Pau Klein

The time has come. Google is now showing ads within AI Mode for the first time ever. Similar to the ads that I had originally spotted showing within AI overviews earlier this year, the placement is at the bottom of the response. And as you can see, the ad results are labelled with the 'sponsored' tag, appearing in a similar way to the organic link cards directly above. This was first spotted by @gsterling yesterday for a service-based query, and I've now been able to replicate it. Interestingly, the example Greg spotted was within the labs interface (signified with the beaker icon), but my example shows that it also displays outside of this experimental interface. Google has been briefing brands on a Q4 rollout, according to reporting on @sengineland in August, with the rollout looking like it has now arrived in a formalised format. It will be interesting to see if the ad placement becomes integrated in the middle of the answer output, also, like we see within the main section of search results. So, Ads within AI Mode are here. This marks a significant difference between Google's AI Mode and the likes of ChatGPT, with ChatGPT not having even close to the same infrastructure for ads as Google does, with the ChatGPT rollout of ads being one that is also looming and has been spotted by some within recent weeks. More details on this experiment can be found within the comments. Make sure to subscribe to my monthly newsletter 'SERP Alert' if you haven't already, where I'll be giving a breakdown of major SERP feature changes on Google over the past month.