Ads in AI Overviews: What Paid Placement Changes

By Muntazir · Published 13 October 2026

Search a plumber, a mattress or a project management tool on a phone in Australia, Canada, India or the US today, and the AI-generated summary at the top of the page can carry a block labeled “Sponsored,” sitting inside the same panel as the generated answer. That placement didn’t exist when Google first tested ads around AI Overviews in October 2024. Google’s own support documentation now describes ads appearing in three places: above the panel, below it, and — more recently — inside it.

Which ads are eligible to appear inside an AI Overview?

Not every campaign qualifies, and the eligible set for ads inside the panel is narrower than the set eligible to sit above or below it. Google’s documentation specifies that text and shopping ads from existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns can appear inside the AI Overview itself. A broader group — Search, Shopping, Performance Max and App campaigns — is eligible for the older above-or-below placement. Several agency write-ups covering the rollout add that AI-driven targeting, such as broad match or the keywordless matching built into AI Max for Search campaigns, is what actually earns a spot, rather than a separate campaign type anyone can simply switch on. The placement is also restricted by topic: Google excludes “sensitive verticals like adult, alcohol, gambling,” and lists finance, healthcare and politics among others.

Can an advertiser turn it off, or choose where it lands?

No, on both counts. Google’s help page is unusually direct about this, in a section phrased as the question an advertiser would actually ask: “No, you can’t directly target ad placements in the AI Overviews,” and separately, “No, you can’t opt out of serving ads in AI Overviews.” An advertiser already running an eligible campaign is in the AI Overview rotation by default, with no setting to leave it and no control over whether a given ad lands above the summary, below it, or inside it.

What does Google tell advertisers about how those ads perform?

Less than it tells them about a standard search ad. The same documentation states that “Google Ads currently doesn’t offer segmented reporting when ads show within Search AI Overviews” — an advertiser sees aggregate performance, not a breakdown of what happened specifically inside the AI-generated panel versus a conventional results page. Google frames this as a temporary gap in an early feature and says more reporting is coming, without a date attached. Adthena, a competitive-intelligence vendor that tracks AI search placements for its clients, summarized the broader rollout bluntly in its own analysis of the 2025 announcements: they “reduce advertiser control and visibility in key areas” even as they open a new ad surface.

Does paying for a placement change what the summary cites?

This is the question that matters most to a business that isn’t buying ads, and it’s also the one with the least public documentation. A companion look at ChatGPT found that OpenAI states its ad and answer systems don’t touch — advertisers can’t shape what the model says. Google’s own documentation about AI Overviews doesn’t make an equivalent claim one way or the other; it addresses where ads are eligible to appear and what an advertiser can and can’t configure, not whether buying a sponsored slot has any bearing on which sources the summary chooses to quote. The silence isn’t evidence of anything by itself. It just means nobody outside Google has a documented answer to the one question a competitor denied a citation would actually want answered.

What does a cited site get, now that the panel carries ads?

Less certainty than the ad side gets, even with money changing hands. Separately from the ad rollout, Google runs an invitation-only “AI Contribution Pilot” that pays a small group of publishers — reported by Search Engine Roundtable on 30 September 2026, citing The Information, at around 100 sites — for material Google’s AI answers draw on across AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini. The reported payouts vary enormously: one early participant said they’re earning more than a million dollars a year, while several smaller sites in the same pilot reported earning less than $1,000 over several months, and one site offered what sounded like a $1 million deal reportedly collected less than $1,000 across that time. An executive at one participating publisher told the outlet they couldn’t work out how the payment was calculated. A site cited inside a panel that now also carries a labeled ad, in other words, has no clearer a view of what that citation is worth than an advertiser has of what the ad slot next to it is doing.

Can anyone outside Google actually see this happening?

Not reliably, and that limit applies before ads even enter the picture. An AI Overview is generated per query and per searcher — the same search phrase can return a different summary to two different people, or none at all, depending on signals Google doesn’t publish. No public API returns AI Overview content on demand, which means a tool checking a page’s visibility from outside can’t confirm whether that page’s AI Overview citation is still there, let alone whether a sponsored block sat beside it, above it, or nowhere at all for that particular search. The same blind spot applies to an advertiser’s own ad: Google’s documentation already admits advertisers can’t see a breakdown of their own placements inside the panel. An outside visibility check, free or paid, is working with even less than that.

Google’s rollout turned a summary panel into something with two separate audiences inside the same box: a reader trying to get an answer, and an advertiser hoping to be noticed beside it, neither of whom gets a complete view of what the other is seeing.