Editorial note (2026): This article records Google's mobile Search design announcement from 14 October 2022. Search interfaces change over time, so references below to “now,” desktop availability and visual treatment describe the situation at publication, not necessarily the current interface.
Google was changing the way it formatted mobile search results, the company announced on 14 October 2022. Paid results would carry a larger “Sponsored” label instead of the simple “Ad” label used before, and each website's name would be listed at the top of every search result. The “size and shape” of each website's favicon would also be updated to make it easier to see. The new search-result format was beginning to roll out on mobile, and Google said it intended to test a “similar experience” for desktop searches “soon.”
In its blog post, the company explained that the new “Sponsored” label was being introduced to ensure that “ads are clearly labeled,” with a label that was “prominent and clear across different types of paid content.” Meanwhile, displaying site names and favicons more visibly in search results was intended to make it easier to “identify the website that's associated with each result at a glance.”
Google's changes to search-result formatting had occasionally been criticized for making it more difficult to tell where paid results ended and organic results began.
The timeline in this 2019 tweet (via TechCrunch) shows how the search giant changed the formatting of sponsored desktop results over time. It gradually moved away from displaying paid results with a different background colour and toward showing them simply with a small “Ad” label on desktop.
Criticism was most intense in 2020, when Google launched a new desktop search-results design that added favicons to organic results. The problem was that these small icons were nearly the same size as the “Ad” label in paid results, making the two difficult to distinguish at a glance. Following an outcry, the company reversed the design change and said it would “experiment with new placements for favicons.”
At the time this article was written, favicons had still not been rolled out widely for desktop search results.
Google's paid results were still more difficult to distinguish than when the search giant used different coloured backgrounds, but the move from the two-letter “Ad” label to the much larger “Sponsored” label on mobile felt like a step in the right direction.
The article “Google Now Labels Ads as ‘Sponsored’ in Mobile Search Results” first appeared in Web News.
