Google Ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode: What You Control

Your ads are already eligible to run in AI Overviews, you did not opt in, and you cannot opt out. Google's help page says so in one line: "You can't opt out of serving ads in AI Overviews." The same page says there is no separate reporting for it either. So the useful question is not whether to be there. It is what still moves the needle when you cannot see the surface and cannot target it.

How common is this already?

Common enough that you should check your own money queries this week. Run ten of them in a clean browser profile and count how many come back with an AI Overview on top. Two minutes of work, and the answer is about your market instead of ours.

While you are there, look at who gets cited inside those overviews. If forums, videos and support pages keep beating brand posts in your category, that tells you something about how the answer gets built, and it is not flattering to the average brand blog post.

Google has said the same thing from its side: "In our biggest markets like the U.S. and India, AI Overviews are driving over 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of queries that show AI Overviews." More searches, on the exact queries where the answer box sits on top.

Where your ads actually appear

Google's help page describes three positions: above, below, or within the AI Overview.

Above and below are the normal Search ad slots you already know. Within is the new one, and it has tighter rules. Google says ads must "additionally be relevant to the content of the AI Overviews" to show inside them, and that ads inside the overview run in English on mobile and desktop in twelve countries: Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore and the US.

Read that list again if you sell in Europe. The UK is not on it. Neither is Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands or anywhere else in the EU. If your spend is mostly EU, the in-overview placement is not your problem yet. The ads above and below it still are.

What is eligible, and what you do about it

Google's line is that "Text and Shopping ads from existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible to show within the AI Overviews", and that they can appear "with no action needed from advertisers".

You cannot build an AI Overview campaign. You cannot bid on the placement. Google says you can't directly target ad placements in AI Overviews, and ads serve through the same auction, ranking and signals as everything else.

Google's own advice on the same topic is that campaigns running Performance Max, Shopping, or Search with broad match, "including AI Max for Search campaigns", are automatically eligible. What Performance Max is covers the first one in plain language, and what AI Max changes in a Search campaign covers the last one, since that is a setting you actually can switch.

There is one carve-out worth knowing. Google does not show ads in AI Overviews for sensitive verticals, and it names adult, alcohol, gambling, finance, healthcare and politics "and more". If you sell in one of those, this whole surface is closed to you for now.

The reporting gap, and what to do instead

One sentence from Google's help page should shape your whole response: "Google Ads currently doesn't offer segmented reporting when ads show within Search AI Overviews." Those impressions and clicks land in your account as Top Ads, mixed in with everything else.

So you cannot A/B this surface. You cannot pause it. You cannot report on it. Anyone selling you an AI Overview optimization service with a dashboard is showing you a guess.

What you can do is measure the second-order effects, which are real and visible in your normal reports.

1. Watch impression share and CTR on your non-brand Search terms. If the overview pushes the classic results further down, your click-through rate on the same position moves, and so can your impression share. That change shows up in your existing reports even though the cause does not.
2. Watch your Shopping and Performance Max share of the account. Product queries increasingly resolve into a visual product surface. If your product mix is shifting, that is data.
3. Watch the search terms report for longer, more conversational queries. People ask AI-shaped questions in full sentences. Those searches still hit your campaigns.
4. Watch your landing pages, not your placements. The click still lands on your site. Everything after the click is entirely yours and entirely measurable.

Ads in AI Mode, and the formats Google is building

AI Mode is the deeper version, and Google says it is testing ads there: "Where relevant, ads may appear below and integrated into AI Mode responses." OpenAI now sells the same idea inside ChatGPT, and we keep a dated guide to how ChatGPT ads work.

Google backs the surface with an Ipsos survey it commissioned in December 2025, where 75% of people said they make faster, more confident decisions using AI Mode in Search. Check the footnote on that one too. The sample is 13,189 online shoppers who already use AI Overviews or AI Mode for shopping. People who use the thing like the thing.

At Google Marketing Live 2026, four formats got named for this surface:

• Conversational Discovery ads, where Gemini builds creative tailored to the specific question someone asked and highlights the relevant features.
• Highlighted Answers, where your ad appears inside the list of suggestions when someone is researching options.
• Google's new Shopping ads that write a Gemini explainer, where Gemini "will pull up your most relevant products and instantly write a custom explainer highlighting why your product may be the right choice for them".
• Business Agent for Leads, a chat agent inside the ad instead of a static lead form.

Google says Conversational Discovery and Highlighted Answers are in testing, with the Shopping format and the Business Agent coming in the following months. Of those two AI Mode formats it says they "will also continue to be clearly labeled as 'Sponsored'". The other two are not named in that line.

Why your feed just got more important

Look at the third one again. Gemini picks your product and writes the explainer itself.

That announcement never says where the product data comes from. It did not have to. Shopping ads have only ever had one source, and that is your feed. Google spells it out for the neighbouring product, AI Max for Shopping campaigns, which it says "uses your Merchant Center feeds to transform product data into dynamic Shopping ads that answer conversational queries".

So treat your product title, your description, your attributes, your GTIN and your images as the raw material for copy you do not write. Not a landing page. Not an ad headline you approved. The feed.

We have been saying feed quality decides ecom performance for years, mostly about Shopping and Performance Max. This makes it literal. A feed with a title like "Product 4412 - Blue" gives Gemini nothing to work with. A feed with material, size, fit, use case and a real product name gives it a paragraph.

If your feed has never been cleaned, that is the job this quarter. How Shopping ads get built from a feed is the plain-language version, and the 12-point audit has feed health as check 2 and margin labels as check 6.

What I would not do

Three things I keep seeing people spend money on that do not survive a look at Google's own documentation.

Do not restructure your account for AI Overviews. There is no placement to target and no reporting to optimize against. Any restructure would be steering blind.

Do not buy a tool that claims to report your AI Overview clicks. Google does not split them out, so nobody can hand you your own performance on this surface. Watching the surface itself is a different job and it does work: you can run live searches and count which queries show an overview and who gets cited. Just do not confuse that with knowing what you earned there.

Do not panic about your Search campaigns disappearing. The eligible inventory is the campaigns you already run. Your Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are the ones being placed on this surface. The account you already have is the account that competes here.

You cannot opt out, you cannot target it, and you cannot report on it. So spend your energy on the three things you do control: the feed, the landing page, and the profit per product.

- What I tell brands who ask about this

The boring work still wins

On this surface your product feed stops being data and turns into copy. Nobody writes the sentence a shopper reads inside an overview. Gemini assembles it out of your title, your attributes and your images, and it ships whatever it finds. So "Product 4412 - Blue" is not a scruffy feed entry any more. It is a bad ad, written on your behalf, in front of a buyer, and you never saw it and never approved it.

So the answer to "what do I do about ads in AI Overviews" is the same answer as last year, only with higher stakes: clean the feed, kill the waste, tier your catalog by margin so the budget follows profit instead of volume.

Full disclosure before the pitch: Chris, who founded Scaley, also runs ZenoX Media, a Google Ads agency, and Scaley, an AI media buyer, is the software we sell. Scaley Suite reads your Google Ads account and Merchant Center every day, finds the dead search terms and the products losing money, and hands you each change with the reason attached. It changes nothing until you approve each change. Disapprovals stay where Merchant Center already shows them. If you sell products online and your feed has never had a proper pass, that is where the money is, whichever surface Google shows you on. Here is how the whole thing works, or if you run a Google Ads Dropshipping catalog, what it looks like for that account type.

Start the free trial and the first audit is read-only, so it looks and does not touch. Or see the feature list first.

Where these facts come from

Google's statements above are quoted from Google, checked on 2026-08-20:

• About ads and AI Overviews - placement, eligible campaign types, the twelve countries, the no-opt-out line, the sensitive verticals, and the missing segmented reporting.
• New ways AI in Search helps your business - the test of ads in AI Mode and the 10% usage increase.
• A new generation of ads for the AI era of Search - Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, the new Shopping ads with Gemini explainers, Business Agent for Leads, the Sponsored labeling on the two AI Mode formats, and the Ipsos figure.
• Steer performance with new AI Max features - the Merchant Center feed line, which Google says about AI Max for Shopping campaigns, not about the AI Mode Shopping format.

Our own numbers, like the $200M+ in client store revenue ZenoX Media generated while running the ads across 300+ accounts, come from the accounts our team runs. Chris, who founded Scaley, also runs ZenoX, so read the recommendation in this post knowing he sells both.