Google’s expanding AI ambitions in India clash with global antitrust scrutiny Premium

Google faces mounting pressure in the U.S. over how it has wielded its dominance in the online advertising sector.

As Google rolls out a sweeping expansion of its artificial intelligence tools across search, advertising, and YouTube in India, its global ad and search business models are simultaneously under intense legal scrutiny in the U.S., raising questions about the balance between innovation and market power.

In India, Google is aggressively integrating generative AI into its advertising ecosystem to reshape how brands reach consumers. At a recent virtual media roundtable, the tech giant highlighted AI-driven advancements aimed at enhancing discovery and commerce. Google says its tools are helping advertisers achieve tangible results, with platforms like YouTube, especially on connected TVs (CTV), and Shorts becoming key to capturing consumer attention in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets.

For instance, YouTube now gets over 1 billion hours of global watch time daily, with India contributing significantly. The country’s growing preference for CTV over linear TV is pushing advertisers to adopt newer formats. Some ad campaigns on CTV are also seeing nearly 3.6x conversion rate increase. Meanwhile, YouTube Shorts is gaining traction among younger users, with 72% of Indian respondents saying Shorts ads influence their purchase decisions, Google shared during the roundtable.

Beyond video, Google Search is undergoing a transformation, too. AI Overviews powered by Gemini, Circle to Search, and Google Lens, which now handles nearly 20 billion monthly queries, are enabling more predictive and visually-driven search experiences. Google claimed that businesses are seeing results as some brands are reporting higher return on investment from their campaigns. The search giant shared that quick commerce company Zepto reduced content creation time significantly with AI-powered video tools.

Yet while these innovations promise growth for India’s digital economy, Google faces mounting pressure in the U.S. over how it has wielded its dominance in the online advertising sector.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, on April 17, ruled that Google illegally dominated two markets in the ad tech and noted that the search giant was liable for “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power” in the advertising technology business by being the middleman between buyers and sellers of ad content.

In the trial that began last August, the second one that Google lost in less than two years, the Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged that Google illegally monopolised the digital ads market through its suite of tools, including those developed by DoubleClick, a company it acquired in 2008 for $3.1 billion.