Ad Infini­tum

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At Google I/O this week, the company announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years. The ten blue links? Gone. Instead, you get — first at times? soon always? — “generative UI”, an “intelligent search box” with custom interactive widgets, built on the fly by Gemini. You get “information agents” that monitor the web for you around the clock. You get mini-apps you can build right inside the search box, using natural language. And with Gemini Spark, you get a personal AI agent that runs 24/7, connected to your Gmail, your Drive, your calendar, your photos, and soon your local files and third-party services.

It’s ambitious and also impressive at times, no question. It’s also a staggering gamble. Google is dismantling the very product that built its empire – and rebuilding it into something entirely different. Watching the demos, I kept asking myself two questions. First: what if people don’t actually want to use search this way? And second:

Where did the ads go?

Google made $295 billion in advertising revenue last year, out of $403 billion in total. And yet, across all these announcements – the new search box, the generative UI, Spark, the agents – there wasn’t a single mention of how any of this will be monetized. Not one word about ads.

That seemed odd. I mentioned this on Mastodon, and Sijmen replied with a link that sent me down a rabbit hole.

It turns out there’s a small but growing body of research – some of it from Google’s own researchers – exploring exactly how ads could work inside LLM-generated output. And the ideas are as fascinating as they are unsettling.

One approach, proposed by Google Research, is what you might call a “token auction.” In this model, advertisers don’t buy ad slots on a page. Instead, they bid, token by token, on the actual text the model generates. Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word. The output is a weighted blend of competing interests, shaped by who’s willing to pay more.

Another approach – also from Google researchers – fits the new “Search” much more precisely. It’s called “prominence allocation.” Here, when a user submits a query with commercial intent, the system runs an auction that doesn’t just decide which ads appear, but how prominently the LLM writes about each one. The auction outputs a prominence score for each advertiser, essentially telling the model: give this product 35 words, that one 20, and this one zero. The ad isn’t next to the answer. The ad is the answer. Or rather, it shapes how much space and enthusiasm each product gets within the answer.

Now think about what Google just announced. Generative UI means there are no more discrete ad slots. The search result is a dynamically generated experience – a synthesized narrative, an interactive widget, a curated set of recommendations. In that world, you can’t place a banner ad next to the output. The only thing you can auction is prominence within it.

But it’s not just the ads that disappeared from the keynote. The links did, too.

For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.

That contract is now broken. Generative UI doesn’t link to your article, necessarily. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer. Information agents don’t send users to websites. They deliver “synthesized updates” with maybe a link or two buried at the bottom. The web was the scaffolding Google needed to build its index, to train its models, to accumulate the world’s information, and put ads next to it to get filthy rich. Now that the content is inside the system, the scaffolding is no longer needed. Google is creating its own context.

Google thinks it no longer needs the Web to deliver answers. And it no longer needs ad slots to deliver ads. What it needs is you. Your emails, your files, your calendar, your purchase history, your travel plans – all flowing into Spark, all building the richest possible picture of who you are and what you’re likely to click on. That’s exactly the kind of personal context those auction models need to work. The prediction module in the prominence allocation framework doesn’t run on keywords. It runs on knowing you.

None of this was mentioned at I/O. The entire keynote was framed as a story about usefulness and possibility and trust. Will you opt in to sharing your data? Will you let Spark read your inbox? The pitch is productivity. But the infrastructure being built – a deeply personalized agent, connected to commercial services, generating natural-language recommendations with no visible boundary between organic and paid content – is a monetization engine.

Then, one day later, Google held Marketing Live, its annual keynote for advertisers. Same campus, same week, different audience. And there, the language changed completely. Vidhya Srinivasan, VP of Google Ads, put it plainly: “The best ads must be answers.” Ads are already running inside AI Mode. They’re not banners next to the output. They’re generated by Gemini to read as part of the conversation. And advertisers who want to appear in the new AI search? They must hand over creative and targeting control to Google’s system. “You can’t choose keywords anymore,” Srinivasan said.

Edit: Google’s own blog post now spells out exactly what this looks like in practice. When AI Mode gives you a list of recommendations, paid placements can now appear as items on that list. Google calls them “Highlighted Answers.” When you search for a product, Gemini writes a custom explainer for the advertiser, framed as objective advice about why this product “may be the right choice for you.” The language throughout is about being “helpful” and “building trust.” The mechanism is paid content inside AI-generated recommendations, written by the same model that’s supposed to give you neutral answers.

So yes, Google didn’t talk about ads in the I/O keynote. Everything they announced is the new ad system. One that, in the eyes of Google, no longer needs the open web as an intermediary. And now, they’re gradually turning it on.

But there’s still that first question. The one about whether people actually want any of this. The people building these systems seem so deep inside their own world that they sometimes forget to check. You might have heard that, over the past few days, commencement speakers across the US, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, have been booed off stage the moment they mentioned AI. Not just politely ignored. Booed.

Google is betting its entire future on a world where people eagerly hand over their emails, their files, their habits, and their trust – to an AI system that will quietly auction off their attention, word by word, to the highest bidder. The ad infrastructure is ready. The question is whether the audience is.

~

377 Webmentions

  1. Photo of Jonathan Schofield Jonathan Schofield
    …“Google thinks it no longer needs ad slots to deliver ads. What it needs is *you*. Your emails, your files, your calendar, your purchase history, your travel plans – all flowing into Spark, all building the richest possible picture of who you are and what you’re likely to click on. That’s exactly the kind of personal context auction models need to work.” — ...
  2. Photo of pablolarah pablolarah
    ♾️ Ad Infini­tum by @matthiasott At Google I/O this week, the company announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years. #advertising #AI #google #privacy #search #web https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum advertising ai google privacy search web
  3. Photo of Christopher Kirk-Nielsen Christopher Kirk-Nielsen
    @matthiasott It's mind boggling. It's like blockchain all over again, some person has the idea of "let's use it for everything" except this time it made it to some stakeholder at Google and they're killing their flagship product for… sloppy results which won't drive any traffic to the very sources they slurped up? Eesh, count me out. (well I am already not using Google Search personally, but count me out twice ...
  4. Photo of Amelia Bellamy-Royds Amelia Bellamy-Royds
    @matthiasott This is an excellent write-up Matthias, following the money to find the gotcha under all the gloss. I still suspect they will eventually include conventional advertisements, but covert ads in AI answers are more concerning. Most countries have either regulations or media-industry standards requiring advertising & paid placement content to be identified. Public pressure will be needed to keep that so. ...
  5. Photo of mantish mantish
    @matthiasott great article! "Google is betting its entire future on a world where people eagerly hand over their emails, their files, their habits, and their trust" They have such a big market share and they know people don't really make this choice consciously. Most people are unaware or don't make a big deal out of this.
  6. Photo of Rik Schennink Rik Schennink
    If ad disclosure is a legal requirement, and ads are so intertwined with the conversation as to be unrecognizable, then would this mean that the entire conversation with Gemini should be clearly marked as an ad?
    1. Photo of Matthias Ott Matthias Ott
      Yes, I thought about that too… Will there be little “sponsored reply” badges everywhere? Probably not. But will the whole product then marked as advertisement? I have no idea.
    2. Photo of Marcel Haas 🟥 Marcel Haas 🟥
      That could just be three words on top of the page that some users might actually catch on their first use. Within hours, perhaps days, everybody will just ignore it and use the content as if it were genuine.
  7. Photo of Sylvain Wallez Sylvain Wallez
    "There’s a small but growing body of research exploring exactly how ads could work inside LLM-generated output. And the ideas are as fascinating as they are unsettling". Google doesn't need the web anymore. It needs your data as context for a token bidding engine. matthiasott.com/notes/ad-inf...
  8. Photo of Marco 🇪🇺 Marco 🇪🇺
    @matthiasott another thing is that I can‘t decide anymore to not see ads. Currently we can use content blockers to get a more peaceful and less distracting browsing experience. We are able to decide which sites we support by selectively allowing ads to be visible. This isn’t that easy anymore with the new ad mode (maybe using local ai to rewrite the results to cut out the intrusive content but might be hard ...
  9. Photo of Matthias Ott Matthias Ott
    Oh! Listening to my favorite podcast @shoptalkshow.com reminded me that I forgot to connect the dots to another, probably totally unrelated detail: that Chrome just shipped with the Prompt API and a 4GB Gemini Nano model, despite pushback from other browser makers. matthiasott.com/notes/lazy-a...
  10. Photo of Bastian Allgeier Bastian Allgeier
    Google's plans from this year's I/O are beyond dystopian. @matthiasott is doing a great job to summarize it all: https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott
  12. Photo of Pier #0 Pier #0
    @matthiasott spiega l'ultima scommessa di Google: nell'era dell'AI, la pubblicità diventa invisibile perché diventa il contenuto stesso. https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott
  13. Photo of Jon Henshaw Jon Henshaw
    @matthiasott Ahhh, here they are! https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-marketing-live-search-ads/ A new generation of ads for the AI era of Search
  15. Photo of KanaMauna KanaMauna
    @matthiasott I am assuming that the ads will include paid political advertisements. Doesn’t this get pretty close to political subliminal messaging propaganda?
  16. Photo of Andrew Wippler Andrew Wippler
    @matthiasott Google took the traffic that would cost you bandwidth and decided to pay for it themselves. They will go bankrupt by hogging all the traffic. Down in a blaze of glory.
  18. Photo of Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)
    > So yes, Google didn’t talk about ads in the I/O keynote. Everything they announced _is_ the new ad system. One that, in the eyes of Google, no longer needs the open web as an intermediary. And now, they’re gradually turning it on. matthiasott.com/notes/ad-inf...
    1. Photo of Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)
      > The language throughout is about being “helpful” and “building trust.” The mechanism is paid content inside AI-generated recommendations, written by the same model that’s supposed to give you neutral answers.
      1. Photo of Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)
        > “One approach, proposed by Google Research, is what you might call a “token auction”… Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word. The output is a weighted blend of competing interests, shaped by who’s willing to pay more.”
        1. Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)
          If you're as disturbed as I am by Google's pivot to AI in their search, here are a few alternatives: - startpage.com — privacy-preserving, pulls results from Google/Bing's databases. - SearXNG: software anyone can host to pull from many search engines. List of hosted URLs here: searx.space
          1. Photo of Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)
            For both Startpage and SearXNG, you can right-click in the Firefox URL bar and there should be an option to add it as a search engine. For the list of SearXNG URLs above, I usually type my country into the “country” box to get one located nearby (for speed reasons).
  19. Photo of troy_friz_zell troy_friz_zell
    @matthiasott Motherfuckers are high on their own supply. When I search the web, I don't want a story from a spicy autocomplete. I am trying to find a link to an actual expert. This is exactly the opposite of what I want. I will never use it. That said, good. I hope this brings their entire evil empire crashing to the ground.
  20. Photo of Tim Severien Tim Severien
    @matthiasott I expect these ad-sprinkled LLM outputs will be really bad for users if they're not clearly presented as ads due to the automation bias. I also wonder how Google plans to combat misinformation and such. Surely some political movements and lobbying industries are happy to spend a big ol' bag o' money to nudge answes to their favour. Pretty sure that there's a financial asymmetry between fossil fuel ...
  21. Photo of Kevin Kevin
    @ambientspace G00gley eyes' ads suck. They are very random and irrelevant for me even though I allow them to track me from site to site.
  22. Photo of Kevin Kevin
    @codecapitano @matthiasott I allow all ads but the problem is the ads are overlapping each other since there are so many. I cannot count the number of ads I see on a webpage because they blink so fast and reload over and over. It is very comical. XD
  23. Photo of Matej Lexa Matej Lexa
    But where are the ads!? Interesting observations from @matthiasott. Especially the two possible models of combining LLMs and ads - go to the blog post to read about them. Meanwhile some excerpts: --- At Google I/O this week, the company announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years. The ten blue links? Gone. Instead, you get “generative UI” – custom interactive widgets, built on the fly by Gemini. You ...
  24. Photo of Sara Soueidan Sara Soueidan
    "For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. [...] That contract is now broken. Generative UI doesn’t link to your article. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer. Information agents don’t ...
  25. Photo of Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊ Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊
    Read this. "Google didn’t talk about ads in the I/O keynote. Everything they announced is the new ad system. One that, in the eyes of Google, no longer needs the open web as an intermediary … Google is betting its entire future on a world where people eagerly hand over their emails, their files, their habits, and their trust – to an AI system that will quietly auction off their attention, word by word, to ...
  26. Photo of Hidde Hidde
    🔗 “Google didn’t talk about ads in the I/O keynote. Everything they announced *is* the new ad system. One that, in the eyes of Google, no longer needs the open web as an intermediary. And now, they’re gradually turning it on.” — @matthiasott https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott
  27. Photo of Jeffrey Yasskin Jeffrey Yasskin
    @hdv @matthiasott So, I'm as horrified as anyone by the prospect of advertisers buying influence over the main search results, and I've already switched to kagi.com over the general AI slop in Google results, but the article misleadingly omits that the actual Google demos still say "Sponsored" over all the advertise-controlled content.
    3. Photo of Shoalfield Shoalfield
      It is genuinely difficult to describe both how revolutionary google search was as a tool for information handling, and how fucking steep its decline has been.
  30. Photo of AutoModerator AutoModerator
    Friendly reminder: if you're looking for a Google service or Google product alternative then feel free to check out our sidebar. I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
  31. Photo of Azar42 Azar42
    I found this bit of this article chilling: Another approach – also from Google researchers – fits the new “Search” much more precisely. It’s called “prominence allocation.” Here, when a user submits a query with commercial intent, the system runs an auction that doesn’t just decide which ads appear, but how prominently the LLM writes about each one. The auction outputs a prominence score for each ...
  32. Photo of Matthias Ott Matthias Ott
    @anatudor @AmeliaBR Yes, in their screenshots on the blog post about new ad formats, they are labelled as “sponsored.“ Although I don’t know how they might do that inline within a written answer, I suppose they would need to – or perhaps mark the whole experience as sponsored? But that will probably not be sufficient…
  35. Photo of Grumpfeljens Grumpfeljens
    War eine schöne Zeit mit #webseiten . Aber alles Gute findet mal sein Ende. 😬 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpk7soxvOMY Mit Infos von @matthiasott https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum webseiten Google might have just killed websites
  37. Photo of Frontend Dogma Frontend Dogma
    Ad Infinitum, by @matthiasott: https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum?ref=frontenddogma.com #google #search #ai #economics ai economics google search Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott
  38. Photo of Stefan Grund :eay: Stefan Grund :eay:
    Ad Infinitum / Zu Googles angekündigter AI-Suche → https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum @matthiasott fast zusammen, was Google eigentlich auf seiner AI-durchtränkten I/O-Keynote – hier der 54 Sekunden lange AI-Supercut – angekündigt, aber nicht explizit gesagt hat: Nämlich dass sie ihre bisherigen Quellen – das Open Web – und das eigene Geschäftsmodell – die Werbelinks in den ...

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