Quick facts
- Google is adding ads inside AI Mode, its conversational search, in Malaysia.
- Malaysia is one of 10 new markets in the rollout; Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom are planned for later this quarter.
- Google announced the expansion on 28 October 2026.
- It comes as Alphabet reports 12% growth in Google Search and other revenue for the quarter, its slowest of 2026.
Google is placing advertisements inside the answers its AI Mode writes for people searching in Malaysia. In a post on its advertising blog on 28 October, the company said it is expanding ads in AI Mode to 10 new markets and named Malaysia among them, alongside Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom are planned for later this quarter.
AI Mode is the chat-style version of Google search, where the page returns a written answer to a question instead of a list of links. The ads appear within or alongside that answer, marked as sponsored, in the same space as the answer the reader came for.
The expansion lands at a telling moment for Google's business. Alphabet, its parent, told investors on the same day that its Google Search and other division brought in US$63.35 billion in the three months to September, up 12% on a year earlier. That is its slowest growth in that line of 2026: the same measure rose 19% in the first quarter and 17% in the second, on Alphabet's own figures. On the results call, chief business officer Philipp Schindler said the rise of AI Mode was one factor, "because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode." Alphabet has pointed to "lower monetization" in AI Mode, without quantifying it or naming what it is lower than.
Google is making the case to advertisers that those longer AI searches are worth paying for. The company says queries in AI Mode run about three times longer than a normal search, which tells it more about what the person actually wants, and that in its own United States tests the click rate on sponsored product listings is already close to the rate on unpaid ones. It is also trialling "multiturn" ads in the United States, which can appear as a reader asks follow-up questions within the same conversation.
For a Malaysian shopper, the practical change is that the tidy AI summary can now sit alongside paid placements, labelled as sponsored and, Google says, kept separate from the AI's own answer rather than shaping it. We have tracked how Google's AI has been reaching Malaysian users in our earlier coverage of its Gemini 4 Argon model and of Gemini scam detection in Google Messages. The ads already run in the United States; this expansion adds Malaysia in the same wave as nine other new markets.
What Google has not said is how much less AI Mode earns per search, or how many Malaysian searches already run through it rather than the old page of links. Those are the figures that would show how much this really changes for Malaysian searches, and neither is public yet.
