Google launches ads in AI Overviews as it pushes onward in the generative AI race
The tech giant is advancing its mission to attract advertisers and expand user engagement opportunities through new AI-powered features – as the competition grows more intense.
Like other major tech companies, Google has been investing heavily in generative AI since the release of ChatGPT. / Adobe Stock
Long before ‘generative AI’ was a marketing buzz phrase, Google was using AI to aggregate user data and deliver hyper-targeted ads. Now, the company is using its powerful generative and predictive algorithms to make it easier for brands to promote their products and sell to consumers in the moments when they’re most likely to make a purchase.
Today, the company announced that it’s launching ads within AI Overviews – the short, auto-generated summaries that often appear at the top of Google Search queries (a product debuted last year under the name Search Generative Experience). The new ad format will roll out to mobile users in the US beginning today.
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Users will begin seeing relevant ads – complete with images and product descriptions – beneath AI Overviews. Searching for the best way to remove a grass stain from jeans, for example, will yield links to popular stain removers.
Ads in AI Overviews were originally teased as an experimental feature in May of 2023. The company has been developing the product ever since (overcoming some early hiccups involving hilariously bizarre results), positioning it as a more intuitive and engaging approach to search.
Now, after months of testing, Google believes it can tap into the product’s commercial promise. “People find ads in AI Overviews helpful, because they can quickly connect with relevant businesses, products or services to help them on that next step [of the buying process] at the exact moment that they need them,” Brendon Kraham, vice-president of global search ads and commerce at Google, tells The Drum.
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And some industry leaders are bullish on the approach. “Advertising will be the primary way to monetize AI [moving forward] – Google has a massive head start here versus other AI players, given their ad stack and how much advertising demand they already have,” says Shiv Gupta, managing partner at U of Digital, a digital marketing education firm. “This is a major AI tailwind for Google that doesn’t get talked about much.“
The sentiment is echoed by Eric Beane, chief analytics and data officer at VML, who says the integration of ads into AI Overviews “not only enhances the user experience by providing more personalized and context-aware ads and results, but also opens up new advertising opportunities for businesses.“
Of course, the real measure of success here will rely on the execution, Gupta caveats. “Google has to do it right from a consumer standpoint. If the experience stinks, and users decide to use other AI tools because of it, this may actually work against Google. They will have to thread the needle.”
The introduction of ads in AI Overviews and the development of AI Overviews more broadly is part of Google’s ongoing effort to compete in the cutthroat generative AI market. It’s becoming an increasingly challenging task considering that developers like Perplexity and OpenAI have been eating into Google’s market share with innovative AI-powered search offerings of their own.
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Google is “being challenged by so many external AI forces [that] they are in a position where they need to make a change and innovate to stay ahead of their competitors,” says Nick Mattar, founder and CEO of digital marketing firm Marketing 1080.
At the same time, he says, the company controls such an overwhelming portion of online search traffic – and has become such a deeply integrated part of consumers’ everyday lives – that its new AI-powered search and advertising features will probably be passively accepted by most users.
“Any significant changes to [the company’s] UI … may be met with some resistance in the short-term, but long-term people come to accept it,” he says. “Google is so large and it is so difficult for any competitors to take over, that they can do what they want. And as long as they continue to deliver a semblance of what they’ve always done, I don’t think they’re in any danger of losing any business, and I don’t think advertisers are going to see any changes.”
Google also announced today that it’s launching shopping ads in Lens, its image-recognition tool. Here, too, the goal is to immediately capture shoppers’ interest in a particular product and increase the likelihood of making a quick purchase.
For example, a person might walk by a store window and spot a jacket that they love but that they don’t have time to try on since they’re rushing to catch a ride to the airport. Instead, they can just pull out their phone, capture or upload a picture through Lens, and the system will automatically reference its massive product database to display ads for similar products, along with product reviews, retail locators and other useful information.
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It represents a major opportunity for Google, considering that, of the 20bn Lens searches each month, around 4bn are related to shopping, according to the company.
The new shopping ads in Lens features are being launched today for iOS and Android users in select countries.
Advertisers will have access to all of these new AI-powered features through their existing campaigns on Google’s ad platforms, like Performance Max.
“As a marketer, the benefit here is to [be able to] move at this pace of consumers, reach them seamlessly and effectively and use the products that you know from Google today, with no additional work required,” says Kraham.
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