alt Hacker NewsThe interesting thing about ads in AI search results is that it fundamentally changes the economic model of SEO. Right now, the entire SEO industry exists to game ranking algorithms. If AI Mode synthesizes answers and presents ads as "helpful suggestions" within the conversation, the incentive shifts from gaming rankings to gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
That's a much harder problem to police. Traditional search ads are clearly labeled and separated from organic results. Conversational ads embedded in AI responses blur that line to the point where it may not exist anymore. When an AI tells you "Product X might be right for you because..." and that recommendation is a paid placement, the disclosure burden is fundamentally different from a blue link with "Sponsored" next to it.
Google's blog post frames this as "helpful answers that connect people with businesses." But the history of Google's ad products suggests that helpfulness and monetization diverge over time. The early text ads were genuinely useful too. Give it three years and we'll be navigating AI responses where every other sentence is a product placement.
The real question is whether users will tolerate conversational ads or if it drives them to alternatives. The switching cost for search is essentially zero.
Replies
> the incentive shifts from gaming rankings to gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
My 2ct: The incentive shifts from gaming rankings to bidding the highest on Google’s keyword (or similar) auction. Google then promotes it as helpful while businesses maximize the amount they pay for that service. There is only one winner in this game.
> The switching cost for search is essentially zero.
Those of us who remember when Google first appeared and revolutionized search can testify to that.
I tried Google and that was it, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc, where just little dots in the rear view mirror.
Good insights from Claude
>That's a much harder problem to police
It's also just a much harder problem. At low margins the "solution" may very well be to genuinely make your widget superior to the competing widget for a given set of users or situations.
You realize search result relevancy was also driven by advertising, right? The ads come from Google and the results themselves. It is a hard problem but it's equivalent to LLM response relevancy.
> gaming the AI's understanding of what's "helpful."
The AI doesn't have any understanding. You just have to tell it "this is helpful to AI". It has no critical discernment, it doesn't have a theory of mind to ask "why is the author of this information making this statement?"
> The real question is whether users will tolerate conversational ads
Unfortunately I think they will, as much as I'd hope for the opposite.
People already tolerate influencers, deliberate product placement, etc. Heck, most big content creator type content on YouTube/TikTok right now are basically infomercials disguised as entertainment, and people eat it up.
The problem with ads in LLM responses is now you can no longer trust (what little you could, anyway) the output. You have to constantly guess "did someone pay for this response or is it authentic?" and it goes further than just text responses with the new universal shopping cart thing and other agentic tools. When these things operate autonomously, how much influence are advertisers going to have? Could we see a malicious library pay for Gemini ads and now the coding model is adding it to coding projects?