This Week in AI + Advertising
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You Can Advertise in Google’s AI Mode. You Still Won’t Get Cited 88% of the Time.
A 50,000-keyword study from SE Ranking found text ads now show up on nearly a third of commercial AI Mode queries - but for 88% of those same keywords, the advertiser’s own domain never appeared among AI Mode’s cited sources. Paying for the ad slot and earning the citation turned out to be almost entirely unrelated. The lesson holds beyond Google: the ad budget and the visibility budget are two different line items now.
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Google Just Made “Made With AI” Mandatory on Ads.
Google Ads introduced a requirement for disclosure labels on AI-generated ad content, part of a busy week of search and shopping changes - AI-generated images now appearing inside AI Overviews, and Google testing hidden sponsored products in Shopping results. Assume every AI-assisted creative asset needs a paper trail from here.
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ChatGPT Ads Just Got a Real Dashboard.
OpenAI added location, audience, and negative-keyword exclusions to ChatGPT Ads, plus new attributed sales value and sales ROAS metrics. Three weeks ago this was a pilot with a handful of brands. Now it has the targeting and reporting stack of a channel built to be budgeted against, not just experimented with.
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Google’s AI Overviews Can Now Draw Its Own Pictures.
Google added an image generator directly inside AI Overviews - one more reason a searcher never has to click through to a website to get what they came for. Zero-click search just got a visual layer.
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GA4 Quietly Added a Channel Just for AI Traffic.
Google Analytics rolled out a dedicated “AI Assistant” traffic channel, splitting out referrals from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini that used to hide inside the general Organic bucket. If you’ve been eyeballing AI-driven traffic inside Organic Search, that number was always an undercount - now you can actually see it.
Sources
Search Engine Land · Anicca · B2the7 · The Agile Brand Guide