Google is rolling out a series of changes to its Search and Discover pages, the company shared across multiple announcements. The updates will bring new AI-powered features to these key destinations, while also improving navigation and allowing users to collapse ads on Google Search.
Given that ads are Google’s primary cash cow, the latter initially seems like a more surprising change. The feature will now allow users browsing Google’s Search results to tap a new button, “Hide sponsored results,” to collapse the ads at the top of the search results page.
However, while this action will remove the ads from displaying on the screen, sponsored results are not going away entirely. Instead, Google notes that the “Sponsored Results” label will remain at the top of the screen as you scroll down. In a way, this makes the ads more prominent as they can follow you down the page, even though they’re collapsed.
Plus, Google says that the “Sponsored results” header can appear both above and below AI Overviews — the short AI-written summaries that appear at the top of search results to provide quick answers. The “Sponsored results” header for text ads will also appear at the bottom of the page, with all text ads grouped under the label. These can be collapsed with the same “Hide sponsored results” button if you want to focus on organic content.
Google says the new design makes it easier for people to navigate to the top of the page, and it keeps the size of ads the same, with users never seeing more than four text ads in a group.
The new “Sponsored” label will show up in other places across Google, too, including Shopping ads, where it will be branded as “Sponsored Products.”
The updates will roll out across desktop and mobile.
The company is also making other changes across Search and Discover. When searching for sports information, like looking up players or teams, you’ll now see a new “What’s New” button that displays a feed of trending updates and news articles that could help you catch up with the latest. This will roll out to Google Search in the U.S. in the weeks ahead.
Meanwhile, the Google app’s Discover feed on mobile will introduce an AI-powered feature that also helps you keep up with trending topics you’re interested in. Here, the app will display short previews that you can expand to see more information, plus other links to explore. The company says this feature is designed to help users stay up to date on stories from a variety of publishers, but it also comes at a time when publishers are seeing their search traffic decline due to the shift to AI-provided answers and consumers’ changing media habits.
This latter feature is rolling out now to the U.S., South Korea, and India.