Google Assistant Starts Displaying Ads In Some Answers

Some of you may have already predicted that this would happen and now Google has confirmed that to be true. Google Assistant will show ads in some answers, they will be the same kind of ads that you would find in a normal Google search. They have been rolled out for the personal assistant as part of an update which brings new answer styles and more interactive elements.

Google confirmed in the announcement post for the new features that some of the new results “may include the existing ads that you’d see on Search today.” So if you ask Assistant about hotels nearby, for example, it will display ads for booking sites as you’d see on a regular Google search.

The company appears to have been testing this for a couple of months now as there were some reports back in February of ads being shown in Assistant answers. It didn’t confirm whether this would be rolled out to everything at that point in time.

This is based on the premise that for some questions, the most helpful response to a query might be to show links to a variety of sources from across the web so that the user can easily learn more. In these cases, they will see a full set of search results from the web, and where relevant, Google will also include existing ads that are present in Search today in the results displayed by the Google Assistant as well.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Google, Google Assistant