Ads may be coming to Apple Maps next year

If you think Apple Maps’ job is to offer an unbiased guide to the streets, buildings, and businesses in a given part of the world, you may need to wise up. Because Apple is expected to sell prominent positions in its search rankings as soon as next year, according to a new report.

Three years ago, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple was mulling a plan to bring more advertising to iOS. This could include Apple Books and Podcasts, he said, along with a cheaper tier of Apple TV+. But the first priority was Apple Maps. According to the latest edition of Gurman’s Power On newsletter, that plan is close to fruition. There is now an expectation, he says, that the ads could start appearing “as early as next year.”

The idea is that running a search for “restaurants” or “Mexican food” or “shoe repair” or whatever will produce the same list you currently see, organised according to Apple’s criteria of relevance, proximity, rating and so on. But one or more prominent slots at the top will be given over to paying advertisers, just as is currently the case when you search on the App Store. (And when you search on Google Maps, of course. Apple won’t be the first to make this move.)

For an idea of how this currently works, I just searched the App Store for “Map,” and the organic top five for me were Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps, Google Earth, and Citymapper. But the very top spot was taken by a less well-known app which would otherwise appear (and still does appear) at 10th spot in the list. The fact that this is a paid slot is indicated by a pale blue background color and a tiny “Ad” label under the name of the app.

As Gurman observes, Apple is likely to see pushback from customers when ads land on Maps, just as it did when they appeared in News and Stocks back in 2022, or when iMovie started showing ads for Final Cut Pro, or when viewers started spotting Apple products given prominent positions in TV+ shows. One would have thought the company makes enough money from sales of premium hardware and its cut of app revenue, and wouldn’t need to turn everything into an ad. But the pushback didn’t change Apple’s mind before, and it would be naive to expect this time to be any different.