Have No Fear, Google Has Plans to Enshittify AI Search With Ads, Too

Google’s AI overview has somehow successfully led people to engage less with search results, Click through less oftenAnd Fact-checking is unlikely Present information to them. So you know what that means: it’s time to monetize! According to a report from Search Engine LandGoogle plans to introduce ads inside its AI experiences.

According to the report, Google’s vice president of search, Robbie Stein, said he doesn’t see ads going away anytime soon and actually expects them to evolve to integrate into AI tools. Stein said the company has already “started some experiments on ads within AI mode and the Google AI experience” and hopes to introduce “new and innovative ad formats” in the future so that advertisers can continue to target users and pay Google for the right to do so.

What exactly are those “new and fancy” formats? Stein cites an example of a person searching for information during home remodeling, where a person can feed information into an AI-powered search and it “may offer more fine-tuned recommendations or potentially other services that you might consider, or deals that might be more useful to you.” So…personalized and sponsored ads, but spit out by AI, apparently? It’s not entirely clear what’s novel about this, other than the fact that the person searching will probably be less discerning about what kind of paid placement they’re facing. Of course, there’s always the possibility that your favorite chatbot will gather more detailed information about you, but that’s not really an innovation on the advertising side of things.

For now, the company insists it’s focused on building “consumer products first and foremost,” but is clearly thinking about how to turn a profit on this. Billions of dollars invested In developing. Stein also claims that, for now, AI recommendations include “organic” results first and are not driven by ad input. Keep tabs on it to see how long it lasts.

Gizmodo reached out to Google for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Google is far from the only company figuring out how to make advertising work with AI. Earlier this year, Netflix introduced the idea that it could use Generative AI to create ads which will play between shows for users in an ad-supported tier. So far, though, most of these efforts seem decidedly run-of-the-mill in terms of innovation. Maybe there aren’t many new ways to put products in front of people’s faces. The reality is that what Google is selling here isn’t necessarily a better experience for consumers—it’s just trying to reassure advertisers that, for all its talk that things are going to change, some things will stay exactly the same.