Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, at the Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google announced Tuesday that it will offer advertisers the ability to create immersive visuals in their promotions using generative artificial intelligence, as the company rolls out more AI tools for brands.
Advertisers can take advantage of what Google calls a visual brand profile in search “which yields richer results” for queries that include the name of a brand or retailer, the company said Tuesday at its conference annual Google Marketing Live. Brands can also include videos and product summaries.
Last week, Google announced plans to change its search results page to prioritize a feature called “AI Preview,” which uses AI to summarize information at the top of a results page of research. The move could push organic content and ads further down the page, causing a potential upheaval for publishers and advertisers.
Google said on Tuesday that there will be ads in AI Overview and that they will be relevant to both the query and the information. Posts will be clearly labeled as “sponsored”. The ads include virtual try-on options, a technology Google rolled out to select retailers last year.
“All a merchant needs to do is provide a handful of high-quality images of their shoes from different angles and we will use our advanced AI techniques to create a 360-degree view of their shoes,” Google said in a blog post.
Google did not specify how many sponsored spots in AI Overview it would display for each expected AI query or how the company would decide which ones to present. A Google spokesperson said the company is “starting with a small test in the United States.”
Alphabet Google has seen a rebound in advertising activity this year, following a decline in 2022 and a slow recovery last year. Total revenue soared 15% in the second quarter, the fastest expansion since early 2022. Executives said at the time of the report’s release last month that they had seen an increase in conversions from advertising clients using generative AI tools in its “Performance Max”.
The company said it was giving advertisers more image editing tools and said Google’s AI would generate more visual options and “context” for their ads. For example, Google said that if a user searched for “short-term storage” and clicked on an ad for a storage facility, Google’s AI could recommend a storage unit size and packaging materials while providing links to websites.
WATCH: The biggest winners in AI will go to Meta and Google
cnbc
