AdSense will start showing targeted ads in conversations with AI

Google is launching ad placement within dialogues with chatbots from other companies. The technical implementation of the project will be carried out through the Google AdSense system. A platform that has been providing ad placement on millions of websites around the world for many years. Now this system is being adapted to display advertising messages directly during a user’s conversation with a chatbot created by third-party developers. You’re discussing a trip with ChatGPT and here, immediately hotels and airline tickets are offered by ads. Or you ask about the calorie content of products – and you are offered delivery of ready-made low-calorie meal sets. For business – super. But as for the user – personally I wouldn’t like it. Feels like someone is spying on me.

The decision to launch was preceded by 1 year of thorough testing. Several startups in the field of artificial intelligence participated in the pilot project. And the results obtained convinced Google of the viability of such an approach to monetizing dialogue systems. The financial significance of this initiative is difficult to overestimate. Last year, the Google search engine brought the company 198000000000 dollars in revenue. Which is almost 60% of all Alphabet corporation revenue. Protecting and expanding this market becomes a priority task in conditions when chatbots begin to compete with traditional search as the main way of obtaining information.

Google is also actively investing in developments aimed at maintaining its dominance in the advertising market. Integration of advertising into dialogues with artificial intelligence is a logical step in this direction. Allowing the company to monetize not only its own products, but also to become an intermediary for third-party developers.

I think the transition from the “advertising next to content” model to the “advertising inside dialogue” model is still a bit early. Well, or it needs to be made less obvious. If previously advertising was placed in the static context of a web page, now it becomes a dynamic element of dialogue. Which requires completely different approaches to determining the relevance and format of advertising messages. The next step will probably be the placement of unobtrusive advertising in conversational interfaces. Which may affect trust in the system as an unbiased interlocutor.