When you run a search on Google, you may get an AI Overview at the top of the results. Google announced an expansion of the AI-powered feature to roll out in more markets and for more languages.
Google revealed information about its AI plans yesterday on its Ads & Commerce blog. There, the company noted that AI Overviews is “one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade”. Google saw a 10 percent increase in usage of Google for queries that displayed the overview generated by Google’s Gemini AI.
As a consequence, Google is expanding ads across AI Overviews. In particular, Google says that it is expanding ads in AI Overviews in English to more countries on mobile and desktop, and Search and Shopping ads in AI Overviews for desktop users in the United States.
Ads will also be tested in AI Mode, which Google calls its “most powerful AI search” feature. AI Mode is limited to Google Search users from the United States at the time of writing.
In other words: expect (more) advertisement in AI Overviews and other AI tools in the coming months and years.
Clearly, running AI is expensive. While companies like Google, Meta, or Microsoft have the means to sustain development, infrastructure and operations, the clear goal is the direct or indirect generation of revenue from these services.
Direct revenue may come from subscriptions or ads, indirect revenue from using data for training or other purposes.
The consequences are clear: users should expect to see more and more ads baked into AI services. This looks like a testing ground currently, but it looks similar to how Google introduced ads in search. First, some ads, separated clearly from search results. Now, Google users get more ads than organic search results in some queries and there is no longer a clear distinction between the two.
Now You: do you use AI services? What is your take on ads being integrated into those?
Don’t like ads as a general rule although Bing on Edge can “get it right” sometimes and show “specials” for an item in search. AI generated search–I find it more as a supplemental, secondary way of searching. When I complete an AI search, limited results are provided. AI generates a certain amount of information with a few links; a typical search provides nearly unlimited links that I can continue to scroll through as necessary. Some of the more relevant, “deeper” links are far down the scroll.
My experience so far . . . .
I don’t know anything about ads, AI, Google given I avoid all three.
I remain stunned to discover that Google proclaims that “people have been finding ads within AI overviews helpful”. People wanting AI is by itself a surprise for many of us I presume, but that they moreover would find AI more helpful with a zest (an increasing zest as stated by the article) of advertisement is beyond my understanding.
Concerning AI, if I do avoid it when force-fed (in particular on search engines), I do happen to give it a try but ONLY when totally disconnected from a site’s specificity : I deeply dislike the trend which proudly present their product with “AI-inside” as we knew in the past with “Intel-inside”, even when AI is absolutely not helpful for the product, not to mention the AI label being showed-off even if reality is a simple algorithm far from any form of true AI … the fashion is AI-Super hero, AI-For President … hysterical.
“I deeply dislike the trend which proudly present their product with “AI-inside””.
I agree. Remember Coca-Cola Christmas or Super ball ads proudly saying that they are 100% AI made? Reminds me NFTs and blockchain trend when every company had to integrate blockchain into their products. That backfired badly due to a concept of blockchain that does not lend itself to many applications. I also remember old time when all China stuff was popular. Sometimes in 1998-1999, almost empty website China.com got billion dollar IPO. Trend chasing is hell of a powerful drug.
But if you check YouTube or TikTok, you have to admit that AI slop channels have huge viewerships. Maybe viewers numbers are bought. But if they are not bought, that means that there are literally hundreds of millions of people watching that garbage voluntarily and prefer AI to real channels.
I do not want to use this AI ads feature… How do I turn it off?
You could try a different search engine. If you want to use Google Search, use a good content blocker like uBlock Origin to block ads.
I was trying to order a Dominos pizza on the phone the other day. When the phone rings too many times an AI order bot answers. It usually works ok.
I told the bot “2 medium 2 topping pizzas”, it replied “1 large 3 topping pizza is that correct?”. I went through this on a repeating loop a few times. Then I said “I want to talk to a real person” the AI replied “I am a real person”.
When I went to Dominos in person to place an order, because I had no choice, I told them abouut this and they were blown away, “It said what!?!”.
The point being, maybe that was the “real person” that found AI ads useful?
There you see…. Google just can’t resist the temptation to bombard users with ads when they’ve performed a search for something. I only use Qwant, but if that fails, then I switch to Startpage.