By Vijay Malavia, Director of Digital Media, Streetlight Digital
At this year’s Google Marketing Live, Google introduced Conversational Discovery ads and Highlighted Answers. Google is turning advertising into guidance, and it matters for nonprofits. This is the third post in our series on Google's biggest search change in 25 years.
What, How, I, Is, Can are the top first words in AI Mode queries. Google's new report says, "the average AI Mode search query is triple the length of a traditional search query." These are the question-form queries Post 1's intelligent search box is engineering. AI-powered query suggestions push users to longer, more nuanced searches.
Per Google: "your ad answers a person's specific question." These ads appear from campaigns using AI-powered targeting: AI Max, PMax, or Search with Broad Match plus Smart Bidding. Exact and phrase match-only campaigns are excluded. AI Max (Google's AI-powered Search campaign type) is the most aggressive of these: it auto-enables search term matching and text customization, where Gemini generates creative on the fly.
Here's an AI Mode query: "How can I raise funds for an ALS charity this summer/fall." AI Mode pulls from 11 nonprofit sources including the ALS Association and Les Turner ALS Foundation. The ALS Association's "Walk for a World Without ALS" appears as a Sponsored ad in AI Mode: "To get started with your own fundraising team, you can register for an event like this one."
Similar to traditional search ads, these ads blend in with the organic citations: same card format, image placement, icon styling. Only the "Sponsored" label distinguishes it.
With text customization on, Gemini reads your landing page, existing ads, and search intent to generate creative in real time. Your mission, event, and program pages tell Gemini what to write. That's a show stopper for most nonprofit accounts. Medical research, veterans, advocacy, donor copy need legal review.
Google has built controls in AI Max: AI Brief for plain-English guardrails ("never use cure"), and Mandatory URL Disclaimers that lock legal language even when AI expands the landing page. The question for nonprofits is no longer whether to implement AI Max but how aggressively, and with what controls.
With a billion monthly active users and queries doubling every quarter, Google is creeping towards AI Mode as the default search experience. Monetization is the key that unlocks the gate. These ad formats are how Google figures it out before flipping the switch. OpenAI opened ChatGPT ads to all US advertisers on May 5; Google announced these formats 15 days later. When a competitor closes in, a Google product follows. Same as it ever was.
A few things we will be watching will be whether connected apps data (the layer behind Personal Intelligence) becomes an ad matching input alongside location and audience targeting. Ad Grants run in a secondary auction after paid Search clears. Whether AI Mode inventory follows that structure, or whether Ad Grants are eligible at all, isn't documented. And whether advertisers will see AI Mode performance broken out from traditional Search in reporting.
