Adthena, an ad-intelligence vendor, counted roughly 175,100 paid placements across Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode for U.S. users between June and September, and most sat in two categories: apparel and consumer electronics. Search Engine Journal covered the vendor’s holiday report on Thursday. For retail advertisers heading into peak season, the split shows where Google’s AI answers are already carrying ads.
Apparel accounts for approximately 111,000 of those placements and consumer electronics for about 55,000. Travel follows at roughly 6,500, beauty at about 2,100, and toys and games at around 685. Adthena merged the two Google surfaces into one tally, so the report cannot tell you which surface did the work.
The same report puts ChatGPT at 204,489 ad placements across the same five categories and months. Apparel led there too, at 90,517, followed by consumer electronics at 56,569 and travel at 48,134. Toys and games reached 4,694 and beauty 4,575. Travel is the notable gap: it is a minor category in Google’s AI answers but a large one in ChatGPT.
Treat the numbers as a vendor’s observations. Adthena sells monitoring for both Google and ChatGPT ads, and the report closes by pitching a trial of its ChatGPT product. The report records where ads appeared. It does not track clicks, spend, or conversions on either surface, so it says nothing about whether the placements paid off.
Google advertisers have no separate buy to manage here. Per Google’s help page on ads in AI-powered experiences, Performance Max, Shopping, and Search campaigns already running are automatically eligible. Advertisers cannot aim at a single AI surface, and cannot leave those placements without leaving Search itself. Negative keywords and brand exclusions remain available.
That has a reporting consequence. Google folds queries that triggered ads in those two surfaces into its standard Search reporting, so those searches sit mixed into your search terms report. Teams that want to isolate AI-answer performance have no native split to lean on.
Adthena also tallied how frequently AI Overviews showed up, comparing August 2025 with August 2026. U.S. appearances rose from 304 million to 575 million, an 89 percent increase. The UK and EU rose 160 percent and Australia 536 percent. The report gives no detail on the underlying queries and does not say if they matched in both years, which limits how far the comparison can be pushed.
The ChatGPT data carries its own caveats. The advertiser counts rose from 1,082 in June to 3,741 in July and 6,333 in August, and Adthena projected the September figure. The report does not name the markets it covered or confirm that it watched the same markets and queries throughout. OpenAI also widened ChatGPT Ads during the window, announcing 31 European countries on August 18 and a rollout to seven more Asian markets on September 23, so growth partly reflects reach.
Prompt type varied by category. Adthena defines research and discovery queries as “people comparing or asking what’s best rather than naming a product.” Those queries carried 83 percent of beauty ads, 69 percent of travel, and 67 percent of toys and games. Apparel sat at 48 percent and consumer electronics at 42 percent. The report does not explain how it categorized prompts.
The data is also dated. Google began multi-turn ads in the U.S. on October 28, letting ads appear on follow-up queries in AI Mode, and said AI Mode ads are scaling to ten more countries. OpenAI’s October 21 announcement took ChatGPT Ads to 89 countries. None of that, or Black Friday, is in Adthena’s September cutoff.
Apparel and electronics teams should check now how much of their Search and Performance Max spend is already serving in AI answers, and set brand exclusions before holiday budgets peak.
Search Engine Journal, “Ads In Google AI Answers Concentrate In Apparel & Electronics” by Matt G. Southern, published November 5, 2026, reporting on Adthena’s Holiday AI Paid Search Report.
