Google’s AI Mode Has Arrived
Google Labs has invited me to “meet AI mode”, so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple days. The experience is very ChatGPT-like, from a UI perspective. It’s clean, and spacious. Of course, immediately I’m looking for ads and there are none, yet.
Ads? Nope, but you better believe they’re coming.
Google is working frantically on this, no doubt. The stakes are tremendously high. There is what, $200B annually at stake?
Despite the fact that an AI interaction is a far superior experience to traditional Search (significantly less work/cognitive load for the seeker, less physical hunting and pecking, much faster results), people are not yet leaving Google in droves. StatCounter has Google’s worldwide search market share at 90% in Feb 2025, down just a point and half from a year ago. (Recall that this is 2 whole years since Bing announced AI in search!)
But the writing is on the wall. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is predicting massive changes in Search. Advertisers need to begin to plan for a world where inclusion in Google’s “search results page” is much more exclusive, potentially much more expensive, and much less effective. This is just obvious. As you extract steps from the search process, there are simply fewer opportunities to distract and detour with an ad click. As search morphs into a conversation with an AI entity, interruptions will not be tolerated.
One can imagine a world, however, where AI ads exist in moments when the user is seeking a solution that is a product or service. In this context, ads might actually be appreciated, and offer utility. These moments would be “lower funnel searches” in SEM parlance, typically performed after the seeker has gathered information, educated themselves, and is ready to consider products that address an identified need. AI could massively compress the overall time required to go from an educational, upper funnel search to a lower funnel product hunt, of course. Which would be a blessing, I think.
In the meantime, advertisers need to steel themselves for this coming reality. As a start, they must begin to diversify their marketing efforts, and remove some eggs from the Google search basket. Just in case. And let’s be honest, it makes marketing far more interesting, does it not? 😁
