Google will start telling searchers when an ad’s images or video were built or edited with artificial intelligence. The disclosure, delivered through a new My Ad Center panel called How this ad was made, will determine which advertisers get an automatic transparency label and which ones decide for themselves. That distinction, not the disclosure feature itself, is what search and PPC teams should track before it reaches their accounts.
Search Engine Land reported on July 9 that the panel sits behind an ad’s three-dot menu or its info icon, and that Google confirmed the rollout is global across Search, YouTube, and Discover. In some markets, depending on local disclosure rules, the label surfaces on the ad face itself rather than behind that menu.
Google will auto-populate the disclosure whenever advertisers use its own generative AI ad tools, the company said. Advertisers who build creative with third-party AI tools instead keep control over whether to disclose that use, though local requirements can still force an on-ad label regardless of their choice.
That split creates a quiet incentive. An advertiser using Google’s native AI ad tools gets consistent, automatic labeling with no compliance judgment call to make. An advertiser using an outside AI tool has to decide, ad by ad and market by market, whether disclosure is required, then apply it manually. For agencies running creative through a mixed toolset, that is now a workflow decision with legal exposure attached, not a stylistic one.
Google said its existing ad policies are not changing. Ads must still clearly identify who is behind them and what they are promoting, whether or not AI touched the creative, and misleading or deceptive ads remain prohibited either way. Google already embeds imperceptible SynthID watermarks in content made with its own generative AI tools, and since 2023 it has required election advertisers to flag any synthetic or manipulated imagery inside political ads.
The announcement includes no data on how many current ads would trigger the new label, so the near-term scale of the disclosure is unclear. What is clear is who carries the compliance risk. Google’s own tools produce a paper trail by default. Everything else depends on the advertiser noticing.
Teams running generative AI creative through anything other than Google’s native ad tools should audit which live ads would trigger a market-specific AI label and confirm their review process catches it before an enforcement action, or a regional regulator, does it for them.
Search Engine Land reported Google’s AI ad disclosure rollout on July 9, 2026, citing the company’s own announcement.
