Yes, Google’s AI-infused search engine will have ads

Google Ads is getting into the generative AI game. Today, the company unveiled products that it says will inject generative AI into its advertising business, like copywriting tools and image generators.

Perhaps most notably, it also released further details on how ads will fit into its new generative-AI search engine, something it’s calling the Search Generative Experience, which is currently available via waitlist. These ads will largely appear above or below the generative text spit out by the search engine, all labeled with a “sponsored” tag. At the moment, advertisers also won’t be able to opt in or out of the new search inventory, and the kind of ads users see will depend on the specific search query, Dan Taylor, Google’s VP of global ads, said during a press briefing.

Search is no slouch for Google—the company’s “search and other” category raked in nearly $40 billion last quarter, and its search engine commands a 91% market share in the US, according to SimilarWeb. Google first announced its search engine’s generative-AI facelift during the company’s I/O conference earlier this month, on the heels of its first real search competitor in decades: Microsoft and its ChatGPT-charged Bing.

For now, search ads within its conversational AI search engine are largely “experiments within an experiment,” Taylor said, alluding to a new program called Search Labs, where Google is testing this tech.

Taylor compared AI’s impact on advertising to the shift to mobile advertising. The company is still testing what kinds of searches merit the “generative experience” and whether it would make sense to place an ad there.

As for how it might impact publishers? “We’ve got a long history of working with the ecosystem and publisher partners in particular to make sure that we’re driving traffic to publishers,” Taylor said. “For generative AI to be successful in the long run, it really does need to feed back into the ecosystem.”

Additionally, the company also unveiled tools that have generative AI doing some of the creative legwork for digital campaigns—one generates images and churns out copy.  It also introduced a voiceover generator and a tool that uses AI to upscale images and videos, improving resolution.

These capabilities aren’t exactly original ideas, but Google’s position as *checks notes* the world’s largest advertising platform could fundamentally upend how advertisers and consumers interact with the company.

“It’s potentially transformative for their business,” Paul Verna, head of Insider Intelligence’s advertising and media practice, said. “But this is kind of risky, because it’s just not known to anyone what the ultimate impact of generative AI is going to be on how people search, how ads are served, how ads are targeted, and who the winners and losers might be.”