Now that Google has successfully dodged that bullet, it can finally turn its attention to what matters most: money. One surefire way to up those bank balances is adjusting Search ads. It’s not as bad as it sounds. The search giant revealed that customers will be given the choice to “hide” these ads — after they’ve seen ’em.
As it stands, paid-for sponsored results appear on a search page with a “sponsored” tag on each. Going forward, it’ll group any text ads that appear on the page into a single “Sponsored results” section at the top of the screen. It isn’t actually changing the size of ads, and Google reckons it’ll never string more than four ads together at a time.
Avert your eyes
“This new, larger label stays visible as people scroll, making it clear which results are sponsored — upholding our industry-leading standards for ad label prominence, Google wrote in a blog post.
As users scroll past the group of ads, they’ll be offered the choice to “hide sponsored results,” though the ‘Sponsored results’ tag will remain as they continue to scroll, just waiting to be accidentally clicked and to start showing ads again. These changes also apply to other ad units on the search results page, like shopping ads.
Read More: Despite Google’s recent victory, a flurry of competition cases could still change how the tech giants do business
It appears the search giant is still ironing out the kinks, with some ad groups appearing both above and below the ‘Google AI Overview’ — likely due to most folks immediately skipping over it to get to the human-generated content. And if you go too far without seeing another ad, it may just show you another “Sponsored results” section, this time at the bottom of the screen, which can, once again, only be hidden after viewing.
Don’t think you’re escaping these ad changes if you’re a desktop main. Google say these changes are rolling out for both the desktop and mobile versions of Google Search.
