Google Shows Off Ads In Search Generative Experience

Google showcased some additional Google Ads sponsored search ads in the new Google Search Generative Experience yesterday at Google Marketing Live. Google made a point to say these ad positions and features will likely change as Google continues to experiment with this new search experience.

When Google first announced the Search Generative Experience (I like to spell it out), Google showcased how ads will be displayed, and we covered that over here but now Google showed us an additional ad position within the actual conversation of the AI generative answer in the new experience.

Here is a GIF of it in action, which you can click on to enlarge and see a larger version:

Let’s zoom in a bit and you can see how the “sponsored” labels at the top pretty much look similar to the traditional Google Search result ad slots:

Then the new ad slots are within the generative answer, as you can see in these screenshots both for desktop and mobile:

And Google will also place sponsored search ads below the AI generative answer:

As we said before, advertisers cannot opt out of showing their ads in the new Google Search Generative Experience. This is because this is a labs experiment and Google has not yet built in controls for advertisers yet. Google wants to continue to experiment and see what ad positions work and which do not.

Google also would not share any click through rate differences because again, this is an experiment, labs only right now. But Google may share these in the future, maybe.

In the announcement, Google wrote, “over the coming months, we’ll experiment with Search and Shopping ads that are directly integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode. We’ll also experiment with new formats native to SGE that use generative AI to create relevant, high-quality ads that are customized to every step of the search journey.”

So we will be following these experiences and tests closely as soon as we gain access to the new Google Search Generative Experience.

We also covered the new conversation experience for creating Google Ads. And there is a lot more, more than all the stories we covered, so check out both Search Engine Land and this from Google.

Forum discussion at Twitter.