Google is now placing ads for travel companies within the search results of some generative AI search engines.
Similar to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, there are many startups developing their own versions of AI search engines. Through a connection with Google’s Ads program, those startups can now display ads within their normal search results, as Bloomberg first reported.
At least one of those startups, iAsk, shows sponsored links from travel companies in response to user prompts about travel. Skift asked the iAsk chatbot several questions about traveling to New York City. The questions triggered sponsored results from multiple travel companies: Trivadvisor, Viator, American Airlines, Kayak, Furnished Quarters, CheapOair, and several lesser known booking sites.
Making Money from AI Search
Google makes billions of dollars each year from Expedia and Booking Holdings from sponsored links.
Since OpenAI released the first generative AI chatbot in 2022, there have been questions about how to continue to make money from search. Perplexity was the first AI search engine to say it was experimenting with an advertising program, which launched late last year.
It doesn’t appear that Google’s Gemini displays sponsored results — yet.
The new ads come through Google’s AdSense for Search, a service that historically allows clients to deploy a search engine on their website and earn money by displaying ads within search results. Google matches advertisers with websites to show relevant ads to users.
Google confirmed with Skift that it expanded the AdSense for Search program earlier this year to AI search engines after testing the tech with a “handful of publishers.”
Google added: “As always, we offer advertisers tools to control over where their ads run and they can choose to exclude specific sites that they don’t want their ads to run on, or opt out of the Search Partner Network altogether.”
Google did not disclose the websites it worked with, but iAsk confirmed its relationship with Google in a post on LinkedIn: “As part of early tests with Google’s AdSense for Search, iAsk was one of the first AI startups selected to explore ads within AI chat experiences.” iAsk did not respond to a request for comment.
Chicago-based iAsk was founded in 2022 and raised $4.2 million in seed funding last year. The Bloomberg article also named the startup Liner as a Google client, but questions on that engine didn’t trigger travel ads.
This comes shortly after a U.S. federal district judge ruled that Google carried out anticompetitive acts to exert monopoly power in online advertising, which some travel execs believe could benefit their companies in the long run. That ruling led the U.S. Department of Justice to propose this week that Google sell two of its ad tech products.
Staying ahead of the next wave of change.
June 4, 2025 – NEW YORK CITY