Google Assistant’s Recent Ad Testing is Fake News
It’s been recently reported that Google is testing ads in the Assistant results page by Gennaro Cuafano and Search Engine Land, to name a few. We’ve talked in depth about the future of Paid Voice Search on PPC hubbub, and we believe that this recent “test” could have been faked and is in fact a way to get you to use Voice Search and utilise the Conversational Actions they have built for ‘Four Week MBA’ – Gennaro is the founder.
As a floppy haired president would say, it’s “Fake News”.
What is being “tested”?
As you can see from the tweet below, you can see how the Google Assistant is displaying Paid Search Ads as an answer to a question alongside the organic results further down.
Have you noticed that Google is pushing ads results in the voice assistant? @rustybrick @bill_slawski pic.twitter.com/VymSVGn4fx
— Gennaro Cuofano (@fourweekmba) 13 February 2019
What this essentially looks like is the Assistant displaying the usual search results page, however the screenshot implies that there are no organic search results and only a single ad. The screenshot doesn’t really add up either, at the bottom of the ad you can see that it is cut off, almost as if it’s been photoshopped.
I’ve not been able to replicate the search results myself, and I believe there is a reason why.
It’s a fake screenshot to get you to the Quiz, built with Conversational Actions
Here’s what we got when we searched for the exact same thing:
It’s clickbait for you to to find out more about the company and to ultimately visit the website. Either that, or the company has been clever enough to recently build this to help capitalise on the additional traffic that has been generated from the hubbub around the new “test”. Here’s some more information on Conversation Actions for the Google Assistant.
Well done. We salute you for fooling the Paid Search Community!
LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/siondanielroberts
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