Are there ads in Google AI Mode? Google takes them to 10 more countries

What happened

In a post on its Ads & Commerce blog, Google said it is scaling ads in AI Mode beyond the US. The same day, Search Engine Watch spotted a test that puts a “Sponsored” heading over paid products and an “All products” heading over organic ones.

What this means for your site or store

AI Mode answers now mix paid and free product listings, and Google says people click both about as often. That gives you two ways in:

1. Free: make your product and service pages easy for AI to read, with prices, sizes, stock, delivery and returns in plain text, plus product schema.
2. Paid: if you already run Search, Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, Google says they are eligible for AI Mode automatically, with no new campaign needed.
3. Check your website copy: Google may add short AI-written “explainers” next to ads, using public sources including your website. You can’t edit them, so your pages need to say clearly what you sell.

If you are still learning how AI search finds products, read how shoppers use ChatGPT to find products.

The technical details

According to Google’s help page on ads in AI experiences, ads are matched either to the query itself or to the query plus the AI response, when a commercial need comes up during a longer question. Broad match, AI Max for Search, Shopping and Performance Max can use both kinds of matching, while exact and phrase match only serve on queries with clear buying intent. Text and Shopping ads can appear, and AI Mode results are included in your normal campaign reports, not a separate one.

Want to know if Google’s AI and ChatGPT can read your product pages? Run our free AI check, or get robots.txt, llms.txt and schema done for you with the AI-Ready Kit.