Google Is Putting Ads Inside AI Mode, and Your Campaign Might Not Even Be in the Running

What Google announced, and what's still unknown

On October 28, 2026, Google announced that ads in AI Mode, which until then ran mainly in the United States, are expanding to 10 more countries: Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. In the same announcement, Google said Brazil, Mexico and the UK are next, later this year, with no exact date given.

The ads sit inside the AI-written answer and are labeled "Sponsored". In the US, Google is also starting to show ads in follow-up questions, the ones people ask next in the same conversation.

What nobody knows yet: how much volume this placement will carry, what clicks will cost there, and how it will perform for local service businesses like clinics. Anyone claiming hard numbers right now is guessing.

The catch: there's no AI Mode campaign for you to build

There's no campaign type called "AI Mode" in Google Ads, and no checkbox for it. According to what Google has said since it first announced this format in May 2025, ads there come from campaigns you may already be running, as long as they use Google's AI-driven targeting:

Now picture a typical small practice or local business account built a few years ago: Search campaigns running only exact and phrase match keywords, tightly controlled. Great for not wasting money. But under the rules Google has described, that account isn't eligible for AI Mode. The competitor running broad match or Performance Max shows up in the AI answer. You don't.

The flip side matters too. If you already run those campaign types, your ads become eligible for AI Mode automatically, on the same budget. From what's been shared so far, you can't choose to appear only there, and you can't exclude it. Google also doesn't yet offer a separate report showing when ads appeared in these AI placements. Part of your spend can start running somewhere new without a clear view of how it's doing.

So should you just switch on broad match?

Not blindly. Broad match without guardrails is a reliable way to pay for searches that have little to do with what you sell. Broad match and AI targeting work when conversions are tracked properly and someone is actually watching the account. Without that, it's autopilot on your credit card.

What to do before it reaches your market

1. Find out which side your account is on. Do your Search campaigns use broad match? Are you running Performance Max or Shopping? If the answer is no across the board, your account is likely out of AI Mode.
2. Fix conversion tracking first. AI-driven targeting spends based on the conversions you report. If a WhatsApp click or a page view counts as a conversion, it will optimize for the wrong thing. Make sure what you track is a real lead, booking or sale.
3. Tighten your negative keywords. AI Mode questions tend to be long and conversational. The looser your matching, the more it matters to tell Google what you don't want, like "free", "jobs" or "course", whatever fits your business.
4. Test with a control. If you open up to broad match or AI Max, do it in a separate campaign with a capped budget, and compare cost per lead against what you already run. Changing everything at once means you'll never know what worked.
5. Check search terms weekly. With no dedicated AI Mode report, the search terms report is your best signal for new, longer queries and whether they convert.
6. Make the landing page answer the question. Someone arriving from an AI answer already asked a full question. If your page doesn't quickly cover price, process and how to book, they go right back to Google.

If you can't tell which side your account is on, or it was set up years ago and nobody has touched it since, it's worth a review before this change lands. At IKOEH, our Google Ads management does exactly that: we look at the account, show you what's being left out, and adjust with testing and control instead of handing everything to autopilot.