Google takes AI Mode ads to 10 more countries, and multiturn ads are coming to the US

Google is taking ads inside AI Mode to ten more countries and launching ads that respond to a follow-up question, not just the first one, inside the US version of the AI-powered search experience. Shashi Thakur, who runs Search Ads and Ads on Google Experiences, announced the rollout on Google's Ads & Commerce blog on October 28. The timing is not incidental: on the same day, Alphabet told investors that Search's ad revenue grew 12% year over year in the third quarter, down from 17% in the second quarter and 19% in the first.

What's changing

Ads in AI Mode are "scaling now" in Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore, according to Google's post. Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom are planned for the fourth quarter. In the US, Google is adding what it calls multiturn ads: sponsored results that can surface when a user asks a follow-up question inside the same AI Mode conversation, not only on the opening query. Every ad carries a "Sponsored" label.

Google is leaning on two of its own data points to justify the pace. It says AI Mode queries run about three times longer than a typical search, drawn from its US AI Mode report from May, and that in a two-week US sample at the end of August, click-through rates on sponsored product listings inside AI Mode were already close to those on organic listings. Both figures come from Google's internal research, not an outside audit, which matters for anyone trying to decide how much weight to put on them.

Why the rush: the earnings call behind the blog post

Google framed the expansion as a product update. Alphabet's chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, framed it as a revenue mandate on the same day's Q3 earnings call, saying the move "includes taking our monetization footprint global for the first time," as reported by TechCrunch. Alphabet's total revenue hit $127.6 billion in the quarter, up 25%, but shares fell 8% after the results, and Search's own growth rate has now decelerated for three straight quarters. Google Cloud, by contrast, grew revenue 103% to $30.7 billion.

"This includes taking our monetization footprint global for the first time."

Put together, the two announcements say the same thing from different sides of the building: AI Mode has moved from an experiment Google could afford to run ad-free to a surface it needs to monetize everywhere, fast, because the search ad business that funds the company is growing at its slowest clip in years.

Who this affects

Any software company running Google Search or Shopping campaigns in Australia, Canada, India, Southeast Asia or the other newly-listed markets should expect AI Mode to start carrying paid placements alongside, or instead of, the organic listings they've optimized for. Companies expanding into Brazil, Mexico or the UK should plan for the same shift to land by year-end. And because multiturn ads target the second or third question in a conversation rather than the first, teams that write ad copy only for a single, keyword-style query are optimizing for a format Google is actively moving away from.

There's a second group affected less directly but just as materially: anyone watching organic search traffic erode as AI Mode usage grows. Google's own numbers show AI Mode sessions running longer and more multi-step than classic search, which means fewer discrete queries produce fewer discrete ranking opportunities — and now, more of those remaining moments carry a paid listing that a software marketer either bought or lost to a competitor who did.

What to do differently

• If you run paid search in any of the ten listed countries, check your account for AI Mode ad eligibility and placement reporting now, before the format is fully scaled rather than after.
• Rewrite a sample of search ad copy to answer a plausible follow-up question, not just the initial query — multiturn ads reward campaigns built for a conversation, not a keyword.
• Keep product feed data (titles, structured attributes, pricing) current if you sell software with usage-based or tiered pricing, since AI Mode is already surfacing product listings conversationally.
• Track your own click-through and conversion data on AI Mode placements separately from classic Search — Google's parity claim is self-reported, and your account's numbers are the only ones that should change your budget.

The open question

Google has not said when AI Mode ads reach full global coverage, nor published independent, third-party data on how sponsored placements perform against organic ones at scale. For now, software marketers are being asked to trust Google's internal measurement of its own new ad surface while that surface decides an increasing share of what a search ad dollar buys. The deceleration in Search's growth rate is the clearest signal that Google has an incentive to make that surface look good quickly — which is exactly why marketers should verify it with their own numbers rather than Google's.