I think people who see AI search ads as a worse business than web search ads aren't thinking avariciously enough.

AI results are their own citation- and context-free reality.

If Pepsi pays Google $100M for every statistical +10% they give recommendations of Pepsi over Coke in Gemini... how would anyone ever know?

Google hasn't done that obviously yet, because they have the cash to weather the choppy PR waters around public AI perception, but once AI is normalized it's going to be trivial to turn the knob on managed models.

Especially free ones, served cost efficiently by Google's infra backend, pushed via the most widely used phone OS and browser in the world.

The monetization (and user profiling) opportunities make web tracking and ads look like kids' toys.