Ten countries, and a new place to put an ad
Google is extending advertising inside AI Mode, its conversational search surface, to Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore, the company said on 28 October. Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom are to follow in the fourth quarter of 2026.
The second part of the announcement is a new ad slot rather than a new market. Google is launching what it calls multiturn ads in the United States, which place advertising in the answers to follow-up questions as a user keeps talking to AI Mode. Until now an AI Mode conversation carried advertising only at its start. Ads will be labelled “Sponsored”, the post says.
The company’s own numbers, and what they do not say
The post is written by Shashi Thakur, vice-president and general manager for Google Search Ads, and the figures in it are Google’s. It says AI Mode queries are on average three times longer than traditional searches, that the company’s research indicates people are comfortable with ads in AI Mode and find them highly relevant, and that click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product listings inside AI Mode.
None of those claims comes with a number attached beyond the query-length multiple. There is no disclosure of how many AI Mode sessions now carry an ad, what they earn relative to a conventional results page, or how the click-through comparison was measured.
Timing
The announcement landed the same day Alphabet reported third-quarter results. Google Search and other revenue was $63.350bn for the quarter, up 12% year on year. TechCrunch reported that the segment grew 17% in the second quarter and 19% in the first, making 12% the slowest of the three.
That is the context the expansion sits in. Search remains by far Alphabet’s largest business, and AI Mode is the surface that answers a growing share of queries without sending the user to a results page of blue links and text ads. Extending ads into it, and into the follow-up turns of a conversation, is how Google proposes to keep the revenue attached to the query.
What to watch
Two things are checkable from here. Whether Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom arrive inside the quarter Google has named, and whether the next earnings release separates AI Mode monetisation from Search advertising as a whole. Until it does, the effect of putting ads in a conversation will remain inside a single reported line.
