Paid search
One search plan. Two execution rails. Neither of them writes your keywords for you.
3 bands, 82 down to 45
Three discrete values rather than a sliding scale. Which one your plan carries depends on what the brief gives the compiler to work with, and the rationale printed on the plan is the one printed here.
Active-intent projection from buyer-authored search topics, with native negative keywords and city geo.
The brief names the search topics your buyers actually type.
Interest-to-query projection: useful seeds for keyword planning, but not evidence of active product intent.
The brief names interests rather than intent.
Persona-label fallback only; product and offer context must be supplied before the keyword plan is activation-ready.
The brief is a persona label and nothing else.
Naming a city the UK geography table cannot map costs 15 points here as it does everywhere else, and the rationale on the plan names the city rather than dropping it quietly. That penalty applies on top of the bands above.
What your audience actually becomes here
There is no segment catalogue behind this channel. These are the inputs the compiler carries through from your own brief, with the provider that resolves them and the basis the lawful-basis manifest records.
Examples are drawn from the sandbox-scale slices of each taxonomy the platform ships with. The full exports load into the same shapes, so catalogue size does not change the compiler behaviour or the fidelity grade. Nothing here has yet run against a full production catalogue, because nothing has run live.
From one sentence to a Paid search targeting spec
Search has no segment catalogue behind it, unlike the five channels above: it compiles from your own words with no registry lookup at all. The persona's intent topics become plain-language seeds; the provider's own keyword planner resolves them into ideas with volume and bid data. Nothing auto-buys. The buyer explicitly applies buy words and negatives to a version-fenced draft, and provider suggestions never become live keywords on their own. Positive and negative terms that collide once normalised for Unicode, whitespace and case are rejected atomically rather than partially applied, and an absent Microsoft bid or volume value is treated as unavailable rather than as zero.
The fastest way to see this is a real brief compiled live in the session rather than a worked example.
Talk it throughThe rails that reach this channel
2 of the 25 connectors the platform registers touch Paid search. Each one is graded on our own evidence ledger, which is deliberately blunt: a mocked HTTP test proves a client was written, not that a vendor accepted the request, spent money, or returned real delivery.
Google AdsBuying API
Client builtPaid search, with buyer-applied keywords and negatives on a version-fenced draft. Provider suggestions never auto-buy.
- What has to happen next
- The design-partner canary, passed for this rail specifically: staged PAUSED, human-recorded creative decision, separately granted resume, capped canary, then spend reconciled to the Google account total.
- Getting access
- Initial canaries are clicks-only. Live conversion optimisation fails closed until an approved conversion definition is bound to an exact provider-owned goal, read back before staging and reverified at resume.
Microsoft AdvertisingBuying API
Client builtPaid search on Bing, planned against the same neutral brief as Google rather than as a separate campaign.
- What has to happen next
- The same canary gate, passed separately. A Google pass proves nothing about Microsoft.
Named on this channel's compiled plans: Google Ads · Microsoft Advertising. Across all 25 connectors, spend-tested stands at 0 and report-verified at 0, and a continuous-integration check keeps those two counts honest.
The whole supply matrix →What Paid search will take
Formats and the limits the product enforces on this channel. Where a limit is a schema constraint, over-long copy fails at the edge rather than being silently truncated on the way to a provider.
Responsive search ads
3 to 15 headlines at 30 characters each, 2 to 4 descriptions at 90 characters. The limits are schema constraints, so over-long copy fails at the edge rather than being silently truncated on the way to the provider.
Asset production is charged separately and never blended into the media fee. The creative studio, in full
What Paid search can prove, and what it cannot
Search is the easiest channel to measure and the hardest to claim credit on, which is why it sits inside a cross-channel plan here rather than being sold as the whole answer. Delivery and click data come from the provider. Response is observed through your analytics on the campaign's immutable UTM key. Initial canaries are non-conversion only — clicks, not conversions — until an approved conversion definition is bound to an exact provider-owned goal, read back before staging and reverified at resume.
Provider delivery, observed response, modelled estimates and powered causal evidence stay visibly separate on the report rather than being averaged into one number, and the geo-lift engine returns an underpowered verdict instead of a lift figure when the spend cannot carry the test. The four verbs, in full
Your own site's analytics, read through your token, so brand response is measured on data you already own and can audit.
GA4 as an alternative brand-response source where that is what the advertiser already runs.
What this will not pretend past.
Every one of the seven channel pages carries one of these, in the same type. The best this channel scores is 82, graded content-level, and the paragraph beside this is what that score does not cover.
Search was £17.9bn of a £46.7bn UK market in 2025, on AA/WARC and IAB UK figures. You are almost certainly already buying it well, and we are not going to out-optimise your existing search team. What it does is stop search being planned in a different room from the £3.4bn of addressable TV, DOOH, audio and cinema around it, and it deduplicates the audience across the two. If all you want is better search management, buy something else.
If that limit is disqualifying for your budget, we would rather you heard it in the session than after the invoice.
Talk it throughThe same audience, compiled everywhere else
One audience definition, seven translations, seven published scores. A plan that funds two or three of these with enough weight to prove something beats one that puts a token line on all seven.
CTV & streaming TV
The one channel where a job title survives the translation almost intact.
3 bandsPodcast & digital audio
You are not buying a person here. You are buying what they listen to.
fixed bandPaid social
Vendor-neutral until the moment of execution, then exactly as native as it needs to be.
3 bandsAddressable & linear TV
The fastest-growing channel on this list, and the one that needs the most paperwork.
fixed bandDigital out-of-home
A billboard cannot know who you are. It can know who walks past it.
fixed bandCinema
The lowest fidelity score on the site.
fixed bandSee what your audience compiles to on Paid search.
Forty-five minutes. Bring a real audience and we compile it live on Paid search and the other six, with the score and the lawful-basis manifest on screen.
Book a working sessionDesign-partner phase · the sandbox needs no card and no credentials · nothing here sells self-serve media
Paid search questions
Does the AI write my keywords?
No, and the refusal is structural rather than a setting. The model turns your brief into plain-language seeds. The provider's keyword planner resolves those into ideas with real volume and bid data. You then explicitly apply buy words and negatives to a version-fenced draft. Provider suggestions never auto-buy at any point in that chain.
Why did my search plan only score 45?
Because the brief was a persona label with no product or offer context, and a keyword plan built from a persona label alone is not ready to activate. The rationale on the plan says exactly that. Add what you sell and what the offer is, and the same brief compiles at 68 or 82.