Why is everyone confused about Gemini ads?
Google ran a five-month public repositioning on Gemini ads: flat denial in December, conditional caution in January, open-minded by April. As of 14 August 2026, the standalone Gemini app carries no ads. What confuses the question is that two completely different things get filed under "Gemini ads," and only one of them is real today.
The confusion has a specific origin. In December 2025 Adweek reported that Google had told at least two advertiser clients it was targeting Gemini-app ads for 2026. Google pushed back hard. On 8 December 2025 Dan Taylor, VP of Global Ads, said the story was "based on uninformed, anonymous sources who are making inaccurate claims. There are no ads in the Gemini app and there are no current plans to change that," as reported by Search Engine Land. That correction is where the news cycle split from reality: the denial made headlines and the nuance did not, so a factually accurate rebuttal about the app somehow left readers more convinced that Gemini ads were imminent. The headline outran the quote.
The query cluster around "gemini ads" carries two distinct buyer intents, and conflating them is where marketers lose the plot:
- Ads inside Gemini. The consumer chat app shows its users no advertising today.
- Gemini as a tool for advertisers. You can use Gemini to build and run Google Ads campaigns today, through AI Max for Search. That is a separate product and a separate answer.
Both are legitimate questions. They just have opposite answers. One yes, one no. The rest of this piece separates them and adds the third fact that ties the room together: Google does run AI ads, but in Search, not in the chat app. For the deeper mechanics of showing up inside Google's generative search results, see the AI Mode search marketing playbook.
Where Google's AI ads actually run today
Google's AI advertising lives in Search, on two surfaces at two different maturities. Ads in AI Overviews are live and shipping revenue. Ads in AI Mode are named but still in testing. The Gemini app is the third surface, and it has no ads at all.
Ads in AI Overviews: live in 12 markets
Start with the live surface. Ads in AI Overviews launched on US mobile in October 2024, reached US desktop after Google Marketing Live in May 2025, and expanded internationally from 19 December 2025. That expansion put ads in AI Overviews into 12 markets: Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United States, per Search Engine Land. The United Kingdom was not on the list. Every market Leapbuzz operates in was.
The mechanics matter more than the map. Ads inside AI Overviews are sourced automatically from your existing Search, Shopping, and Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. There is no new campaign type. There is no separate bid. There is no toggle to opt in or out of the placement. If your campaign is eligible and wins the standard auction, an ad can appear inside the AI Overview block carrying the same "Sponsored" label used elsewhere in search, per Google Ads Help. AI Overviews reach 2.5 billion monthly users, Google reported at Google Marketing Live in May 2026.
There is a reporting consequence that trips up teams expecting clean attribution, and it is the kind of detail that sinks a campaign review three months in, when someone senior asks for the AI Overview number and the honest answer is that the platform never captured it as a separate line. Nobody wins that meeting. Google's help documentation states that ads shown in AI Overviews are counted inside standard "Top Ads" metrics. There is no segmented report that isolates AI Overview clicks, impressions, or conversions from the rest of your top-of-page search performance. You cannot answer "how much did the AI Overview placement drive" from the interface, because the interface blends it.
AI Mode: four ad formats in testing
Now the testing surface. At Google Marketing Live on 20 May 2026 Google unveiled four named ad formats for AI Mode, its multi-turn conversational search experience. AI Mode reached 1 billion monthly users and hosts searches roughly three times longer than traditional queries, Google said at that event, per blog.google. The four formats are still in testing or limited rollout, with no general availability and no dedicated bidding or reporting announced.
| Format | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Conversational Discovery Ads | Gemini generates ad creative tailored to the specific conversational query. | Testing |
| Highlighted Answers | Ads placed directly inside the AI's recommendation lists. | Testing |
| AI-powered Shopping Ads | Custom product explanations generated for the query context. | Testing |
| Business Agent for Leads | An AI chatbot embedded in the ad to qualify and capture leads. | Testing |
The Gemini app: no ads, one billion users
The through-line is simple, and it explains every decision above once you see it: Google is monetising AI in the surface where commercial intent already lives, which is Search, and it is leaving untouched the surface where users go to reason, draft, and think out loud rather than to buy, which is the chat app. Money follows intent. The app stays clean because that is where the habit is built, and Google would rather protect the habit than tax it early. For how the two Google campaign types powering AI Overview eligibility differ, see Google AI Max vs Performance Max.
| Surface | Ad status | How to buy | Reporting | Markets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI Overviews | Live | Automatic from existing Search / Shopping / PMax. No separate campaign, no separate bid, no opt-out. | Blended into Top Ads. No segmented report. | 12 markets, incl. SG, US, CA, AU, MY. |
| AI Mode | Testing | Four named formats in limited rollout. No dedicated bidding announced. | None announced yet. | Limited test. |
| Gemini app | No ads | No inventory. Nothing to buy at any price. | N / A | Global app, no ad surface. |
How did Google's official line on Gemini ads shift?
Google's public position on Gemini-app ads did not stay still. Over five months it travelled from a flat denial to "open-minded," and reading the sequence tells you more about the trajectory than any single quote does.
Five statements, one direction
The sequence reads like this. First the denial. On 8 December 2025 Dan Taylor gave the flat no quoted above. Second, a conditional. On 21 January 2026 at Davos, DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis reiterated there were no plans and said he was surprised OpenAI went "so early," then added: "if you start mixing that with advertising, it could work, but you just have to be very careful about how that's done," per 9to5Google.
Third, the door opens. Around March 2026, Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge and Information, told WIRED in March 2026: "I would expect that the learnings that we get from ads in AI Mode would likely carry over to what we might want to do in the Gemini app down the road." He framed it as "a prioritization question, not a values question." Fourth, the confirmation of intent. On 29 April 2026, on Alphabet's first-quarter earnings call, Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler called the company "open-minded" and said "a format that works well in AI Mode would transfer successfully to Gemini app." That was a quarter Alphabet reported above 100 billion US dollars in revenue, per the Alphabet Q1 2026 earnings call.
One billion users changes the maths
The fifth data point is not a quote, it is scale. The Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly active users on 11 August 2026, with Sundar Pichai calling it "the fastest-growing product in Google's history," per blog.google. The second-quarter earnings had reported roughly 950 million. A billion-user surface with no revenue model is a monetisation question waiting to be answered, and the language above is Google answering it slowly in public. I read that sequence as a company clearing the runway, not closing the door.
Gemini as a tool for advertisers: AI Max for Search
The other half of the "gemini ads" query cluster is not about ads shown to consumers at all. It is about advertisers using Gemini to run their own Google Ads. That product exists, it is called AI Max for Search, and it has a hard date attached that belongs in your calendar.
AI Max for Search launched on 30 April 2025 as a one-click feature set inside a Search campaign, powered by Gemini. The feature set has three moving parts. An AI Brief, which Gemini generates to frame the campaign. Generated creative for conversational and long-tail queries. And Final URL Expansion, which routes traffic to the most relevant landing page rather than just the one you manually set. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers had turned it on by May 2026, per blog.google. Shopping and Travel variants were in closed beta through 2026.
The date that matters: from September 2026, legacy Search campaigns auto-migrate to AI Max, and Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are deprecated as part of that transition, per blog.google. Auto migration applies defaults, not your intent; campaigns whose owners skip that setup in Q3 will inherit whatever the system decides. If you run DSA today, this is not optional housekeeping. The auto-migration will apply AI Max defaults for the AI Brief and Final URL Expansion, and those defaults may not match the targeting your DSA campaign was tuned for.
- Audit your DSA campaigns before September 2026. List every campaign relying on Dynamic Search Ads and note its intended targeting and excluded URLs.
- Final URL Expansion needs a deliberate scope decision per campaign. The auto-migration turns it on by default. For tightly controlled landing-page strategies, constrain it: the difference between broad and narrow expansion can route queries to pages your team never intended to surface.
- Review the generated creative against your claims. Gemini writes ad copy for long-tail queries. In regulated sectors that copy must sit inside your approved claim set, not outside it.
This is the honest framing to give a client: yes, Gemini can help with Google Ads, and the help is becoming mandatory rather than optional. You will use it. The only question is whether you configure it deliberately or inherit its defaults. For how AI Max compares to Google's other AI campaign type, see Google AI Max vs Performance Max.
What advertisers in the five markets should do now
You cannot bid for AI Overview placement, and you cannot report on it in isolation. So the useful question is not "how do we buy Gemini ads," it is "what can we actually control across the surfaces that exist." There are four levers, and they apply across Singapore, the US, Canada, Australia, and Malaysia, all of which carry live ads in AI Overviews.
Paid: eligibility, measurement, and AI Mode readiness
- Manage campaign eligibility, because it is the only lever into AI Overviews. Since placement is automatic from Search, Shopping, and PMax, your control point is upstream: keep those campaigns eligible, well-funded on assets, and clean on policy. A campaign that is disapproved or thin on creative cannot appear in the AI Overview block even when the query is a perfect fit.
- Fix your measurement expectations before the reporting question comes up. AI Overview clicks are blended into Top Ads with no segmented view, per Google Ads Help. Tell stakeholders now that "AI Overview conversions" is not a number the platform will hand you. Measure at the campaign and Top Ads level, and resist inventing an AI-Overview attribution that the data does not support. Honest measurement here is a positioning advantage over anyone promising a metric that does not exist.
- Prepare for the AI Mode formats before general availability. The four formats, Conversational Discovery Ads, Highlighted Answers, AI-powered Shopping Ads, and Business Agent for Leads, will draw on your product feeds, your creative assets, and your landing pages. Clean product data and a well-structured asset library are the prerequisites, and they take weeks to fix, not days. Build them while the formats are still in testing.
- Build organic presence in Gemini's answers through Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), while the app is ad-free. This is the argument specific to the Gemini app: there is no ad inventory to buy, so the only way to appear in a Gemini answer is to be cited organically. GEO, structuring content, schema markup, and entity signals so AI answer engines cite you, is the mechanism. A 1-billion-user surface with no paid entry point is a rare window where visibility is earned rather than auctioned. For the full method, see our guide to Generative Engine Optimisation and the visibility optimisation service.
Organic: build Gemini citation share while the app is ad-free
The strategic read across all four: Google has separated where it takes money (commercial-intent Search) from where it builds habit (the reasoning app). That separation is temporary, and the trajectory in the timeline above says the wall comes down eventually. The brands already cited in Gemini answers when monetisation arrives will hold a position that cannot be bought retroactively.
At Leapbuzz we run this across all five markets: Search and PMax eligibility for AI Overview presence, AI Mode readiness on product data and creative, AI Max migration planning ahead of the September 2026 deadline, and the GEO programme that earns citation in Gemini and the other answer engines. For the paid side, see the AI performance marketing service; for the platform mechanics, the Google platform page. The honest version of the pitch is the one this whole piece has made: there is no Gemini ad to sell you today, and the work worth doing is the work that pays off whether or not that changes.