Google allowed ads in Gemini after previous commitments against advertising

Google no longer rules out the appearance of ads in Gemini. After months of cautious statements, the company has acknowledged that successful advertising formats from AI Mode could eventually transition to the separate chatbot application.

Why the tone changed

Back in January 2026, Google leadership said Gemini had no plans to launch advertising. But by late April, the rhetoric had noticeably shifted. On a quarterly earnings call for investors, Google's Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler directly stated that the company is currently focused on advertising in AI Mode, however, the format that proves successful there could successfully move into Gemini as well.

This is no longer a denial, but a careful preparation of the market for a new scenario. The reason is clear: Gemini is growing rapidly, and a free AI service with millions of users is very expensive to maintain. Google already has subscriptions and paid AI plans, but a subscription model alone may not be enough to scale such a product to a mass audience.

Advertising, in this sense, is not a zero-start experiment for Google, but a familiar business tool that the company is now trying to adapt to a conversational interface.

First test in search

For now, Google is in no rush to insert ads directly into the separate Gemini application. Instead, the company is using AI Mode and AI Overviews in search as a testing ground. The logic is simple: users in search have long been accustomed to ad blocks, so testing new formats there is safer than immediately changing the experience in a chatbot, where any intrusive insertion is perceived more painfully. According to Google's leadership, the basic principles are already clear:

• Advertising should be separated from organic results
• Ads should be explicitly labeled
• They should only be shown when highly relevant
• They will not be implemented hastily in Gemini
• For now, the priority remains free access and subscriptions

This approach shows that Google wants to first find a format that doesn't break the user scenario. This is where the main risk lies: in search, ads look familiar, but in dialogue with AI, they easily begin to be perceived as interference with the answer itself. It's no accident that Schindler separately emphasized that with proper implementation, advertising can be not noise, but useful commercial information. That's exactly why the company is choosing a maximally cautious pace.

"If done right, advertising can be useful commercial information".

How it differs from ChatGPT

OpenAI took this step earlier. Starting February 9, 2026, the company began testing ads in ChatGPT in the US for free-tier users and the Go plan. Ads are shown below the response, receive a sponsored label, and are visually separated from the main text.

Paid tiers Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu have no ads. Additionally, OpenAI excluded showing ads next to sensitive topics like health, mental state, and politics. OpenAI has also described personalization rules.

The system can select ads based on current chat content, and with personalization enabled, also taking into account past chats and memory. At the same time, the company separately emphasizes that advertisers do not have access to conversations and cannot influence model responses. For Google, this is a convenient market test: you can see how painfully users perceive ads in an AI interface and what restrictions actually help maintain trust.

What this means

It seems the era of completely ad-free mass AI chatbots is ending. Google hasn't yet announced the launch of ads in Gemini, but the shift from "we have no plans" to "we don't rule it out" is already a significant move. For users, this is a signal that free AI products will increasingly be monetized not only through subscriptions. For the market—that advertising formats are gradually moving from search results into conversational interfaces.