Ads are now inside AI Mode in Australia. The free links moved up a fortnight ago. Neither is a coincidence.

Australia was first on a Google list on Thursday morning, Sydney time. I'd love to tell you that's strategic. It's alphabetical.

The list is in a post by Shashi Thakur, Google's vice president and general manager for Search ads, published on 28 October, US time: "Now we're scaling ads in AI Mode in Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Singapore." The ads carry a "Sponsored" label.

It landed with Alphabet's third-quarter results, and on the call Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, gave four reasons Search growth had slowed. The fourth, and not the biggest: "the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode." People are asking AI Mode more questions than Google can currently charge for.

Thirteen days earlier, Google had published a post about making the free links in those same answers easier to see. I filed it under "Google being nice to the web again" and moved on. That was a mistake. Read the two together and you've got the deal Google's now offering Australian websites: we'll show your links a bit higher, and we'll sell ads in the same box.

Two posts, thirteen days apart

The 15 October post, by Hema Budaraju, a product VP at Google, lists five changes to how links appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. In Google's words: inline links shown "higher up in responses more frequently"; a test of a dedicated block of key official links at the top of some answers; news carousels rolling out "to additional locations and languages globally"; bigger end-of-answer links with thumbnails; and a test of "clickable creator and publisher names on video results" in AI Mode (Google, 2026).

The post contains one statistic: Preferred Sources users have "grown by more than 7x since the start of the year." That's a number about a setting, not about clicks. No click data, no traffic data, no country list, so Australia's neither in nor out. As far as I can find, no Australian outlet covered it.

The 28 October post has plenty of numbers, all about ads. "Multiturn ads" on follow-up questions, US only for now. And one claim worth reading slowly: "click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product list items within AI Mode" (Google, 2026). That's Google's own US data for a fortnight in August and September, and it's about product list items. Shopping tiles. It says nothing about whether your article gets clicked.

Barry Schwartz

@rustybrick

Google expanding ads in AI Mode to Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Singapore. Plus, Google is rolling out "multiturn ads" in the U.S. within AI Mode

seroundtable.com/google-expands…

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28 Oct 2026

On the call, Schindler described the expansion as taking Google's ad footprint "global for the first time", and said "the majority of AI Mode queries are incremental" (Motley Fool, 2026). Search and other revenue still grew 12 per cent to about US$63.4 billion (Alphabet, 2026), down from 17 per cent in the June quarter (Mumbrella, 2026). The same exhibit says Search query growth is "the highest it has been in the last five years".

So here's the sequence. Make the organic links a little more visible. Then put ads inside the answers, in ten more markets. The second post names Australia. The first names nobody.

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Ads in AI Overviews have run in Australia since late 2025 (PPC Land, 2025). AI Mode itself arrived here on 8 October last year (Google Australia, 2025), with publishers already nervous about another drop in organic traffic (AdNews, 2025). Mumbrella had Schindler scaling ads "within AI Overviews in AI Mode" (Mumbrella, 2026); the transcript says "and". Two surfaces, and a sign the local coverage hasn't caught up.

The obvious pushback is that this is correlation dressed up as a sequence. Google's been adding links and adding ads all year, the thirteen-day gap is a calendar accident, and Google's own figures say sponsored and organic product tiles get clicked at similar rates. The sharper version: most AI Mode queries are new, so an ad there takes a click from nobody. Maybe so, for Google. For a site, the question is whether the answer cites you at all, and what sits above the citation when it does. The CTR figure is about shopping tiles in the US over a fortnight, and Google said both things on the same call. Whether or not the gap is a coincidence, the practical moves are the same.

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Three moves before the data gets muddy

Set a baseline this week. Search Console has had a generative AI performance report for every site since 31 August: impressions only, AI Overviews and AI Mode lumped together, no clicks (Search Console Help, 2026). Export it, annotate 29 October there and in your analytics, and if you've never opened it, write that down too. It's still a baseline. From this week you won't know whether a click inside an AI answer went to you, to an ad, or nowhere, and you'll want to tell the difference.

Make the official page unambiguous. Google's testing a block that puts official links at the top of some answers. Be obviously the official source. That means consistent organisation markup across the site, one canonical page per entity (one contact page, not three) and a claimed Search profile where you're eligible. I'd bet most sites have two "official" pages for something, and I wouldn't bet on ours being the exception.

Put a line in the budget. Not to rush out and buy them, but because that's what Google's just told Australian advertisers it's selling. Google's help page says existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are automatically eligible, and that the AI ad numbers are reported only in aggregate (Google Ads Help, 2026). So you may already be in without deciding to be, and you can't see what AI Mode is doing on its own. Check both. Publishing news? Check your article markup, because the carousels are rolling out globally and Google hasn't said where. If you sell products, the tiles in AI Mode draw on your Merchant Centre feed, paid or free (Merchant Centre Help, 2026). A stale feed is a closed door.

The ads roll out from this week. The links moved a fortnight ago. Google's published no click data on the links and one shopping-tile comparison on the ads, and I wouldn't hold my breath for more. The test comes in December, when you try to work out which clicks you lost and which you paid for. If you can't tell them apart, Google can.

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