Ads aren’t dead in a zero‑click world – they’re just moving. What’s really fading is the old idea that “search ads” live only in blue links and website clicks, while the real action is drifting into AI answers, new modes and always‑on agents.
Ads in Search are…over?
If you just looked at Gemini, Perplexity, or ChatGPT’s answers, you’d be forgiven for thinking ads in search are on borrowed time. Zero‑click behaviour is up, AI happily gives you an answer without sending traffic to site, and for a lot of people it feels like we’ve finally escaped the bloated, click‑baity web we spent the last decade optimising for.
That’s created a narrative: “AI will kill ads; search will finally be pure again.” It’s emotional, it plays well on LinkedIn, and it’s also wrong. Ads are not disappearing; they’re being rewired into the answer layer itself – closer to the intent, and much harder to ignore in your strategy.
This week, Adthena saw this in the wild with Ads in Google’s AI Overviews. Ads are here in AI Search Experiences, alive and kicking.
Google is not walking away from its ad machine.
Anyone betting against ads in search is also betting against Google’s core DNA. While everyone has been obsessing over ChatGPT, Gemini has been quietly closing the gap: its traffic and market share have spiked, its mobile app downloads are catching up with ChatGPT’s, and its overall usage has surged through deep integration across Android and Google’s services. Recent reporting shows Gemini users now spend more time per visit chatting than ChatGPT users, which is exactly the kind of engagement an ad business loves.
At the same time, Google has started rolling out ads inside AI Overviews and AI Mode across mobile and desktop. These aren’t bolted‑on banners; they’re Search and Shopping formats blended into the AI answer, with the model deciding when and how to surface them based on context. This is a company with +20 years of auction design and sales muscle methodically grafting ads onto its next‑generation UX, not one quietly sunsetting its ad stack.
If (or when) the AI hype cycle cools, Google still has a mature, high‑margin ads business to lean on. That gives it the freedom to experiment, get AI‑native ad formats wrong a few times, and still out‑invest rivals who are only just working out where an ad even goes in a chat window.
Everyone else will get to ads eventually.
Google is just furthest along. Others are already moving in the same direction. Perplexity runs curated sponsored results and brand placements in its answers – small in scale today, but proof that even “answer engines” gravitate to paid inventory once usage and costs ramp up. OpenAI and ChatGPT have now seen leaked code in the Android beta which shows an internal ads framework and “search ads carousel”, signalling imminent rollout (see Bleeping Computer).
Microsoft is tying Copilot more tightly into its existing Ads stack, with sponsored links and shopping‑style formats beginning to appear inside AI experiences across Bing, Edge and Windows. Once Google starts reporting what AI Overviews and AI Mode are doing for revenue, the rest of the market will move even faster – nobody at scale willingly walks away from a proven monetisation mechanic.
https://twitter.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/1995357492713570735
Users didn’t hate ads, they hated the experience.
A lot of the “kill ads” energy is really “kill terrible ad experiences”. People are sick of:
- Typing a question into Google and landing on bait pages with weak answers.
- Navigating through pop‑ups, autoplay video, paywalls and infinite scroll just to find the one paragraph that actually helps.
- Feeling like clicking through was a punishment for daring to want more detail.
Zero‑click and AI search took off because they fixed this for the user. They brought back the feeling of “ask a question, get a decent answer, job done” without making you pay a tax in attention, battery and sanity. That has democratised access to information and AI, and given people back some control over a web that had been relentlessly optimised for ad yield instead of usefulness.
But that doesn’t mean people hate the concept of advertising. They hate feeling like ads are wasting their time. When ads are clearly labelled, contextually relevant and feel like part of the help – not an obstacle to it – tolerance goes up, and so does performance. The platforms that make ads feel native to AI answers and agent workflows will win, and Google is in the best place to do that at speed and scale.
What this really means for “PPC”
Here’s the uncomfortable bit: if your definition of PPC is still “user searches → sees text ad → clicks → lands on your site”, then yes, that world is shrinking. According to Adthena’s analysis, Paid search click-through rates could decline by 8-12% – equivalent to a 20-40% relative drop – as AI-generated answers take up more space on the traditional SERP results page.
More of the journey – and increasingly, more of the conversion – will happen inside AI experiences and agents, with fewer traditional clicks and shorter, messier sessions when they do happen.
The underlying economics, though, are very much alive. Brands will still pay to be:
- The option an assistant recommends first.
- The product featured inside a generated answer, panel or carousel.
- The place an AI surface sends you to visit, buy from, or get help from.
In other words, the ad isn’t dying; it’s moving. From the text ad into the answer, from the SERP into the chat, from the click into the action. If you only measure and optimise for the old touchpoints, it will absolutely feel like ads are disappearing – because you’re not looking where the value is going.
In the next post, the focus shifts from “are ads dead?” to a more interesting question: if the click is no longer the main unit we pay for, what replaces it?
