Google Confirms AI Mode Ads Earn Less Than Search Ads as 0.9% CTR Study Lands

Google's senior vice president and chief business officer Philipp Schindler confirmed on the company's October earnings call that ads running in AI Mode carry "lower monetization" than ads in traditional search results. The admission came the same week a small study put the click-through rate of Google's AI search features — AI Overviews (Google's AI-generated answer summaries above web results) and AI Mode (Google's full conversational search interface) — at roughly 0.9%, and found that opting out of appearing in them also drags down clicks in the main web results.

The 0.9% figure comes from a study by SEO professional Cyrus Shepard, who removed his site from AI Mode and AI Overviews via Search Console (Google's tool for monitoring search presence) and published the resulting data. His numbers begin to answer the question the industry has asked for months: what does this change for publishers weighing whether to stay in Google's generative AI surfaces? On the evidence so far, visibility in AI answers yields modest clicks, and exiting them does not cleanly restore the old traffic pattern either — the opt-out coincided with a drop in clicks in standard web results too. The study's sample is small, so treat it as directional signal rather than settled fact.

Schindler's comment adds the revenue dimension. Google earns less per search when ads appear inside AI Mode, but AI features are expanding the total number of searches people run — a volume-versus-yield trade the company appears willing to make. Alphabet's wider quarter was rocky: Bloomberg reported that Alphabet's quarterly filing puts its AI risk exposure above $1 trillion, and the Financial Times chronicled a $500 billion share rout, though Bloomberg's analysis framed the wobbly quarter as no sign of a crisis.

What did Google's spokespeople say this week?

John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, told interviewer David Iwanow that cheap AI-era tactics — listicles built to rank in AI search, for example — will not last. "Eventually the systems will catch up," Mueller said, advising against fast, easy tricks in a conversation that also covered the future of SEO, technical SEO, the crawl stats report, redirect chains, and e-commerce product data.

Gary Illyes, another Google Search veteran, told Aneta Samkoff on the Odys Podcast that bot impersonation — rogue bots pretending to be Googlebot or other trusted crawlers — has grown worse because of AI. His warning lands at a moment when server-log analysis for AI traffic is becoming a standard SEO task; Moz published a guide on exactly that this week.

Ads reach Bing's AI Overviews

Microsoft is now showing ads inside Bing AI Overviews powered by Copilot. Search marketer Khushal Bherwani shared a screenshot of an ad embedded in a Bing AI Overview — a placement that appears to be in limited testing, since the observer who spotted it still cannot trigger the ads himself. For advertisers, the development signals that Microsoft is following Google down the path of monetizing AI answers directly, and the UK trade blog Koozai is already advising advertisers on preparing for AI Mode ads arriving there.

Google unwinds a tracking change

Google appears to have stopped appending UTM parameters (tracking tags attached to URLs) to cited links in Gemini's AI responses. Google began adding them in early September and stopped around September 28, according to observed link data. The quiet reversal matters for analytics teams trying to attribute traffic from AI assistants — a measurement problem that keeps growing. Semrush emailed customers this week that its Copilot visibility tracking will be discontinued as of November 9, citing Microsoft's blocking of Copilot data collection, as Glenn Gabe noted — evidence that AI visibility tools face the same anti-scraping headwinds as rank trackers.

Those headwinds explain another reversal: Google Search may be restoring the num=100 parameter, which lets users display 100 results per page. Google removed it in September 2025 as one of several anti-scraping measures, degrading third-party tracking tools in the process.

Also on the radar

• Google Business Profile's AI-powered messaging feature, first covered in June, is rolling out to more businesses with updates since launch.
• Both Google and Bing shipped Halloween easter eggs; Bing's floating ghost that bursts into candy drew better reviews than Google's AI Mode costume finder.
• Reddit shares sank on weak sales guidance, a planned login-requirement test, and shrinking Google search traffic — with Reddit's CEO telling The Verge that Google's AI Mode "does not drive traffic."
• Ahrefs published an analysis tracking 37,500 AI citations for stability patterns, and iPullRank compared how 16,000 users behave in AI search versus Google.
• Search Engine Journal reported that GA4 missed 66% of one retailer's holiday orders, a caution for anyone relying on it before peak season.
• Google reported search volatility twice this week, alongside spam updates and continued AI Overviews expansion.

The through-line to watch: whether AI Mode's lower per-search monetization holds as ad placements scale, and whether the restored num=100 parameter — and tracking access like it — stabilizes the third-party measurement layer the industry is currently flying blind without.