We Read the Published Record on AI Mode Ads. The Number You Want Does Not Exist.

You can't buy an ad in Google's AI answers. You can only get eligible for one, and once you're in, Google Ads won't break out how that slot did. So the straight answer on Google AI Mode ads performance is this: no one outside Google can tell you, and Google hasn't published a number.

One thing up front, because measurement is the subject here and ours has to hold. We did not buy AI Mode placements and we have no first hand performance data from them. Everything below draws on what Google, independent testers and ad tech vendors have published, with dates attached, and the best thing I found is that the test I wanted to run could not have been read even if we had paid for it.

So this is a read of the public sources. What Google says, what two vendors say, what one big independent study says, and what I'd do with an account on Monday.

What an AI Mode ad is, as of now

AI Mode is Google's conversational search interface, a self contained Gemini product that answers multi part questions and takes follow ups. AI Overviews are the generated summaries that load on a normal Google results page. Sundar Pichai told investors in July of 2026 that Google had merged the two into one Search experience. That's the reason the AI Overviews help page is the closest thing to a rulebook you'll find for any of this.

At Google Marketing Live in May of 2026, Google announced two new ad types for AI Mode. Read the verbs. Google says it's "testing" them, and calls the Gemini work an "experiment." Those are Google's words, not mine, and they're fair.

Conversational Discovery ads are the first type. The ad answers the question a person asked, with creative Gemini writes for that search. Highlighted Answers are the second: ads that can sit inside an AI Mode list of recommendations. Next to the advertiser's creative, Google puts an explainer written by Gemini, and the ad is still labeled Sponsored.

The job of a paid search program hasn't changed. Some of your impressions land in a new spot, and, as we'll get to, you'll know less about them.

Can you buy an ad in AI Mode?

No. In AI Overviews, you can't target the slot, you can't opt out of it, and you can't pull a report on it. I'm not reading between the lines here. Google's help page on ads and AI Overviews answers those questions in a row, and here are the answers, word for word:

"No, you can't directly target ad placements in the AI Overviews."

"No, you can't opt out of serving ads in AI Overviews."

"Yes, ads in AI Overviews are reported as Top Ads."

"Google Ads currently doesn't offer segmented reporting when ads show within Search AI Overviews."

Top Ads is the Google Ads reporting bucket you already have for the premium spots on a results page. An impression inside an AI Overview goes into that bucket with every other top of page impression, and nothing flags it. Google says on the same page that ads in AI Overviews are still new and that it'll announce more on reporting when it has more to share. Fine. But the row you'd want to read isn't there.

To get in at all, you hand Google the match. The help page names broad match on Search, or keywordless targeting, where Google's models pick the searches in place of keywords you supplied, through AI Max for Search, Performance Max, Shopping campaigns or Dynamic Search Ads. Google also says it looks at the text of the AI Overview, and at the query, when it picks an ad. So you don't buy the slot. You give up control of the match and get eligible. If that setting already worries you, Jared has written on how it taxes a sloppy account.

One more thing surprised me. All four of those answers cover AI Overviews. There is no Google Ads help page for ads in AI Mode as of September of 2026. The help topic Google files this under, ads in AI powered experiences, lists one article: the AI Overviews page. So for AI Mode, the claim I'll stand behind is a little narrower. Google hasn't written it up. No trade source I read found an AI Mode report either.

What has Google published about how they perform?

One sentence, with no number in it. The help page's only performance claim says Google's internal data shows people find the ads in AI Overviews helpful for getting to a business when they need one. The footnote cites Google internal data from 2024. No figure, no sample, no method, no control group. It's also two years old. That's a claim about feelings. No measurement is attached.

The May announcement has one number in the whole post: 75% of people say they make up their minds quicker and feel surer about it using AI Mode. Read the footnote before you put that on a slide. Google paid Ipsos for the survey. It ran online in December of 2025 in 25 countries, with 13,189 shoppers. The results weren't weighted to population, and the sample was screened down to shoppers who already use AI Overviews or AI Mode to shop. That number tracks shopper feelings. It says nothing about an advertiser's account.

Then the Alphabet side. Pichai's published remarks for the second quarter, in July of 2026, say over 1 billion people now use AI Mode each month after it went global, that it's adding Search queries, that Google now sends billions of clicks a week to websites through AI features, and that AI Mode answers are now the cheapest to serve since launch. Search and Other revenue grew 17% year over year. In that whole Search section there's no sentence about how ads inside AI Mode perform. Google has told investors AI Mode is big. It hasn't told investors, or you, the return on an ad in it.

What have people outside Google counted?

Two vendors looked at one surface and came back with numbers about five times different. In August of 2026, Similarweb launched an AI ads dataset saying nearly 30% of ad eligible AI Mode queries already show ads. Adthena put United States AI Mode ad frequency at 5.8%. PPC Land reported both figures.

You can't line those two up. PPC Land's writeup that month pointed out that Similarweb's base is ad eligible queries, not all queries, and that Adthena's figure isn't stated on the same basis. The panels, denominators and ways of collecting data don't match, and, in PPC Land's words, "no third-party measurement standard exists for any of these environments." Similarweb hasn't disclosed panel size, geography or device mix. So I can't tell you which number is closer, and I'd be wary of any vendor or consultant who picks one with no reason given.

PPC Land also noted, fairly, that the two firms have a commercial stake in their numbers, and that Similarweb sells the product that fixes the blind spot it reports. That's normal in this business. Keep it in mind whenever a density number hits your inbox.

Adthena shows the same problem from the other side. In June of 2026, per PPC Land, it reported zero ChatGPT ads in 169,560 UK scrapes, then reported US ChatGPT ad frequency of 24.7% a few weeks later. It hasn't publicly squared the two. That isn't two vendors disagreeing. It's one vendor, with a June number and a later number it hasn't reconciled.

Add it up and the measurement for this surface is being assembled in public by the companies selling it. The buy side has no neutral party to check them against each other. We found the same failure in GEO tracking tools earlier this month, when not one of eleven vendors published a margin of error.

The case that these placements are fine

The best independent data says paid CTR held up better on AI Overview pages, not worse. In April of 2026, Search Engine Land reported on Seer Interactive's fourteen month study of 53 brands, 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion impressions, from January of 2025 to February of 2026. Here's the paid search line: "When Google showed an AI Overview, paid CTR rose slightly from 14.6% to 16.2%. When it didn't, CTR fell from 26% to 21.8%."

That's AI Overviews, not AI Mode, and the metric is click through rate, not conversions. Pages with no AI Overview still post the higher paid CTR in raw terms. But the trend favors the AI pages. If AI answers were poisoning paid search, Seer would have seen paid CTR fall on those pages. It rose.

Second, the gloomy numbers were wrong once already. Seer's own model from September of 2025 predicted clicks on AI Overviews would keep falling. They didn't. Organic click through rate on AI Overviews bottomed at 1.3% in December of 2025 and climbed to 2.4% by February of 2026, an 85% jump in two months. Jared wrote up the older figure people still quote and how stale it is. That applies here too. Confident pessimism about a surface this young ages badly.

Third, the surface is big. A billion people a month and Search and Other revenue up 17% aren't a fad. Fourth, the price of getting in is dropping. More on that next.

Michelle Morgan at WordStream, in a post last updated in December of 2025, argued that getting ads into AI Mode probably shouldn't be your top advertising goal. I agree with her, and I'd add this. Nothing in print is cause to pull back from it either. What no one has shown is the claim some people want to make next, that these ads beat normal search ads. No one has published that head to head.

September brought bigger news

In September of 2026, per PPC Land, Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, confirmed that exact and phrase match keywords are now eligible to serve text ads in AI Mode. Her description: "This is a small experiment that recently kicked off." She scoped it to cases of "explicit and direct user intent," and Google hasn't published a definition of that condition. It came in a LinkedIn comment. The help pages say nothing on it. Highlighted Answers stay reserved for Performance Max and AI Max campaigns. According to PPC Land, Google named no geography, vertical, account count or end date.

The upside is fair to name. For the first time, you could land in AI Mode with no switch to a campaign type that has the weaker independent record. If the experiment sticks, the entry fee drops.

The reporting side is the catch. In PPC Land's telling, an exact match keyword row in a September account can now mix three groups: literal matches, close variants and AI Mode impressions, and nothing in the interface splits them. That row was already getting muddy. PPC Land also cites smec, which looked at 383 million impressions in EMEA ecommerce search and found that by July of 2026, about 71% of exact match impressions were exact in fact, down from at or near 100% in the first half of 2025. Now AI Mode is one more ingredient in a number you used as your clean read.

What I would do about it

Stop asking for an AI Mode report. There isn't one. Ask something the account can answer: did your Top Ads impression share move after the start of September, and did the portion of exact match impressions that are exact in fact drop? Pull Top Ads impression share by week and mark the week the experiment surfaced. One caution on the second check. Since May of 2026, the search terms report has shown Google's guess at the searcher's meaning in place of the typed query, per PPC Land, so treat that check as rough.

Judge Performance Max and AI Max on independent published tests of those campaign types, not on the AI Mode access they advertise. Exact and phrase keywords can now reach AI Mode too, at least in Google's small experiment. Highlighted Answers are among the formats still held back for the automated campaigns.

Treat any vendor's density figure for AI Mode as an estimate. Ask for the denominator before it goes in a deck. If the vendor can't give it to you, leave the number out.

Put the money on buying searches. In that same study, Seer found AI Overviews on about 5% of transactional queries and about 95% of comparison queries. Again, that's AI Overviews, but it's the best read available. It says this is a research surface. Most of your buying searches aren't there yet.

Write landing pages that hold up when summarized. Google matches ads against the AI Overview text as well as the query. A page that says plainly what you sell, to whom and at what price hands the model something to work with.

The gold rush talk starts from the wrong question. The thing being described isn't for sale, and the instrument you'd need to weigh what you got hasn't been made yet. When Google ships a report that splits out AI answer impressions, that's the week to run the test. Until then, do what we did when we checked if ChatGPT and Perplexity get PPC advice right: read what's been published, write down what's there, and say out loud what isn't.

FAQ

Can you target ads to Google AI Mode? No. Google's help page says you can't target AI Overview slots or opt out of them. To be eligible at all, you need broad match or keywordless targeting through AI Max, Performance Max, Shopping or Dynamic Search Ads, plus, since September of 2026, a small Google experiment under which some exact and phrase match keywords are eligible for text ads in AI Mode.

Can you see AI Mode ad performance in Google Ads? No. For AI Overviews, Google says there's no segmented reporting and those impressions are filed under Top Ads. For AI Mode, there's no help page at all as of September of 2026. No trade source has turned up an AI Mode report.

How do ads in AI Mode perform compared to other search ads? No one has published a head to head, from Google or anywhere else. Google's only performance claim has no figure and cites internal data from 2024, and with no split in reporting, an advertiser couldn't pull those impressions out anyway.

What percentage of AI Mode queries show ads? The vendors disagree by about five times. Similarweb said in August of 2026 that nearly 30% of ad eligible AI Mode queries show ads, and Adthena put US frequency at 5.8%. The two numbers rest on different, partly undisclosed bases.

Is it time to change your budget because of ads in AI Mode? Not on the published data. Seer's study, reported in April of 2026, found paid click through rate rose on pages with an AI Overview, and AI Overviews turn up on only about 5% of transactional queries, so keep spending on searches from people ready to buy and watch your Top Ads and exact match numbers.