On March 9, 2026, Google updated its Help Center documentation for Performance Planner. The change was not announced in a blog post. There was no press release, no notification inside the Google Ads interface, no email to advertisers. The relevant passage was added to the "About Performance Planner" page, effective immediately:
Effective March 9, 2026, Performance Planner no longer supports planning for Display and Video campaigns, or plans that involve metrics based on impression share.
The Display and Video campaign types were removed. So were impression share, top impression share, and absolute top impression share as planning metrics. Any existing plans built on those campaign types or metrics became inaccessible — not deleted, exactly, but frozen. They cannot be viewed, edited, or exported. The data exists in a kind of industrial suspended animation, preserved in the format that made it unusable.
What had been removed was not a feature. It was a category. The ability to plan awareness-format advertising — display banners, video pre-roll, the formats that exist to be seen rather than clicked — was no longer a function that Google's native planning infrastructure recognized. The open web's display impressions had fallen from over 40 percent of Google's own display inventory in January 2019 to 11 percent by January 2025. The display format had been deprecated internally before it was deprecated officially. The tool did not break. The category did.
Performance Planner had been, for years, Google's primary budget forecasting tool for advertisers who wanted to plan across Google Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Display networks. It offered a straightforward function: input a campaign structure and a target, and receive projected spend levels, impression volumes, and conversion estimates. For Display and Video campaigns — the formats most closely associated with brand awareness and upper-funnel reach — this was the planning infrastructure inside Google's system.
The removal of Display and Video support is the third step in a sequence. In September 2024, Google deprecated Enhanced CPC bidding for Search and Display. In September 2025, Performance Max became the default campaign type whenever an advertiser selected multiple channels in the campaign setup flow. In March 2026, the remaining Display and Video planning support disappeared. The direction of travel is consistent: impression-based formats and reach-oriented planning are being removed from the native toolset.
Google's stated rationale, from Brandon Ervin, Director of Product Management for Search Ads, quoted in Time.news: impression-level management is misaligned with how modern AI-powered systems operate. Display and Video, Ervin explained, operate in fundamentally different auction environments than Search — the forecasting model that Performance Planner uses, built on search auction data, does not produce reliable outputs for display formats. The tool was not broken in the conventional sense. It was producing outputs that could not be trusted, and rather than fix the model, Google removed the inputs that required it.
The practical effect is a planning gap. Display campaigns can still be created and run inside Google Ads. YouTube pre-roll still exists as an inventory format. The formats have not been removed from the auction. They have been removed from the floorplan — the schematic that told advertisers how to think about allocating budget across them. Advertisers who used Performance Planner for Display forecasting must now use nothing, or use something else, or build their own models from scratch.
The industry response, in the weeks following the March documentation update, followed a consistent pattern: acknowledgment of the gap, followed by the identification of partial alternatives, followed by the recognition that no direct replacement exists inside Google's ecosystem.
Reach Planner remains available for YouTube and video planning. It estimates reach and frequency for video campaigns. But it does not integrate with the cross-channel budget optimization that Performance Planner offered, and it does not support display campaigns in the traditional sense. Google has positioned Demand Gen — its format for image and video ads running on YouTube, Gmail, and Discover — as the successor for upper-funnel objectives inside Performance Planner. Demand Gen is explicitly supported in the tool.
But Demand Gen operates on conversion-tracking architecture. It optimizes toward declared outcomes — clicks, conversions — not toward reach or impression share. The planning metrics for it are not reach curves or GRPs. They are the same conversion metrics used for direct-response campaigns. Google is asking advertisers to plan awareness-format advertising using direct-response planning frameworks, inside a system that has now formally excised the planning metrics designed for awareness.
This is not a failure of product design. It is a coherent statement about what Google believes advertising is for. When a system removes the tools required to plan a category of advertising, it is not malfunctioning. It is telling you something about whether that category belongs in its future.
The reason Display occupies a smaller role in Google's inventory is not mysterious. The audience that Display once delivered has migrated, partly by Google's own design.
Since the rollout of AI Overviews in search results, multiple independent research firms have documented a sustained collapse in organic click-through rates. Define Media Group, studying 64 publisher sites, found organic search clicks down 42 percent from pre-AI Overviews baseline. Seer Interactive, analyzing 25.1 million impressions, documented a 61 percent year-over-year decline in organic CTR for queries where AI Overviews appeared. Pew Research found that users click links only 8 percent of the time when AI Overviews are present, compared to 15 percent without — a 47 percent relative collapse. Ahrefs reported that 83 percent of searches with AI Overviews result in zero click to any website.
The traffic that publishers once received from Google — and that advertisers once purchased against, via Display retargeting, via programmatic display against publisher audiences — has been substantially diverted. Publishers have documented the consequences: Chegg lost 49 percent of its search traffic; Business Insider lost 55 percent of its organic search traffic between 2022 and 2025; travel blog The Planet D lost 50 percent of its traffic after AI Overviews launched; Digital Trends fell from 8.5 million monthly US Google clicks to approximately 265,000 — a 97 percent decline.
When the audience that Display once reached is no longer present at the publishers where Display inventory was placed, the format itself becomes structurally diminished. The 11 percent figure is not a preference failure. It is an architectural consequence.
The budgets that once flowed through open-web Display have followed the audience. The去向 is predictable: connected TV, retail media networks, and the owned inventory of platforms with first-party purchase data.
Forrester predicted in October 2025 that advertisers would cut display ad budgets by 30 percent in 2026, redirecting spend toward connected TV, streaming audio, and social video. Connected TV advertising grew to over $33 billion in US ad spend in 2025, making it the fastest-growing ad channel per the IAB. Retail media networks — Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel — collectively exceeded $60 billion in US ad spend in 2025, growing 15 to 20 percent annually globally. These channels share a structural feature: they are closed systems. They do not require the open-web Display infrastructure that Google's deprecated planning tools were designed to support.
Google's own revenue mix reflects this shift. In Q2 2025, for the first time in over a decade, 90 percent of Google's advertising revenue came from Google-owned properties — Search, YouTube — while only 10 percent came from the Network, the collection of publisher-facing products including AdSense and Google Ad Manager. Network revenue actually declined 1 percent year-over-year, to $7.4 billion, while Search grew 12 percent to $54.2 billion and YouTube grew 13 percent to $9.8 billion. The floorplan Google just removed from Performance Planner was describing a category that had already left the building.
There is an irony embedded in the sequence that is not visible inside Google's measurement systems. The research literature on what happens when brands stop advertising — the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's multi-decade study of 41 beer and cider brands tracking 57 cases of advertising cessation — documents a consistent pattern: one year without advertising produces a 16 percent sales decline. Two years produces 25 percent. Three years produces 36 percent. These are not small perturbations. They are structural dependencies that manifest over time, in channels that brand-advertising creates — organic search, direct traffic, word-of-mouth — that no platform's attribution system captures.
The brands that use Google's deprecated tools to plan Display campaigns are, in the main, the brands that believe upper-funnel advertising creates downstream value. The research suggests they are correct. The fact that this value is not visible inside the measurement infrastructure of the platform where they spend their budgets is not evidence that the value does not exist. It is evidence that the platform's measurement infrastructure was designed to optimize toward what it can claim credit for, not toward what it actually causes.
The Discontinued Floorplan is not a story about a broken tool. It is a story about the infrastructure of a category — awareness-format advertising, the kind that exists to be seen rather than clicked — being formally removed from the planning stack of the company that dominates digital attention. The tool was removed because the category had already left. The removal is the confirmation. What remains is the question of who, in the industry's planning departments and media teams, is doing the work of planning for the awareness that Google's system no longer believes in — and whether that work is being done anywhere at all.
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