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Bing Chat, Microsoft’s latest search agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, “explores” and includes advertisements in its responses. These sponsored results are labeled as such, but it still raises the question of how far we have progressed from the first generation of search engine advertisements.
Microsoft’s official blog post today acknowledged the existence of this feature, though it is currently in its experimental stages. The necessary information may be found at the end, following “a bit of background” that explains why no one should be surprised:
We are also exploring additional capabilities for publishers including our more than 7,500 Microsoft Start partner brands. We recently met with some of our partners to begin exploring ideas and to get feedback on how we can continue to distribute content in a way that is meaningful in traffic and revenue for our partners. As we look to continue to evolve the model together, we shared some early ideas we’re exploring including:
• An expanded hover experience where hovering over a link from a publisher will display more links from that publisher giving the user more ways to engage and driving more traffic to the publisher’s website.
• For our Microsoft Start partners, placing a rich caption of Microsoft Start licensed content beside the chat answer helping to drive more user engagement with the content on Microsoft Start where we share the ad revenue with the partner. We’re also exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.
Advertising have been rumored for a few weeks, but today, Glean’s Debarghya Das tweeted a screenshot of one in the wild.
Bing Chat now has Ads!
It's going to be fascinating to see how the unit economics of Ads in language models will unfold and affect search advertising.
1/3 pic.twitter.com/o5YjRjikOP
— Deedy (@debarghya_das) March 29, 2023
Some people have mentioned that advertisements have been present since the beginning. I made a valiant effort to call one, but they don’t appear to be available for my account (yet). But plainly, this is a foreshadowing of things to come.
Let’s be honest: search engines (and, by extension, these search agents) are a business, and they need a way to make money. But I think that with all the hype about revamping search and starting fresh, we all rather expected something a little more than sponsored responses.
It’s unclear to the user what is being advertised in the example provided above. Is TrueCar selling this car and paying for placement on searches for new Hondas? Or are they merely a price comparison or reference site that pays to be Bing’s go-to source for vehicle pricing? When compared to Honda’s prices, why are these so much higher? Is Microsoft receiving compensation to exclude listings from Autotrader and Cars.com? Can the user request that they not see sponsored content?
This is not to imply that something sinister is occurring. Nevertheless, it is expected that the user will comprehend the marketing message. Ads are easy to spot because they have a small box surrounding them and appear first in search results, which we’ve learned to analyze. It’s not necessary to agree with someone or anything before you can learn about it and use that knowledge to interact (or not) with them wisely.
A better “meta-conversation,” if you will, a little thought bubble to the side of the chat with its citations and, if they exist, its ads, would be fantastic in this situation. The answer itself shouldn’t be changed, but you could add a few useful links and a “If you’re looking to buy a new HR-V, 3 were just listed at TrueCar.” to the metacontext (ad).
The more serious downside is that these advertisements can’t be prevented using any of the methods now available. However, this does not mean that they cannot be stopped; it is easy to imagine a version of uBlock Origin that replaces chatbot responses that have been identified as advertisements with a request for a different response. But the era of commercials being treated as static, unchanging objects placed in clearly delineated spaces is coming to an end.
On the one hand, that’s nice! Everyone despises advertisements, but they’re a necessary evil for keeping websites online (including this one). It’s a new kind of advertising that might not be as obvious or easy to ignore because of its subtlety or subversion.
Even with “ad” labels, trust might be slowed or eroded if the user starts to wonder if the chatbot was paid to say what it said. You have to question the companies’ integrity when dealing with them. Why shouldn’t they have a tier of ads that don’t get labeled but still have an effect on the rankings? It’s par for the course in the advertising world.
Although no one expects Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and the rest to run these costly and computation-hungry language models out of the goodness of their hearts (if there is any goodness in them), it would be lovely to see some consideration given to how advertising may be properly incorporated.
The obvious option, which happens to be quite similar to one you employed in the past, is not necessarily the best when the entire model is changing. By going along with it, the corporation risks revealing its true priorities, which could cause doubt and mistrust.
