• by Laurie Sullivan , 7 hours ago

Google has updated image-generation functions in Google Ads, releasing Nano Banana Pro and making it available to advertisers globally for free in Asset Studio and other Google properties.

The company announced the "Nano Banana Pro" edition Thursday. For advertisers, it means an update for advanced creative and editing and image generation in Google Ads.

The update is intended to benefit advertisers through creative and editing features, to help reduce budgets and turn imaginative concepts into images in less time.

Google also rolled out the upgrade to Workspace customers in Google Slides and Vids.

Nano Banana Pro uses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) built on Gemini 3, which the company made public on Wednesday, to support advertisers.

The model's features accelerate the creation of high-quality content that can potentially also lead to improved ad performance.

Image-generation tools like Google Nano Banana Pro are an integral part of the creator economy that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) forecasts in the U.S. will reach $37 billion in 2026 in the U.S., growing 4x faster than the overall media industry.

The estimates were released in the IAB's 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report today, showing a surge in advertising spend.

Creators have increasing influence over consumer purchase decisions. While 43% of brands participating in the IAB study said they leverage creator campaigns for awareness, the study found 32% use it to drive online sales.

The model supporting Google's Nano Banana Pro technology has the ability to generate complex, professional-grade images in less than 10 seconds, and some processing can take less than a second, according to Google's estimates.

Conversational text editing and the ability to add multiple products in one scene are some of the advanced features that have been added.  Advertisers prompt Nano Banana Pro with the edits they want to make to an uploaded asset, and the new model rapidly creates seasonal variations and tests new creative concepts without starting from scratch.

Advertisers can highlight products with greater detail and photo-realistic accuracy because Nano Banana Pro now renders complex textures.

Google has also added a verification tool for generating images in AI. All media generated by Google’s tools is embedded with its SynthID digital watermark.

Creators can now upload an image into the Gemini app and ask whether it was generated by Google AI. Google has started this process with images, but soon plans to expand to audio and video.

In addition to SynthID, Google will add a visible watermark in the image that the company calls "Gemini sparkle" for all images generated by Google AI Pro tier users. This will make Google AI-generated images easy to detect.

Google, however, did remove the visible watermark from images generated by Google AI Ultra subscribers and within the Google AI Studio developer tool.