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Google has rolled out ads in AI Overviews on mobile in the US, the company announced on Thursday.
Google Director of Global Search Rachel Melgaard said earlier this year that ads could appear above, below, and within AI Overviews in search results, and that future is officially here. In an example shared in a press release, a mobile search for “how do I get a grass stain out of jeans?” returned shopping ads for products like a Tide To Go stain-remover pen and Oxiclean stain-remover spray embedded within the AI Overview results.
Ads are also coming to Google’s visual search tool Google Lens by the end of the year, the company announced. That means that, in an example provided by Google, a photo of a backpack in a store window could return search results that include shopping ads for the “exact item in your photo,” the company wrote in the press release.
Ad-ons: Google is already running plenty of ads above and below AI Overviews in Search, and the additional mobile ads embedded within Overviews will offer advertisers yet another batch of inventory as Google looks to continue keeping its ultra-lucrative Search business churning. In Q2, Google’s Search business pulled in $48.5 billion in revenue, making it the company’s most profitable line item.
For the first time in years, Google is facing stiff competition in the search world from AI startups like OpenAI and Perplexity and TikTok, which many zoomers report using instead of a traditional search engine.
+1: In May, Marketing Brew spoke to Google’s VP of search ads, Shashi Thakur, who detailed how Search’s AI features could impact the internet ecosystem.