a whim. Large agency holding groups were reportedly among the launch partners, which were also major consumer brands purchasing through the holding groups. It’s something to keep an eye on in 2026, but as far as I can see at the moment, it won’t be until we’re at a serious scale that this becomes more widely available.

But ads have been around for a longer time than ChatGPT: Microsoft Copilot has been rolling out the format since well before ChatGPT, and has now extended it to shopping campaigns and comparison ads, also known as “compare and decide” ads, as well as an in-conversation checkout experience it recently introduced in January 2026. This is a much more user-friendly way to begin conversational AI advertising than ChatGPT is right now, given the current relationship that Microsoft has with advertisers through Bing.

Grok is also being developed as an ad-targeting layer, a system that matches conversations based on contextual signals rather than on traditional keyword and demographic targeting, and that will be added to X’s AI system.

Perplexity did just the opposite. Perplexity pulled back from ads after testing sponsored follow-up questions starting in late 2024, as users were concerned about the trust that the ads would bring, and has shifted to paid subscriptions as a key strategy for revenue in 2025 and 2026. It’s a good indicator to watch because it is not a given that all AI platforms will be destined to follow the same path of an ad-supported model as search engines did.

Not to mention the twist: Google is doing its own thing. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are monetizing, and ads are showing up in a relatively larger percentage of AI-generated search results than they did a year ago. But saying that, it’s not necessarily a way to escape the gravitational pull of Google to advertise inside AI answers, it all depends on which AI product you are referring to. With this entire category set for a watchlist in 2026 and 2027, it is not the best time to divert dollars away from things that work today to unproven avenues. The targeting tools, measurement and reporting are not sufficiently developed to stand up to a platform that has 20 years of development.

How to Match the Right Alternative to Your Business

No one size fits all when it comes to Google Ads, and no one size fits all with regard to your business. Let’s see how to cut down on the options based on what you sell and who you are selling to.

If you’re at a very low realistic spend and just starting to test, Reddit, Quora, and Meta have low realistic entry thresholds and don’t penalize low spend like enterprise programmatic platforms or LinkedIn.

When your buyer is by job, not by demography, LinkedIn + Microsoft Advertising is the best combination of signals that’s out there: search intent from folks who already know what they’re looking for, plus precision targeting by job and company for everyone else.

If you are selling physical products, you should begin with Amazon first, but if your customers already go to Walmart, Target, or Kroger, don’t take Amazon for granted, consider looking at the retail media network that is attached to that retailer.

With a visual or inspiration-driven product, it will typically beat out generic display advertising by a landslide, as their intent is already to make a purchase and you’re targeting them there. Home, fashion, food, weddings, travel, Pinterest, it’s pretty much guaranteed they’ll beat out generic display advertising by a mile.

When your conversion goal is an app install, Apple Search Ads is best not to be an afterthought, it’s the channel with conversion rates that beat the pants off most others.

If it’s a category where you’re actually doing research and comparison before a consumer makes a purchase, software, financial products, technical purchases, Reddit, and Quora both beat their reputation because your buyers are doing it without you in the room.

While it may seem like you need to replace Google Ads entirely, if you’re just looking to lessen your reliance on Google as your sole platform, then avoid sweeping changes. Add 1 adjacent channel, test it for its own sake and then add the next one.

How to test a new platform without destroying your numbers

This is the section that gets left out of 99 out of 100 of the here are 20 platforms blogs, and it’s the one that decides whether or not the budget diversification pays off or proves a point.

You can’t just duplicate your Google ad into another platform and then claim it to be a fair test. This is the one most often given excuse for a plausible alternative to be dismissed, as it just doesn’t work for us. This doesn’t mean that TikTok or Reddit isn’t working, it’s just that you tested the wrong thing and an ad headline that comes up in a Google search will underperform. Each platform in this list is unique and requires respect for the creative language of the site.

Plan appropriately for the learning phase. Almost every automated bidding system on every platform requires a handful of clicks and conversions to optimize properly, typically 2–4 weeks of consistent spending, not 2–4 days. A pull test that was performed after 72 hours, but the initial numbers were bad, is one of the quickest ways to determine that a platform “doesn’t work” when it never really had the opportunity to.

Properly track UTM parameters and track them consistently from day one on all platforms. Otherwise, you will be making comparisons between dashboards that mean different things by the term “conversion,” making it nearly impossible to make decisions across platforms.

Don’t judge by only looking at the platform-reported ROAS. Each of these platforms attributes to itself. It’s not what any one dashboard will take credit for that’s important, it’s what is going to affect your overall business economics when you bring a new channel into the fold.

Be sure to look for attribution overlap. If someone views a TikTok ad, sees a retargeting ad on Meta, or does a Google search of your brand name before converting, you’ll be credited with the conversion on all three platforms if you let them be. Multi-touch reality doesn’t fit in a single-platform reporting, and if you believe otherwise, you make poor budget decisions.

Don’t consider invalid traffic a single audit item, it is an actual cost. This is particularly true of programmatic and native ads, which are also more prone to fraud than the major walled garden platforms. On any channel where you’re spending money, the cost of a basic click-fraud monitoring system is worth it.

Don’t try out five new platforms at once. If you divide a small budget into a handful of tests, no single test will have a large enough number of samples to give you a clear answer at the end of the quarter, instead, you’ll have five inconclusive tests. Add a channel that is adjacent and run it correctly, then make a decision.