Google is reportedly showing ads in chats with some third-party AI chatbots

Google’s AdSense advertising network started supporting ads inside users’ chats with some third-party AI chatbots earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.

The company is rolling out the feature following tests with AI search startups iAsk and Liner, the report said, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

“AdSense for Search is available for websites that want to show relevant ads in their conversational AI experiences,” Bloomberg cited a Google spokesperson as saying.

The search and advertising giant is ostensibly seeking to capitalize on — and offset the potential threat of — the burgeoning trend of users increasingly using AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity to search the web and answer common queries.

Google has invested heavily in AI tools and products, with a slate of large language models and frequent updates to its Gemini AI apps and models. The company late last year started showing ads in AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries it supplies for certain Search queries.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.