Google is launching a “limited pilot program” allowing marijuana businesses to access its advertising platform if they’re compliant with federal law in Canada.
About seven years after Canada ended cannabis prohibition and a commercial adult-use market emerged, the tech giant announced last week that it’s testing the waters to provide the marketplace with advertising options available to other industries.
“This pilot will run on Search only, beginning Aug 25, 2025, for up to 20 weeks,” the notice, first reported by StratCann, says. “Its purpose is to explore user interest and inform potential future policy updates.”
“During the pilot, cannabis product ads may be available on Search,” Google said. “Participation in this pilot is restricted to federally licensed operators in Canada.”
The pilot program will allow Canadian cannabis businesses to reach audiences by having ads available through the company’s search engine results pages—meaning companies will be able to pay to have their ads prominently displayed to users based if they enter certain search words.
This comes almost three years after Google lifted a ban the advertising of certain hemp and CBD products in select parts of the U.S. after the cannabis crop was federally legalized.
Google faced criticism when it announced in 2019 that marijuana products would be banned from its app store, Google Play. But it seems to have eased up on that in the years since.
Sergey Brin, co-founder of the company, separately joked about supplying employees with joints at a post-election meeting in 2016.
In other tech and cannabis news, Twitter ended a federal partnership in 2022 that had presented users who searched the site for certain drug-related keywords, including “marijuana,” with a suggestion they consider entering drug treatment. No such suggestion had appeared for “alcohol” searches.
In 2019, a Facebook executive discussed how the social media giant is able to leverage visual AI to spot “policy-violating content,” including advertisements to sell cannabis on the platform.
