A significant shift. Google is now placing ads inside the AI answer rather than beside it, and the ad is judged against the response the model generates, not just the query someone typed. What stands out is that the groundwork hasn't changed. The same things that have always separated strong accounts still decide this: clean conversion data, a CRM connected to the ad platform, and pages that genuinely answer the question. The format is new. The fundamentals are not.

This is the development worth watching most closely. AI search doesn't answer the question as asked — it breaks it into eight to twelve smaller ones, answers each, and synthesizes the result. Profound's analysis shows the engines even append their own modifiers, like "best" and the current year. The striking part: most of the sources that get cited don't rank on page one for the original query. Ranking for a single keyword isn't the game anymore. Covering the full set of questions behind it is.