"Oddly, it only seems to be a small fraction of users or queries that are showing these ads at the moment, and by default it's appearing below more direct answers. That's for the results that are marked as "Sponsored" to comply with laws in the US and other countries. This is well below the advertising load in the "All" and far more direct "Web" tabs of Google Search, which show sponsored results immediately (and typically require lots of scrolling to get past for especially lucrative searches)."
"BleepingComputer reports that ads are appearing below both the LLM-generated answers for user queries, centering the most immediate answer to the query, and effectively highlighting the sources for the generated answer on the right. These sources are still pretty lightly featured, especially on mobile, where I have to scroll to the very bottom of the page in order to see the sites that actually provide the information Google is scraping and regurgitating."
"Google is under pressure at the moment, desperate to compete with skyrocketing use of tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, while preserving the web advertising empire that makes it one of the most valuable technology companies on the planet. Meanwhile, it's pushing its own AI tools onto users, in almost the same way Microsoft is trying to shove Copilot into every aspect of Windows and Office."
Ads have begun appearing in Google's AI Mode for some users as of November 20th. The ads are marked "Sponsored" and typically appear below the LLM-generated direct answers. The ad load in AI Mode remains much lighter than in the "All" and "Web" tabs, which place sponsored results immediately and often require extensive scrolling. Ads appear beneath generated answers and cited sources are highlighted on the right but remain minimally featured, particularly on mobile where users must scroll to the bottom to view source sites. Limited replication suggests a phased rollout or feature-flag targeting. Google faces pressure to retain ad revenue while competing with ChatGPT-style services and is integrating AI tools widely.
Read at PCWorld
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