What happened
- Google announced on 28 October 2026 that ads inside its AI Mode search experience are now running in Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore.
- In the fourth quarter of 2026 the company plans to add more markets, including Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
- In the United States it launched “multiturn” ads, which can appear in follow-up questions within the same AI Mode conversation. All of them will be labelled “Sponsored”.
- The announcement was posted on Google’s blog and repeated by Philipp Schindler, the company’s chief business officer, on Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings call.
Why it matters
- This is the first time Google takes the monetisation of its AI-generated answers outside the United States, Schindler said.
- Search revenue grew 12% year on year in the third quarter, against 17% in the second and 19% in the first, according to TechCrunch. Alphabet shares fell 8% after the results.
- For advertisers in Latin America, Brazil and Mexico will be the entry point. No timetable was given for the rest of the region.
- The company says click-through rates for sponsored product listings in AI Mode are already similar to those of organic listings.
The number
3 times. That is how much longer AI Mode queries are on average than traditional searches, according to Google.
Context
Alphabet reported revenue of US$127.6 billion for the quarter, up 25% from a year earlier. Chief executive Sundar Pichai said search queries grew at their fastest year-on-year pace in five years, without giving the figure, and that one in five AI Mode searches uses voice, images or documents. He also said Google now handles more than 50 billion visual searches a month.
The move adds to other attempts to place ads inside conversational answers. Mamífero has followed how sponsored ads gained ground in ChatGPT answers and how Google’s AI summaries take clicks from the first result. An academic benchmark also measured where an ad bothers people least inside a chat.
In May Google had introduced Gemini-based ad formats, such as conversational discovery ads and sponsored recommendations built into answers. Earlier it had put a conversational agent inside YouTube ads.
What’s next
- Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom are scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026.
- Google said it will keep testing new formats. It did not say whether multiturn ads will leave the United States.
- For advertisers in the region a practical question remains: how to measure a sale that starts in a multi-turn conversation rather than a click on a link.
Bottom line
Google needs AI answers to pay their own way, and the quarter showed why: search is growing more slowly than before. The ten-country rollout is the first step outside the United States. Latin America comes in through Brazil and Mexico, and the rest of the region has no date yet.
Sources
- Google, “Ads in AI Mode expand to new markets”, 28 October 2026: blog.google
- TechCrunch, “Google expands AI Search ads globally as core ad growth slows”, 28 October 2026: techcrunch.com
- Cover image: Panelxf, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Edited by Rodrigo Cornejo. How we select and verify: who writes these notes.
