- By Alex David
- Mon, 27 Oct 2025 12:01 AM (IST)
- Source:JND
Apple is continuing its push to bring more advertising to the iOS platform, with a new report suggesting that the company's iAds programme has started work on generating ad segments for deployment throughout the Maps app. The move is “gaining traction” inside Apple, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his most recent Power On newsletter — meaning that there seems to be some internal momentum behind an effort to pull in more ad revenue from the company’s mobile ecosystem.
The plan would enable businesses—with an emphasis on restaurants and other service providers—to pay for their listings to be more prominently displayed in search results in Apple Maps. According to the report, that would be similar to how it currently allows developers to pay for top placement when users go searching in the App Store for apps relevant to a specific user search. By taking this format and applying it to Maps in a similar way, Apple is potentially creating another type of promoted search slot for businesses (and one that would appear to be quite high up especially for local searches): literally turning map searches into monetisable real estate.
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What differentiates Apple from rivals is how it places ads and delivers results through AI. Instead of just serving the highest bidder or a generic promoted result, Apple is reportedly more interested in providing relevant and contextually aware directions, maintaining simplicity and making sure that it presents useful information for users. This integration of AI potentially could serve to make ads less interruptive, presenting them as assistive help rather than marketing messages in order to distinguish Apple’s Maps ad strategy from those offered by Google and its other competitors.
But as Gurman points out, Apple also runs the risk of consumer backlash. People have come to appreciate iOS for its privacy-friendly design, with little advertising intrusion, and broadening paid placements within Maps will likely provoke criticism. The company will have to find a middle ground between monetisation and ruining the user trust and experience, which has always been its strength with iOS.
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If executed effectively, this push could have the potential to hugely increase Apple’s services-based revenues and at the same time turn a navigation tool like Maps into a business model in itself. The new timeline for the rollout remains fuzzy, although momentum inside Facebook suggests it could arrive in the very near future.
The move highlights how Apple is becoming more aggressive in its use of AI and the broader ecosystem to grow its ad business — while also trying to maintain that differentiator — and it comes as other competing platforms are powering up their own ad businesses.