By the Mayab Media Team
On October 28, hours after Alphabet posted its quarterly results, Google said ads in AI Mode are rolling out in Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. Brazil, Mexico and the UK are slated for later this quarter, per Google's announcement.
The US gets something different. "Multiturn" ads.
These show up on follow-up questions, not just the first query. Someone asks AI Mode about running shoes for flat feet, then asks which ones hold up on muddy trails, and an ad can now appear in that second answer.
The timing isn't subtle. Alphabet's ad revenue grew 10.5% to roughly $82 billion, short of analyst expectations, and its chief business officer pointed partly to the surge in AI Mode usage, according to PPC Land's earnings coverage. AI Mode carries fewer ads than a classic results page. Google wants to fill it.
You're probably already in
This part surprises people. There's no AI Mode campaign to build. Google's help page says any Search, Shopping or Performance Max campaign you already run qualifies on its own. No new budget, no new campaign type.
You also can't opt out of AI Mode while staying on regular Search. Or target AI Mode alone. It's bundled, and the only levers you get are the ones you already had: keywords, negatives and brand exclusions.
Your match types decide how you show up. Exact and phrase match only serve when the query itself shows direct commercial intent. Broad match, AI Max for Search, Shopping and PMax can also match contextually, which means Google reads the whole conversation plus the AI's answer and decides your ad fits.
That second route is where budget drifts.
Where the money leaks
Picture a dental clinic with two locations running broad match on "teeth whitening." Someone spends ten minutes in AI Mode asking whether whitening strips damage enamel, what causes sensitivity, and whether charcoal toothpaste works. Somewhere in that chat, Google decides there's commercial intent. Your ad shows. Maybe they book. More likely they were just curious.
Is that click worthless? Not always. But it's a very different click from "teeth whitening near me," and you pay for it all the same. If 10% of a $3,000 monthly budget lands on exploratory chats that rarely convert, that's $300 a month spent sponsoring someone's homework.
The reporting has a catch too.
AI Mode results are folded into your standard campaign reports in aggregate, so there's no tidy AI Mode column showing what those clicks cost. The search terms report does include them. That's where you'll have to dig, and it's worth doing monthly rather than once.
What about Google's claim that click-through rates are already similar for sponsored and organic product listings in AI Mode? It's based on internal US data from August 20 to September 3. Fine, but product listings are visual and shoppable. That tells a plumber or a law firm running text ads almost nothing, and Google didn't publish the numbers behind it.
What we'd change this week
If you advertise in the US or any of the new countries, we'd give this an hour:
- Pull the search terms report for the last 30 days and sort by cost. Look for long, question-shaped queries. Those are the conversational ones.
- Add negatives for research-only phrasing that never converts for you ("is it safe," "how does," "what causes," depending on your business).
- Set up brand exclusions in PMax and AI Max if you'd rather not appear in competitor-comparison chats.
- Keep your highest-value terms on exact or phrase match, where Google only serves on clear commercial intent.
- Put a reminder two weeks after rollout reaches your market, then compare cost per lead before and after.
What we wouldn't do is panic and cut budget. Google says AI Mode queries run about three times longer than traditional searches. Longer queries reveal more about what someone wants, and for a business with a clear offer and a tight landing page, that could mean better leads, not worse ones.
"Could" is doing a lot of work there, though. Trust your search terms over Google's averages.
Your existing budget is already flowing into AI Mode, so audit it like a channel you never chose to launch.
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