Google Ads is testing two animated flourishes on sponsored results in Google Search: a scrolling marquee that cycles through reviews, ratings, visit counts and a visit-site link inside the ad unit, and an animated underline on the domain-name chip. Both were spotted in the wild this week by an advertiser who posted screen recordings of the tests in action.
The tests were spotted by Alex Greenland, who posted videos on X on October 22, writing that he was “seeing new experiments being trialed in Google Ads display formats today.” He said the tests were appearing for about 5% of the searches he ran.
What The Two Tests Show
In the first test, the sponsored result’s display block scrolls like a marquee: the ratings and review count, the number of visits and a “visit site” link cycle through the space the ad occupies. The second test is subtler — the domain name in the ad snippet gets an animated underline, drawing the eye to the advertiser’s address.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the tests on October 23, noting that while something about the format felt familiar, he could not find any prior coverage — the experiments appear to be new. The report includes screen recordings and GIFs of both tests: the marquee cycling reviews, ratings and visit counts, and the underline animation on the domain chip. Google has not announced the tests, and advertisers cannot opt in or out: like most format experiments, Google applies them automatically to a small share of traffic.
The ~5% prevalence figure matters because it shows Google is still in the measurement phase. At that level of traffic, Google can compare click behaviour between the test and control groups with statistical confidence, without committing to a change advertisers would need to redesign around. Whether the tests graduate depends entirely on whether the moving ads outperform static ones in those comparisons.
Why Advertisers Should Care About Moving Ads
Small format changes in sponsored results are rarely cosmetic. Click-through rate is the currency of the search results page, and anything that makes an ad unit more visually distinct from organic results — movement, ratings, visit counts — tends to shift clicks between the two columns.
For advertisers, the marquee test matters because it front-loads trust signals: a user sees ratings and a visit count before they even read the ad copy. For users, the animated underline is a clearer signal of exactly which domain the ad leads to — a small transparency improvement in a results page where sponsored and organic listings already look similar.
Tests like these also arrive in the middle of an unusually busy season for ad formats. Google recently expanded sourced videos and landing-page images in Performance Max, overhauled customer lifecycle goals with retention modes and percentage multipliers, and rolled out AI Max auto-enablement in some accounts — a reminder that the appearance of a sponsored result is now a moving target.
Why It Matters
The marquee and underline tests show where Google thinks paid clicks can still grow: not in new placements, but in richer, more animated versions of the ones that exist. An ad that moves catches the eye; an ad that shows its ratings upfront shortens the decision to click.
The flip side is familiarity fatigue. Advertisers have spent years learning what a Google ad looks like. Tests that change the visual grammar of sponsored results — scrolling elements one week, underlined domains the next — keep the auction’s most important variable, the click, unpredictable.
Background
Google tests ad format changes constantly, usually on a small percentage of searches, and most never roll out widely. When a test does graduate — like the recent Performance Max asset expansions — advertisers learn about it through a changelog entry rather than an announcement. The marquee test is currently in the earliest phase: spotted by one advertiser, confirmed by nobody else yet, and undocumented by Google.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
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