Here come the ads in your Google AI Overviews

(Image credit: Google)

Google promised advertisers that its AI plans would not bar them from reaching potential customers, and the tech giant has delivered with the addition of advertising to the AI Overviews feature in Google Search. Whether that makes the Gemini AI-written summaries to your search queries more appealing is debatable. AI Overviews means you may not need to click on a link to get an answer to a question and was hyped at Google I/O this year. Companies that rely on Google's search engine to promote their websites were leery of a tool that seemed to make sponsoring results worthless.

Google anticipated that reaction and promised ads would be an element of AI Overviews. After months of testing, the ads are rolling out. Essentially, you'll see products mentioned and linked to in the text written by the AI. For now, it's just going to be U.S. mobile users who see the ads, but they will likely expand quickly, assuming the tests have worked out most of the bugs.

The idea is to connect how Google traditionally used ads to support itself with the new AI mandate, bringing Gemini to every corner of the company's ecosystem. While you may or may not find the direct suggestions for products useful, it's definitely going to make it more likely that people click on a product and buy it than if there were only the somewhat subtle hyperlinks to the content Gemini used to write the AI Overview. The company said it will only include sponsored links when it's directly relevant, so you shouldn't see any ad spam in the AI Overview.

Google demonstrated in the video below how you might look for tips on removing grass stains from clothing. While the AI Overview would normally suggest methods and provide links, the sponsorship of a cleaning product company means you'll also see a list of products you might want to buy for that purpose. The products are marked as being sponsored, much like when you see a bunch of sponsored links at the top of a search result page.

AI Overviews Just for You

"This new ad format was designed to help people discover new brands and make informed purchasing decisions," Google explained in a blog post. "People have been finding the ads within AI Overviews helpful because they can quickly connect with relevant businesses, products, and services to take the next step at the exact moment they need them."

Google has been keen to push AI Overviews onto users despite some major problems with how safe the answers were early on and reports that Google was pulling back on its rollout. Still, the feature is now international, and clearly, Google feels comfortable enough with it to trust its AI models with its crucial advertising dollars.

Melding its keystone services of search and ads with AI could be a boon to both advertisers and consumers who want a faster route between having a question and getting a product to solve the problem. It's also necessary for Google as it works to match and beat its rivals in both search and AI. Microsoft has been playing with ads in its Copilot AI chatbot, as has Perplexity with its sponsored follow-up questions. And, Amazon has pursued a similar objective from the other direction by making an AI chatbot on its website called Rufus that will also offer sponsored suggestions for purchases.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.