Google's iOS app is injecting Search links on websites
Google has added a new kind of ad that will appear as clickable texts on third-party websites. The feature, if you can call it that, is named Page Annotation.
Page Annotations are currently only available via the Google app on iOS. The company says that it will "extract interesting information from Google Knowledge Graph entities and highlight them in line". A user clicking on the text ad will be shown more information about people, places or things without leaving the site they are on.
The change was announced on the Google Search community forums, was spotted by SERoundTable. Here's a screenshot of how the ads will appear on a web page.
Certain words are highlighted, i.e. underlined like a regular link, and when interacted with, opens a pop-up with an ad relevant to the text that was annotated.
Page Annotations may sound familiar, here's why. Google had announced a new ad format called Ad Intents in Google AdSense earlier this year. This design added ads in the form of clickable links to text content on webpages. A user who clicked on the link would be taken to a page on Google Search. These ads/links did not depend on third-party cookies. One important part to note here is that this ad format was an opt-in feature, i.e. it was not enabled by default, and publishers who were interested needed to participate willingly in the program.
