Philadelphia Cream Cheese has stopped paying for search ads, at least for prospects who shop on Google.
Over the past year, the Kraft Heinz-owned consumer goods brand has phased out traditional search ad spending, choosing instead to put that money into retail media and broader channels, said Maddie Jingles, vice president of marketing for Kraft Heinz’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
“People are no longer typing ‘cream cheese’ into Google,” Jingles told Digiday. “What we’re trying to integrate is more focus on actual recipes and use cases, rather than just buying search terms for brands.” Jingle declined to say how much consumer goods brands spend on retail media.
Fragmented search environment
It’s a calculated gamble. There are more places to search online than ever before. For things like cream cheese, retail media is gaining traction because shoppers are less likely to use Google and more likely to start on the grocery store’s website.
“Even the people searching already know what they’re looking for, so it doesn’t drive any real activity,” said Nitin Sinha, head of media planning at Noble People.
Instead, Philadelphia Cream Cheese is investing in e-commerce and retail search. “Because it’s a very low-funnel for us and leads directly to purchase,” Jingle said. For example, she added, if someone searches for team “cheesecake” in the Walmart+ app, CPG brands will buy the term for their product and appear first in the results.
Philadelphia Cream Cheese spent about $495,000 on seven retail media networks last year, according to the MediaRadar advertising intelligence platform. Approximately 29% of this spending went toward advertising for Meijer, a Midwest grocery store. MediaRadar detected no Google paid search activity for Philadelphia Cream Cheese in 2025.
Philadelphia Cream Cheese spent a total of $31.8 million on digital advertising in the U.S. in 2025, according to insights from AdClarity, a digital-first advertising intelligence platform. Nearly half of the budget was devoted to CTV, and nearly half to social platforms.
Rethink mixed search
Retail media networks are the golden children of the industry, especially for consumer goods brands that value in-store presence. Brands are increasingly directing at least some of their Google search dollars to brand awareness channels and retail media networks for better end results in a fragmented digital landscape, especially as Google remains the top search platform, according to Mercacy Performance Marketing agency.
But that’s not to say authorities are putting the nail in Google’s coffin. Marcuse recommends clients set aside ad dollars for traditional search.
“We believe traditional search is still growing, and that’s what’s interesting about search,” said Christopher Jones, co-founder and co-CEO of Markacy.
Maintain the status quo
Further down the dairy aisle, Kerrygold butter has a similar thought pattern. Kerrygold global brand director Brian Creer said Kerrygold is layering agent search and AI search on top of its existing traditional search and retail media.
“We definitely [in] Agent search, but it’s probably not going to eliminate some of the things we’ve been doing around traditional search,” Claire said.
There is no doubt that cracks are appearing in the exploration landscape. Google is no longer the only game in town, as people research products everywhere from Reddit to retailer websites and, of course, LLMs. ChatGPT does not replace Google. Because LLMs obtain information from numerous sources on the Internet, marketers are segmenting their media strategies so that they can be accessed everywhere at the same time, at least as much as possible.
Last summer, Bose suspended paid search for half of its U.S. marketers as part of a test to build an AI model to decide where to invest, according to Adweek.
When it comes to AI search hacking, it’s a conundrum that Philadelphia Cream Cheese is still trying to solve. In the meantime, the safe bet is e-commerce and retailer-focused search, Jingle said, adding, “We can simply connect directly to the entire digital ecosystem to go directly to purchase and understand the consumer better and get the data behind it.”
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.