Official: Google is rolling out green “Ad” label globally

Yellow is out, green is in for text ads in Google search results.

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In April, Google users in many countries began seeing green “Ad” labels instead of yellow ones next to text ads in Google search results.

In the last week, more and more users have reported seeing the green labels. On Wednesday, Google confirmed with Search Engine Land that the switch is officially no longer a test and the green labels are rolling out to all users.

“We regularly test ways to improve the look and feel of our search results page. We’ve been experimenting with a green search ad label and have decided to roll it out based on positive feedback from users and advertisers. Our goal is to make our results page easy to use, and our labeling clear and prominent,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.

Here’s a look at the green label on mobile:

google green ad label rolling out

Here’s what the yellow label looked like on another search:google-uk-yellow-adsIt would seem using the same green for the label as the display URL would make it easier to miss, but Google says it studied whether the change in color had any impact on users being able to distinguish paid and organic listings and found none, which it says was the goal.

Whichever color, it should be noted that Google’s “Ad” label is more visible than the demarcations by Yahoo, Bing and the “Sponsored” labels used for ads by most social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. For a comparison, check out our most recent survey of how the search engines treat ad labeling.

Google says the green labels will roll out to all devices globally, so if you’re not seeing it yet, you soon will.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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