Does running Google Ads help my organic rankings?

No. Paying for ads does not lift your organic rankings, and Google has stated this consistently for years — the ad auction and the organic ranking systems are separate, and spending more with one does not buy position in the other.

The useful version of the question is whether the two help each other commercially, and there they do. Ads give you query-level data on what actually converts, which tells your content team which pages are worth building. Owning both the ad and the organic result on a high-intent search takes up more of the page than either alone. And ads produce results this week while SEO compounds over months, which is why most accounts run both.

Where the myth does real damage is in the reverse decision — cutting ads expecting organic to absorb the demand. It generally doesn't, because the traffic wasn't the same traffic. Judge each channel on the leads and revenue it produces, tracked separately.