Google’s Gemini AI assistant does not have ads today, but the company has “very good ideas for native ad concepts” on the platform, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the company’s revenue call with analysts and investors.

Google will lead with the user experience. Options will come in time, but not likely in 2025.

Today, users can access Gemini for free or pay for a subscription to use advanced features. Pichai appeared to indicate that this will change in the future for its Gemini multimodal model.

The discussion was sparked by a question about the future of monetization for Gemini by a Wells Fargo analyst.

Google said it would focus on offering a free and paid version of Gemini. The platform competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Gemini powers search in AI Overviews, which is available in more than 100 countries. Circle to Search drives additional search use, and it is running in more than 200 million devices.

The company said these platforms and others like Lens are expanding commercial opportunities for brands.

“2025 will be one of the biggest years for search innovation,” Pichai said.

For example, Gemini 2.0 was built with the view of developing more Agent use cases, Pichai said. It expands the opportunity in the space.

People shop more than 1 billion times daily across Google. Last December, Google saw more than 13% active daily users across a rebuilt Google Shopping platform in the U.S. compared with 2023.

The company reported that it ended 2024 with an advertising run rate of $110 billion.

AI Overviews ads are monetized at about the “same rate,” as ads in traditional Google Search, rather than cannibalize revenue.

Project Mariner is a reasoning model that can complete tasks on browsers, and Project Astra is a research prototype of a universal AI assistant that can understand the physical world. Both will come to Gemini later this year.

“Part of the reason we are so excited about the AI opportunity is we can drive extraordinary use cases because the cost of actually using it will keep coming down to make more use cases feasible, and that’s the opportunity,” Pichai said.

What is the future of monetization for Gemini other than a subscription model? CEO Sundar Pichai touched on future plans for a revenue model during Google’s earnings call with analysts and investors on Tuesday.