Last week, Google introduced radical changes to its search engines, thanks to which users receive answers to their queries generated by artificial intelligence. Now the company says it will soon start including ads in AI reviews, as auto-responders are called.
Google announced plans on Tuesday to test search and shopping ads on AI summaries, a move that could extend its search advertising dominance into a modern era. While Google quickly rolled out its AI previews to all U.S. English speakers last week after announcing the feature at its I/O developer conference, it’s unclear how widely or quickly ads will start appearing.
Screenshots released by Google show how a user asking how to remove wrinkles from clothes can receive an AI-generated summary of tips sourced from the internet, along with a carousel of ads for sprays that claim to lend a hand freshen up their wardrobe.
Google’s AI overhauls aim to keep users from switching to alternatives like ChatGPT or startup Perplexity, which operate AI-generated text to answer many of the questions traditionally asked of Google. How and when Google will integrate advertising into AI reviews has been a substantial question for its ChatGPT catch-up strategy. Search advertising is a company’s largest source of revenue, and even subtle changes in ad placement or design can cause vast fluctuations in Google’s revenue.
Courtesy of Google
In Tuesday’s announcement, Google shared some details about the modern Overview ad format. Ads “will be eligible to appear in the AI Review in a section clearly marked as ‘sponsored’ if they are relevant to both the query and the information contained in the AI Review” – Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president and general manager of advertising, typed post on a blog.
AI Overview will operate ads from advertisers’ existing campaigns, which means they can’t completely opt out of the experiment or adjust their ad settings and designs to appear in this feature. “There is no need for any action by advertisers,” Srinivasan wrote.
When Google began experimenting with AI-generated responses in search engines last year, Google said ads for specific products would be integrated with the feature. In one example at the time, a sponsored option was displayed at the top of an AI-generated list of children’s hiking backpacks. Google says early testing shows that users found ads above and below AI summaries useful. Google’s much smaller rival Bing runs product ads on its Bing Copilot search chatbot, but WIRED didn’t trigger any ads on AI competitor Bing in Monday’s tests.