From PC World: If you’ve been enjoying the lack of advertising in Google’s new “AI Mode”, which replaces conventional web searches with a ChatGPT-style conversational interface, then I have bad news. Users are starting to see the former search engine’s omnipresent ads creep into its shiny new mode as of November 20th.
Oddly, it only seems to be a small fraction of users or queries that are showing these ads at the moment, and by default it’s appearing below more direct answers. That’s for the results that are marked as “Sponsored” to comply with laws in the US and other countries. This is well below the advertising load in the “All” and far more direct “Web” tabs of Google Search, which show sponsored results immediately (and typically require lots of scrolling to get past for especially lucrative searches).
BleepingComputer reports that ads are appearing below both the LLM-generated answers for user queries, centering the most immediate answer to the query, and effectively highlighting the sources for the generated answer on the right. These sources are still pretty lightly featured, especially on mobile, where I have to scroll to the very bottom of the page in order to see the sites that actually provide the information Google is scraping and regurgitating.
I was unable to replicate advertising in AI Mode, despite using the same queries that users on Twitter did to find the ads, so they seem to be very limited at the moment (or tied to some other flag that doesn’t apply).
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