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Shoppers are adding to cart for the holidays

Over the next year, Roku predicts that 100% of the streaming audience will see ads. For growth marketers in 2026, CTV will remain an important “safe space” as AI creates widespread disruption in the search and social channels. Plus, easier access to self-serve CTV ad buying tools and targeting options will lead to a surge in locally-targeted streaming campaigns.

Read our guide to find out why growth marketers should make sure CTV is part of their 2026 media mix.

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Google is Finally Monetizing AI Overviews, and It's A Huge Deal

Last month, I got the chance to interview BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu about Google’s winning moves in the AI search space. ICYMI, here’s the writeup in FastCompany.

Today, though, Jim’s people emailed me with another new and impactful piece of research about Google: The search engine is apparently beginning to monetize AI Overviews.

That’s a huge deal. SEOs and marketers have long wondered how Google planned to make money from its expense, snazzy new AI features. And consumers were probably wondering (or should have wondered, anyway) why they were getting all this powerful AI for free.

Well, as the old saying goes: “If you’re not paying for a product, then you’re the product”

Indeed, that seems to be true with Google’s approach to monetizing its AI features. Yu observed—and I independently verified—that Google now appears to be using its LLMs to deeply understand user queries, and then serve relevant ads that appear in-line with AI Overview text.

Crucially, they’re doing this for both informational and commercial queries.

It’s essential to understand how the new ads will work—but also what they reveal about the things marketers and SEOs need to do now in order to get their products into AI Overviews (both paid and organic).

Here’s a full writeup I just did on Medium: