Last month, OpenAI said it would begin showing ads in the free version of ChatGPT, based on what people were asking the chatbot and what they had looked for in the past.

In response, a Google executive mocked OpenAI, adding that Google had no plans to show ads inside its Gemini chatbot. What he didn’t mention, however, was that Google, whose profits are largely derived from online ads, shows advertising on Google.com based on user interactions with the A.I. chatbot built into its search engine.