Bel Lloyd: Why are ads starting to look almost identical to organic search results?
By Bel Lloyd, Customer Success Lead, Amperity
Why are ads starting to look almost identical to organic search results?
It’s a deliberate design choice. Google has been steadily narrowing the visual gap between paid and organic results for years, removing the coloured “Ad” box, matching fonts, and aligning layout so that paid listings slot ‘naturally’ into the page. The goal is to reduce the moment of hesitation users feel when they spot a traditional ad.
For advertisers, that changes the game. Winning in paid search today isn’t just about outbidding competitors on keywords. It’s about writing ads that genuinely match what people are looking for. Quality Score, ad relevance, and landing page experience all feed into whether your ad shows up and what you pay for it. Brands that treat paid search as a blunt spending tool are going to get outpaced by ones that build their targeting around a unified view of who their best customers actually are.
Has the line between paid and organic results become too blurred for the average user?
Honestly, for most people, yes. Eye-tracking studies have shown that users’ scanning behaviour has adapted to the current SERP format. They’re not looking for disclosure labels, they’re just looking for the most relevant result. The “Sponsored” tag gets ignored the same way banner ads do.
For advertisers, that’s actually a good thing, up to a point. It means a well-crafted paid listing gets evaluated on merit, not dismissed on sight. But it also means there’s nowhere to hide. If your ad copy, landing page, or offer doesn’t reflect what you actually know about that customer, including their history, their preferences, their stage in the relationship with your brand, they will bounce just as quickly as they clicked.
Is the small ‘Sponsored’ label enough disclosure when everything else mirrors organic results?
Technically yes, ethically it’s a stretch. The “Sponsored” label is small, greyed out, and positioned in a way that most users skip right past. Compare that to how TV or print ads announce themselves, and there’s a clear asymmetry. Regulators in some markets are starting to take notice, with the UK’s ASA and the EU both scrutinising online ad disclosure standards.
For advertisers, the more pressing question is whether the blending actually helps them. Click-through rates may be higher, but if users feel misled when they land on a page that doesn’t match their intent, that damages brand trust. The brands getting this right are the ones using what they know about their customers, drawn from real purchase history and behaviour across channels, to serve ads that feel relevant rather than random.
What does this mean for businesses ranking organically but sitting underneath multiple ads?
It’s a real problem, and mobile makes it worse. On a smartphone, four paid placements above the fold can mean a strong organic result doesn’t appear until a user scrolls past everything. For brands that have invested heavily in SEO, that feels like shifting goalposts. Because it is.
The practical response is to treat paid and organic as complementary rather than competing. Owning both the paid and organic result for a high-intent keyword isn’t wasteful. It reinforces credibility and captures clicks from users at different stages of their decision. The brands doing this well tend to be the ones with a clear, unified picture of their customers: who they are, where they are in their journey, and what they are likely to do next. That kind of foundation lets you spend where it actually matters.
Are businesses effectively being pushed to pay just to compete?
In competitive categories like insurance, finance, retail and travel, yes, effectively. Organic alone won’t get you above the fold. CPCs have climbed significantly across most commercial verticals over the past five years, and the introduction of Performance Max campaigns has given Google more control over where and how ads appear, which makes it harder for advertisers to manage costs tightly.
The businesses that manage this well tend to be the ones with a clear view of their customer lifetime value, built from data that spans online and offline behaviour, not just last-click attribution. If you know what a converted customer is worth over 12 months, you can make a rational decision about what to bid and avoid the trap of optimising purely for cheap clicks that don’t convert. Paid search doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom if you’re measuring the right things.
Is this an intentional design strategy by Google to increase click-through rates?
Let’s call it what it is: yes, and it’s been working. Google’s own earnings reports show search advertising revenue has grown even as overall search volume flattens, which points to higher ad prices and better click yields rather than more searches. Removing visual friction between ads and organic results is one of the levers that makes that possible.
For advertisers, it’s worth being clear-eyed about this dynamic. Google’s incentives and yours aren’t perfectly aligned. Their system rewards spend; yours should reward outcomes. That means understanding the full conversion path, including in-store sales that never appear in your ad platform dashboard, setting bid targets that reflect real customer value, and regularly auditing where your budget is actually going. The brands pulling ahead are the ones closing that feedback loop with their own data, rather than relying on the platform to tell them what is working.
Bel Lloyd is a contributor in the Australian Martech landscape and the Customer Success Lead at Amperity, where she operates at the intersection of people, technology, and data. Recognised as the 2023 Digital Marketer of the Year (Women in Digital), Bel drives impactful growth for enterprise brands by unifying complex customer data to deliver personalised experiences and measurable business outcomes, including leading the charge in closed-loop attribution, having facilitated a first-of-its-kind industry partnership with MixIn by Endeavour Group and Criteo to bridge the gap between digital advertising and verified in-store sales. Beyond her technical leadership, Bel is a dedicated advocate for Women in Tech. She serves as a Lead Mentor in the She Codes community, empowering women to transition into technical roles, and is a frequent industry speaker on the role of diversity in fueling innovation. Through her advocacy and technical expertise, Bel continues to champion inclusion and share forward-thinking perspectives on the future of the digital economy.
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