Apple's ad business used to be an App Store footnote. In iOS 27 it's growing a camera. MacRumors found code in the iOS 27 betas on September 10 that lets Visual Intelligence show sponsored results: point the iPhone at something you might buy, and a search provider can slot paid product tiles in beside the organic ones.
The structure matters more than the tile. Per MacRumors, the code has Apple opening the space to the providers it already hands shopping queries to, Google Image Search, Amazon, Etsy, and Anthropologie among them, rather than selling the placement itself. Google already sells sponsored images in its own results; the change would let those ride into Apple's camera view. How money moves between the two isn't in the code.
None of it is live. It's a code path in a developer beta, and Apple hasn't said a word.
But the surrounding year makes the direction hard to misread: App Store search went from one sponsored slot to several on March 3, first in the UK and Japan and then everywhere Apple sells ads, and Maps started showing labeled ads in the US and Canada at the end of August with no toggle to hide them.
The practical read is smaller than the headline. Visual Intelligence's shopping results are already a retail panel, so a sponsored tile lands inside something that was never Apple's own index. What changes is the feel of the camera, the one surface that still read as a viewfinder, not a storefront. It's the same Visual Intelligence that gated Split Bill behind a waitlist in the iOS 27 beta 1 hands-on, and the ad code got there before some of the features did.
