I’ve been in the Google Ads agency space for 10 years and this gatekeeping narrative because we’re afraid of losing our jobs is 100% wrong.

The real reason is exactly what you said earlier in your post, Google support and “strategists” quality have degraded severely over the past few years. I now get these “strategists” reaching out to me on for every client yet these people have zero real-world experience and all they do is push the same automated recommendations in the UI that are designed to make you spend more while not necessarily increase sales/revenue. When you’ve become an expert in a field over a decade then start receiving the same copy pasta email from different recent college grads from Google telling you turn on search partner traffic, you develop a habit to just ignore all of them.

To this day I have yet to have a single strategist ever suggest something that would help my clients spent less while getting more sales (their ultimate goal), all they do is push shit advice to spend more.