Details of the new service first surfaced last October when the firm began testing it, and the tech giant has now officially launched it and provided more details about how the tool will work.

Users first draw up a survey which is then sent out and appears to respondents as a ‘surveywall’ when they try to access premium content, like news or videos, around the web. The publisher of the site hosting the premium content and survey is paid every time somebody completes the questionnaire.

Once the questionnaire is completed Google will aggregate and analyse responses and feed back results to the user in real time. DoubleClick cookies and the respondent’s IP address will be used to provide demographic and geographic information so that the user can segment answers by age, gender and location.

Google said: “Unlike other online survey platforms which send questionnaires to predetermined ‘panels,’ Google Consumer Surveys takes a new approach to survey sampling, data collection and post-stratification weighting. This produces a close approximation to a random sample of the US internet population and results that are as accurate as probability-based panels.”

Pricing is either $0.10 per response for the “general population” or $0.50 per response for demographic targeting.