In 2026 and well beyond, a core part of the performance marketer’s charter is learning to leverage AI to drive growth and efficiency.
Anyone who isn’t actively evaluating new AI tools to improve or streamline their PPC work is doing their brand or clients a disservice.
The challenge is that keeping up with these tools has become almost a full-time job, which is why my agency has made AI a priority in our structured knowledge-sharing.
As a team, we’ve honed in on favorites across creative, campaign management, and AI search measurement.
This article breaks down key options in each category, with brief reviews and a callout of my current pick.
One overarching recommendation before we dive in: be cautious about signing long-term contracts for AI tools or platforms.
At the pace things are moving, the tool that catches your eye in December could be an afterthought by April.
AI creative tools for paid social campaigns
There’s no shortage of tools that can generate creative assets, and each comes with benefits as well as the risks of producing AI slop.
Regardless of the tool you choose, it must be thoroughly vetted and supported by a strong human-in-the-loop process to ensure quality, accuracy, and brand alignment.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the tools we’ve tested:
- AdCreative.ai: Auto-generates images, video creatives, ad copy, and headlines in multiple sizes, with data-backed scoring for outputs.
- Creatify: Particularly strong on video ads with multi-format support.
- WASK: Combines AI creative generation with campaign optimization and competitor analysis.
- Revid AI: Well-suited for story formats.
- ChatGPT: Free and widely familiar, giving marketers an edge in effective prompting.
Our current tool of choice is AdCreative.ai. It’s easy to use and especially helpful for quickly brainstorming creative angles and variations to test.
Like its competitors, it offers meaningful advantages, including:
- Speed and scale that allow you to generate dozens or hundreds of variants in minutes to keep creative fresh and reduce ad fatigue.
- Less reliance on external designers or editors for routine or templated outputs.
- Rapid creative experimentation across images, copy, and layouts to find winning combinations faster.
- Data-driven insights, such as creative scores or performance predictions, when available.
The usual caveats apply across all creative tools:
- Build guardrails to avoid off-brand outputs by maintaining a strong voice guide, providing exemplar content, enforcing style rules and banned words, and ensuring human review at every step.
- Watch for accuracy issues or hallucinations and include verification in your process, especially for technical claims, data, or legal copy.
Dig deeper: How to get smarter with AI in PPC
AI campaign management and workflow tools for performance campaigns
There are plenty of workflow automation tools on the market, including long-standing options, like Zapier, Workato, and Microsoft Power Automate.
Our preferred choice, though, is n8n. Its agentic workflows and built-in connections across ad platforms, CRMs, and reporting tools have been invaluable in automating redundant tasks.
Here are my agency’s primary use cases for n8n:
- Lead management: Automatically enrich new leads from HubSpot or Salesforce with n8n’s Clearbit automation, then route them to the right rep or nurture sequence.
- UTM cleanup: When a form fill or ad conversion comes in, automatically normalize UTM parameters before pushing them to your CRM. Some systems, like HubSpot, store values in fields such as “first URL seen” that aren’t parsed into UTM fields, so UTMs remain associated with the user but aren’t stored properly and require reconciliation.
- Data reporting: Pull metrics from APIs, structure the data, and use AI to summarize insights. Reports can then be shared via Slack and email, or dropped into collaborative tools like Google Docs.
As with any tool, n8n comes with caveats to keep in mind:
- It requires some technical ability because it’s low-code, not no-code. You often need to understand APIs, JSON, and authentication, such as OAuth or API keys. Even basic automations may involve light logic or expressions. Integrations with less mainstream tools can require scripting.
- You need a deliberate setup to maintain security. There’s no built-in role-based access control in all configurations unless you use n8n Cloud Enterprise. Misconfigured webhooks can expose data if not handled properly.
- Its ad platform integrations aren’t as broad as those of some competitors. For example, it doesn’t include LinkedIn Ads, Reddit Ads, or TikTok Ads. These can be added via direct API calls, but that takes more manual work.
Dig deeper: Top AI tools and tactics you should be using in PPC
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AI search visibility measurement tools
Most SEOs already have preferred platforms for measurement and insights – Semrush, Moz, SE Ranking, and others.
While many now offer reports on brand visibility in AI search results from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar tools, these features are add-ons to products built for traditional SEO.
To track how our brands show up in AI search results, we use Profound.
While other purpose-built tools exist, we’ve found that it offers differentiated persona-level and competitor-level analysis and ties its reporting to strategic levers like content and PR or sentiment, making it clear how to act on the data.
These platforms can provide near real-time insights such as:
- Performance benchmarks that show AI visibility against competitors to highlight strengths and weaknesses.
- Content and messaging intel, including the language AI uses to describe brands and their solutions, which can inform thought leadership and messaging refinement.
- Signals that show whether your efforts are improving the consistency and favorability of brand mentions in AI answers.
- Trends illustrating how generative AI is reshaping search results and user behavior.
- Insights beyond linear keyword rankings that reveal the narratives AI models generate about your company, competitors, and industry.
- Gaps and opportunities to address to influence how your brand appears in AI answers.
No matter which tool you choose, the key is to adopt one quickly.
The more data you gather on rapidly evolving AI search trends, the more agile you can be in adjusting your strategy to capture the growing share of users turning to AI tools during their purchase journey.
Dig deeper: Scaling PPC with AI automation: Scripts, data, and custom tools
What remains true as the AI toolset keeps shifting
I like to think most of my content for this publication ages well, but I’m not expecting this one to follow suit.
Anyone reading it a few months after it runs will likely see it as more of a time capsule than a set of current recommendations – and that’s fine.
What does feel evergreen is the need to:
- Monitor the AI landscape.
- Aggressively test new tools and features.
- Build or maintain a strong knowledge-sharing function across your team.
We’re well past head-in-the-sand territory with AI in performance marketing, yet there’s still room for differentiation among teams that move quickly, test strategically, and pivot together as needed.
Dig deeper: AI agents in PPC: What to know and build today