Is that a win for Google, though? They make most of their money from AdSense, because websites want to display ads. If people aren’t clicking through to websites from their search results, that seems like fewer opportunities to display ads, reducing the viability of AdSense.
seems like so far things are going well, businesses spend more on ads on google 🙃
Google, for now, is still laughing its way to the bank. The search giant is putting advertisers’ ads within or directly above and below AI Overviews themselves. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview last year, “If you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.” Organic links are pushed down.
Even in 2024, market research company SparkToro’s study of searchers found “almost 30 percent of all clicks go to platforms Google owns.” For every 1,000 Google searches in the United States, 360 clicks go to a non-Google-owned, non-Google-ad-paying property. With the rise of AI Overview, Google’s share can only have grown, while everyone else’s has shrunk.
I believe maps and youtube were money losers for google for a very long time but the goal was to keep people within the google ecosystem where they can extract money from users in other ways
Is that a win for Google, though? They make most of their money from AdSense, because websites want to display ads. If people aren’t clicking through to websites from their search results, that seems like fewer opportunities to display ads, reducing the viability of AdSense.
seems like so far things are going well, businesses spend more on ads on google 🙃
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/opinion_column_google_ai_ads/
I believe maps and youtube were money losers for google for a very long time but the goal was to keep people within the google ecosystem where they can extract money from users in other ways