What was your methodology? Are you absolutely sure you eliminated all variables that would signal to Google that you were needing whatever you were talking about? Maybe you were talking in the car with your wife about buying something, and she decided to look up prices for it on Google, which then triggered their algorithms to associating that thing-of-want with her identity, and then associated that thing-of-want with your identity since it likely knows you two are married.

Mitchollow tried to demonstrate exactly what you’re claiming with a controlled experiment where he would prove that Google would listen in to him saying “dog toys” without him clicking on or searching anything related to dog toys beforehand. What he failed to realize was that:

1. He livestreamed the whole thing to YouTube, the conspirators he claimed were listening to him in the first place, so they were already processing his speech (including him claiming his need for dog toys repeatedly) and likely correlating all of that data to his identity
2. He directly clicked on a (very likely coincidental, or due to data collected by #1) ad corresponding to his phrase of choice (“dog toys”), triggering the algorithm to exclusively show him dog toys on all other pages that used AdSense.

After these flaws were pointed out, he admitted the test was effectively worthless and retracted his claims. The point here is it’s important to eliminate all variables that could lead to confirmation bias.

I’ve had other similar stories of friends allegedly receiving ads after saying specific keywords. Probably one of the best ones to demonstrate that this entire notion is silly was an avid Magic: The Gathering player getting surprised that he received MTG ads after talking about MTG to his MTG playing friends. He was spooked out and claimed that Amazon was listening to his everyday speech.