Google Is Not Ruling Out Ads in Gemini | WIRED

Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Google executives have insisted for months that the company has no immediate plans to put ads in Gemini. But in an interview with WIRED, Google’s senior vice president of knowledge and information, Nick Fox, says the tech giant is “not ruling them out.” “I would expect that the learnings that we get from ads in AI Mode would likely carry over to what we might want to do in the Gemini app down the road,” says Fox. “It’s an odd thing to say, but our research shows that users actually like ads within the context of Search. Over time, we’ll figure out what makes sense in the Gemini app.” Google has spent the past year racing to catch up with OpenAI in the AI chatbot market. Its efforts appear to be paying off. Gemini now has more than 750 million monthly active users, compared to the 350 million it had in March of last year (OpenAI doesn’t release monthly active user numbers, but its weekly active user number is 900 million ). Now, the question for both companies is how to make money from free users. In January, OpenAI announced it would start testing ads on ChatGPT’s free tier in the United States. Naturally, this raised questions as to when Google—which runs the largest online advertising businesses—would follow suit. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis tried to put a stop to that speculation, telling reporters at Davos the following week that the company didn’t have “any plans” to put ads in Gemini. Instead, Google is testing ads in AI Mode, the Search product powered by Gemini. “We have an environment with AI Mode where we can experiment [with ads],” Fox says. He notes that Google’s business is doing quite well these days—2025 was the company’s first year generating more than $400 billion in revenue—so it doesn’t have to rush to monetize Gemini. That puts Google at an advantage compared to OpenAI. The ChatGPT-maker reportedly aims to more than double its $30 billion revenue in 2026 , with a significant chunk of the growth expected to come from ChatGPT. Anthropic is taking the opposite route, running a Super Bowl commercial last month highlighting the potentially disastrous impact of ads in AI. This sparked a broader conversation around how the AI industry can do ads in a way that’s helpful and preserves people’s privacy. In February, Perplexity executives said they would stop experimenting with ads in its AI , partly because of the impact on user trust. One open question for Google is how ads will interact with Personal Intelligence , a feature the company launched in January, which allows Gemini to reference a user’s Gmail, Photos, and Calendar to generate contextual responses. Fox says it’s “TBD” whether Personal Intelligence will make it into traditional Search but notes that personalizing Search has long been his “holy grail.” This interview has been edited for clarity and length. WIRED: Nick, there was a lot of concern a few years ago that AI was going to cannibalize Google, but the business has continued to do better than ever. How is AI changing Google’s ads business? Nick Fox: On the ads side, there's three different pieces. First is improving core ad quality. For every ad, we generate a prediction of how well that ad will perform on a query. Will the user click on it? Is the user likely to convert? Turns out, AI models do a better job at those predictions. I would say that’s the biggest way Gemini is improving our ads. Second is advertiser tools. If you’re a small business, you’re not thinking about all the queries people are going to type in. AI is great at figuring out which keywords to use, what’s the optimal creative, and generating all of that. The third piece is the most nascent: ads in new experiences. The general philosophy we have is to build a great consumer product, then figure out monetization. Because the business is so strong and healthy, that's a luxury we have. What have you learned from experiments around ads in AI Mode? Ads are always separate from organic results and clearly labeled. If we don’t think any ad is relevant, we don’t show any ads. Probably the biggest principle of all is that ads should be useful. What [ads in AI Mode] have shown is mostly intuitive things. If it’s relevant, a user will click on it. If not, they won’t. At Davos, Demis Hassabis said that Google has no plans to bring ads to Gemini. How are you thinking about it now? The reason we focused on ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews is because we see them as extensions of the Search experience. It’s the most natural place for us to do initial experiments. I would expect that the learnings that we get from ads in AI Mode would likely carry over to what we might want to do in the Gemini app down the road. We're able to get all those learnings within a context and a construct that users are already aware of ads. It’s an odd thing to say, but our research shows that users actually like ads within the context of Search. O