Google Is Not Ruling Out Ads in Gemini

From an advertising point of view, there are no ads in the Gemini app at this point. Within AI Mode, we’re still working through it. We don’t sell data to advertisers. All this stuff is very nascent, but probably what we’ll figure out is how to make sure that an ad can be targeted and relevant to the context in a query. Maybe in this case, it could have known the specific brand of goggles.

We’ll need to figure out how the targeting of the ads can be consistent with the organic response and to make sure it all fits together. But we’ll make sure that your private information remains private and isn’t shared with advertisers.

I’m guessing you saw Anthropic’s Super Bowl commercial about ads in AI. What was your reaction to it?

I thought the ads were funny. From our point of view, ads in Search have worked incredibly well for 20-plus years. It doesn’t change our confidence that we can build incredibly useful, relevant ads in the context of AI search.

Search has a lot of AI in it today. Where is it heading?

The broad vision for Search is you should be able to ask anything. If you can ask all the questions in your head, you’ll probably visit more web pages, and you might buy more products.

I would say that personalization, for years, has been the holy grail of Search, but we never actually figured it out. For me, seeing the rollout of Personal Intelligence has been really game-changing in terms of Search getting more useful. You should expect to see us push quite a bit on that.

Do you mean Personal Intelligence will be a bigger part of AI Mode, or Search in general?

So far, we’ve brought it to AI Mode. We think of AI Mode and AI Overviews as increasingly one and the same. A core part of how we’re evolving Search is that it should be more seamless. Users should just bring whatever question to Search and we should show you the most useful response. That might be a navigational link to a webpage. It might be a set of news articles. It might be an AI response.

All those things come together, and that’s a reasonable way to think about how Personal Intelligence will evolve as well.

Do you expect all of these products—AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, and Search—to be one thing at some point?

It kind of depends on how usage evolves. Today, the way we think about it is Search is becoming AI search, and the Gemini app is your personal assistant. Those areas have overlap for sure.

Within the context of Search, users shouldn’t need to be thinking quite as much about what’s traditional Search, what’s AI Overviews, what’s AI Mode— that really should come together into a seamless, holistic Search experience. That’s the direction we’re going.

If Personal Intelligence gets wrapped up into Search more, that means that people's searches could be influenced by their emails, photos, and all of these different things. How are you guys preparing for that shift?