AI Mode ads reach 10 more countries but get no report

If you run Google Search, Shopping or Performance Max in Australia, Canada, India or seven other countries, your campaigns now buy a new placement. You did not opt in and cannot opt out, and no report shows it apart from the rest. Google announced on 28 October that ads in AI Mode now serve in 10 more countries, and that in the US they can now appear in follow-up questions as well.

What Google said

The post on Google’s Ads & Commerce blog names the 10 countries: Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. Brazil, Mexico and the UK are next, “in Q4 2026”. In the US, Google is launching multiturn ads: the ad can appear in reply to a follow-up question in an AI Mode conversation, not only the first one.

Google’s help page for these placements fills in the rules. Existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible automatically. You can’t target AI Mode alone or exclude it from Search. Two details are only in the country list: Pakistan gets text ads only, and Indonesia has ads in AI Overviews but not in AI Mode. Everything is English only.

What the reports show: nothing separate

Google’s help page says AI Overview and AI Mode results are “included in aggregate” in your campaign reports: impressions, clicks, conversions and cost. The queries that trigger them are “included in aggregate” in your search terms report as well.

We checked the four reporting fields in the Google Ads API v26 that say where an ad served or how it matched. The reference pages were updated on 28 October, the day of the announcement:

API field	Values today	An AI Mode value?
ad_network_type	SEARCH, SEARCH_PARTNERS, CONTENT, YOUTUBE, DISCOVER, GMAIL, MAPS, GOOGLE_TV, MIXED, GOOGLE_OWNED_CHANNELS	No
slot	SEARCH_TOP, SEARCH_SIDE, SEARCH_OTHER, two Search partner slots, CONTENT, MIXED	No
search_engine_results_page_type	ADS_ONLY, ORGANIC_ONLY, ADS_AND_ORGANIC	No
search_term_match_source	keyword, AI_MAX_BROAD_MATCH, AI_MAX_KEYWORDLESS, DSA, PERFORMANCE_MAX, vertical feed	No

API v26.1 shipped the same day. Its release notes add budget caps by network, a new-customer recommendation and reach frequency buckets. They say nothing about AI Mode.

Google knows how to split a surface out when it wants to. Demand Gen stats were one network value, GOOGLE_OWNED_CHANNELS, until v20, which broke them into GMAIL, DISCOVER, MAPS and YOUTUBE. AI Mode has no value of its own, so nothing in the API tells an AI Mode click apart from a click on a normal results page.

The read

Your blended Search numbers change, and the reports can’t show you why. In AI Mode, Google says, queries are on average three times longer than traditional searches. An ad matched halfway through a conversation is a different click from an ad on a short query, and it may convert at a different rate. In these 10 countries, those clicks are now mixed into campaign CTR, CPC and conversion rate with no label. A change from late October in Canada or Australia can come from the new placement and not from your bids or your creative.

Match type decides how much of it you buy. Exact and phrase keywords serve in AI Mode only when the question itself is commercial. AI Max, broad match, Shopping and Performance Max are also matched to what the AI answers, so a question about cleaning a pool can show an ad for a pool vacuum. An account run on broad match and PMax gets much more of this traffic than an exact-match account does. The gap between those two kinds of campaign is the closest thing to an AI Mode signal you will get.

Some of the words beside your ad are Google’s, not yours. In some placements, Gemini writes an “AI explainer” next to the ad from the question, the answer and your website. You cannot write, edit, approve or switch it off. If your landing page says something you would not put in an ad, it can end up next to one.

Google’s own number is not a measurement of your results. The post says click-through rates are “already similar” between sponsored and organic product listings in AI Mode, from two weeks of US data. That compares ads with the organic listings beside them. It does not say how either converts.

What to do

1. Write down 28 October as a change date for any account that runs in these 10 countries, and note the Q4 date for Brazil, Mexico and the UK when it comes.
2. Compare broad match, AI Max and PMax with exact and phrase in the affected countries, before and after. If only the first group moves, the new placement is the likely reason.
3. Read the landing pages your ads point to as Gemini would. They are now a source for text that appears next to your ad.

With no segment in the reports, the only way to know what AI Mode adds is an experiment: a holdout or a geo test that compares results with and without it. That leaves the question of how much a lift result can be trusted. Ads that do nothing get a lift result half the time tests that on Google’s own certainty measure.