Ads move into the answer
As Google takes AI Mode ads abroad, a company has two ways into an answer: be the source it cites, or pay to appear beside it.
On 28 October, with its third quarter results, Alphabet said Google would put more ads into its AI answers, in more countries and further into the conversation. The reason was in the same results: people are asking Google more questions, and longer ones, and the new way of asking earns less. For a company that wants to be found, the answer page is turning into an ad page. That leaves two ways to be seen in an AI answer: be the source it cites, or pay to appear beside it.
What Google announced
Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, told analysts that “we are now scaling high-quality ads within AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and queries.” That includes, in his words, “taking our monetization footprint global for the first time.” A Google blog post named the markets the same day: Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom are to follow in the fourth quarter. No country in continental Europe is on the list yet.
In the United States Google is launching what it calls multiturn ads, which can appear on follow up questions, not only beside the first answer. Every ad is labelled “Sponsored”, and advertisers need not build anything new: existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible automatically, and there is no way to opt out of the AI placements separately from Search.
Why the hurry
Google’s Search and other revenue grew 12 percent to 63.35 billion dollars in the third quarter, after 17 percent in the second. Against the previous quarter it barely moved, up from 63.27 billion dollars. Yet Sundar Pichai said query growth was the highest in five years, and that queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches.
Asked about the gap, Schindler named exchange rates as the single largest cause, followed by shifts in retail and media spending. Then he added: “the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode.” Investors heard the last part. Alphabet’s shares closed 12.3 percent lower on 29 October, wiping out roughly 500 billion dollars of market value, Bloomberg reported. The quarter also brought negative free cash flow of 9.1 billion dollars, driven by capital spending on AI.
What Google shows, and what it does not
Google’s case for the ads rests on two claims. Schindler said “Click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product list items within AI Mode”, and that people “are comfortable with ads on these surfaces and find them highly relevant.” Both may hold. But by Google’s own footnote, the click figure rests on internal US data from 20 August to 3 September, about two weeks, and covers product listings only. For the comfort claim Google gives no sample and no method.
Advertisers will struggle to check either claim. Google reports the performance of ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode only in aggregate with the rest of Search, so no one can see what the answer placements alone cost and bring. In our view, a new format measured mostly by the company that sells it deserves a test before it gets a budget.
Site owners face a similar blind spot from the other side. Search Console’s generative AI report, open to all websites since 31 August, shows how often a site’s pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country and device. It counts impressions, not clicks. And the clicks keep thinning: across Chartbeat’s publisher network, referrals from Google Search fell 40.2 percent from July 2025 to July 2026, after 21.9 percent the year before, according to Search Engine Journal.
Two ways into the answer
The first way is earned, and Google has said plainly how. Its guide for site owners, published in May, says that “optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” It asks for what it calls non commodity content, and says no special files, markup or chunking are needed. In practice that means pages that answer the questions buyers actually ask, in plain text, with facts a model can lift: what you offer, for whom, where, and at what price if the price is public.
The second way is bought, and the buying is bundled. A company cannot buy AI Mode on its own: it runs Search, Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, and the auction decides where the ads appear. Google is not alone in this. On 21 October OpenAI took ads in ChatGPT to 26 more countries, 89 in all, and said more than 100'000 advertisers had run campaigns. The ads appear for users of the Free and Go plans, and OpenAI says “advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT provides.”
The two ways do not exclude each other. But only the first keeps working when the budget stops.
What a company can do
Write the pages that earn the citation. One page per real question, the answer in the first lines, and the same facts in the same words everywhere the company appears. It is the slow route, and it lasts.
Measure what the answers send. Check in Search Console which pages appear in AI features, follow the visits from Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and the others in your own analytics, and judge them by what they lead to, not by their number.
Treat paid placement in AI answers as a test with your own yardstick. In our view it makes most sense for companies that sell products from a feed, or whose buyers ask long commercial questions in markets where the ads run. Judge it by enquiries and sales in your own system, since Google’s reporting hides the AI share. For a company that sells only in Switzerland or Germany, the question waits until Google brings the ads there.
And do not depend on one referrer. Chartbeat’s publishers lost two fifths of their Google Search referrals in a year, and in our view no channel that moves that fast should carry a business alone. Direct relationships, a newsletter, the other assistants and a site that converts the visitors who do arrive are the hedge.
Where we stand
We work on the first way. Cited, which is live, measures every week where a company stands when buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity who to choose, and proposes fixes to the website and the wider digital footprint; a person approves every change. Studio, in early access, keeps the website, search and AI visibility, social media and what each channel brings in one place.
