Google adds AI previews and sports feeds to Search and Discover

Google just gave users the power to collapse ads on Search, but it is not quite the ad-free paradise you might hope for.

Alongside this curious advertising tweak, Google rolled out a batch of AI updates to Search and Discover aimed at condensing trending news and sports.

The vanishing ads that follow you

The biggest visual shift in Search is a new "Hide sponsored results" button. Tap it, and the ads crowding the top of your search results page will neatly collapse out of view.

A matching button works for text ads grouped at the bottom of the page, where Google continues to cap groups at four ads. Desktop and mobile users will see this across Google, with Shopping ads getting rebranded as "Sponsored Products."

There is a clever catch, though. Collapsing the ads removes the text, but the "Sponsored Results" header pins itself to the top of your screen as you scroll down. In practice, the ad slot becomes a persistent banner.

Google also confirmed that these sponsored headers can now sit either directly above or right below AI Overviews, cementing their position around automated answers.

Bite-sized feeds for Discover and sports

Beyond ads, Google is deploying AI to summarize web content before you even click.

In the Google app's Discover feed, an upgraded AI feature now presents brief previews of trending topics. You can expand each preview to read more context and click outbound links to publishers. It is currently live in the U.S., South Korea, and India.

Meanwhile, sports fans in the U.S. will soon see a "What's new" button when searching for athletes or teams on mobile. Tapping it surfaces a dedicated feed of trending developments and related news articles.

Why it matters

Google is walking a tightrope between keeping users hooked with quick summaries and keeping advertisers happy. We think the collapsible ad design is remarkably crafty: giving users a feeling of control while actually keeping the sponsor branding glued to the screen throughout the scroll.

For regular users, the AI previews in Discover and the one-tap sports feeds make catching up on the fly genuinely faster. You do not have to dig through ten different links just to see why a player is trending.

Yet for publishers, this is another double-edged sword. Google claims these snippets connect readers to a wider range of creators, but media outlets are already reeling from traffic drops caused by AI Overviews. If Google keeps polishing these AI-generated previews, fewer people will ever need to leave the feed, accelerating Google's transformation into a closed content portal.