The news: Data and market intelligence company Similarweb announced AI Ads on Monday, a data set that purports to offer a competitive analysis of ads in conversational AI environments like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews (AIOs).

Why it matters: AI Ads highlights a key challenge marketers face in advertising across AI environments: A lack of visibility into the context in which their ads appear.

• Advertisers are still unable to specifically target which AIOs they appear in or why, as Google itself decides which search ads to insert into this inventory.
• Marketers experimenting with ChatGPT’s current ad pilot have limited visibility into where their ads appear and the context that triggers them.
• There is still no definitive way to track AI visibility across platforms; marketers are navigating a quickly changing landscape marked by fragmented tracking methods, little standardization, and opaque algorithms that often do not clearly explain why certain content or ads are surfaced.

That lack of transparency is especially problematic as ads proliferate in AI: Similarweb notes that 26% of ChatGPT responses currently contain sponsored ads, while close to 30% of eligible AI Mode queries show ads. It’s also notably different to the major ad channels that AI platforms are looking to rival, as marketers can already turn to public ad databases on established platforms, such as Meta’s Ad Library and Google’s Ads Transparency Center for non-AI inventory.

Implications for marketers: Similarweb’s AI Ads shows marketers’ need for solutions that offer a clearer view into an increasingly opaque advertising channel, as they look for simpler ways to understand where ads appear, what drives those placements, and how they compare with competitors.

The tool could potentially help marketers hesitant to test a relatively unproven format make more informed budget decisions—greater transparency could make AI advertising feel less like a black box and give marketers more confidence to shift spend into the channel.

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