Ads are starting to appear in Google's AI helpers, marking a new frontier for advertising. Photo / Philip Dulian, AFP
Advertising has increasingly encroached into relatively commercial-free zones like streaming services, shopping online and in physical stores, Uber rides, chat messaging and ordering restaurant delivery.
Get ready for what’s next: ads are now starting to show up in Google’s AI helpers. It’s likely to be just the beginning of trial-and-error attempts at more advertising in AI this year.
While hardly anyone admits to loving ads, we deal with them. It could be a new frontier, though, if ads become a fixture in AI chatbots.
Ads could intrude on what have felt like private conversational partners and reliable arbiters of information free from the paid promotions, spam and manipulation that infects other online sources.
AI companies are being cautious about ads. But they are coming. Here’s what you need to know.
Google has told advertisers about a new type of ad they can buy in AI Mode, Google’s chatbot-style search helper. Google is the world’s biggest seller of ads, which makes anything it does with AI ads a potential trendsetter.
Google gave the example of a person using AI Mode to research an ideal dining room rug. If you click on one of the rugs in the chatbot recommendations, you might see a coupon from a rug store that paid Google to show you a discount.
That coupon is an ad – and perhaps a clever one to win you over with advertising you might like. (Who doesn’t like coupons?)
Google has already been testing for many months other kinds of ads to show you in AI Mode and in the AI-generated summaries at the top of many Google web search results.
Google said that the advertiser-paid coupons don’t influence the AI-generated information that people see in AI Mode, and that the coupons give “people access to an exclusive deal for a product they’re already interested in”.
You probably haven’t seen ads yet in Google’s AI Mode or its AI-generated search results. There are billions of Google searches each day, which gives the company wiggle room to try advertising experiments with little notice.
Google probably won’t be alone in adding advertising to the AI you use.
OpenAI has been cooking up advertising for its ChatGPT, according to a December article in the technology news publication the Information. OpenAI referred me to an X post by an executive that said: “If we do pursue ads, we’ll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that.”
Last fall, the AI search company Perplexity pulled back from ads, which it had started to show users, but the company says that it’s “continually experimenting with advertisers that prioritise our users and how they use the internet now”.
Meta has given itself permission to use what you share with its bot to target you with ads on Instagram and Facebook, though it’s not showing ads in the Meta AI chatbot itself.
Nate Elliott, an analyst with the research firm eMarketer, said that AI companies are walking a tightrope with advertising. The $1 trillion yearly global spending on advertising could help fund the whopping costs of AI. He also said it’s not an accident that AI companies are not saying much publicly about their advertising plans.
“They need to start making money from these investments, but to run ads – which people generally don’t want to see – creates the risk of scaring people away,” Elliott said.
AI ads might not be much different from the online ads you’re used to. We’ll see.
Google has tried paid product promotions that are similar to the “sponsored” web results you might see in Google searches. If you use AI Mode for help creating a small business website, Google has said it might take money to show you an ad pitching website-building software. Seems logical.
But you could also imagine how advertising could turn unwelcome or creepy in chatbots that feel like intimate personal spaces and that also save gobs of your private data.
You don’t want sexting with an AI girlfriend to be interrupted by a “sponsored by Coca-Cola” message. If you see an ad for a prescription pill when you’re asking a chatbot for advice about menopause symptoms, will that feel like an intrusive product suggestion skewed by advertiser money?
Elliott said he expects smaller companies to commit to ads in their AI this year, while more prominent companies including Google and OpenAI will experiment before going bigger with ads in 2027.
If you’re thinking heck no to ads in chatbots, Elliott assumes that most companies would let you opt out – if, that is, you pay for a subscription.
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