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This is the transcript of a chat I just had with Google AdWords tech support. It seemed like a pretty straightforward advertiser question, but it wasn't covered by their scripts, so I ended up with a not very helpful conversation.

Thank you for contacting Google AdWords. Please hold a moment while we route your chat to a specialist who will help you with your question:

"I've noticed that metacrawlers like Dogpile, Metacrawler and the like aggregate both organic and paid search listings. If a Dogpile searcher clicks on a result that is actually an AdWords ad that I've placed, will I be charged for that click? Does that mean that metacrawler sites are in your network, or are they basically throwing you guys some free business?".

(Auto-generated text removed to protect your sanity)

Claire: The ads that appear in the AdWords section and the Google search results are separate and unrelated. It is possible that a website will appear in both sections. Is that what you are referring to, Mitch?

I'm thinking: [Hello? Hello? Anybody there?]

Mitch Speers: no, i understand the difference between organic and paid listings on SERPs. I'm specifically interested in metacrawlers like Dogpile.com. Since they aggregate and return a mix of results from a lot of search engines, including Google, and some of those results are actually paid listings. By contrast, if a user searches on AOL search, they will see my paid adwords ad, and I KNOW I pay for that [click]. But I don't think Dogpile works with Google that way

Claire: The Dogpile website is in our search network, meaning that the ads shown on that website are paid for. I am not sure I understand your question correctly, does that answer it Mitch?

I'm thinking: [OK, we seem to be getting somewhere. Maybe I'll get to the bottom of this]

Mitch Speers: yes, it does in fact. It's confusing because the ads are not separately presented on Dogpile but all mixed up with organic results, though they are flagged as "sponsored by". Is there any way to get a listing of the top sites in your network? It would be really helpful

Claire: Excuse me, it appears that the listings on the Dogpile website are from the Google search results, not AdWords.
There is no way to request the top spots since placement is automatically determined by the AdWords ad ranking system. AdWords ads that appear in the first, second, or third positions above search results rank the highest among AdWords ads. Ad Rank is determined by the maximum cost-per-click (CPC) and Quality Score of the matching keyword.

I'm thinking: [Um, yeah. That canned explanation of Ad Rank was just what I needed to clear everything up]

Mitch Speers: OK. I'm not requesting top spots, i'm just wondering where you distribute my AdWords ads

Claire: To view examples of where your ads display in the search and content networks, please click on this link: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6712.

At that point, I thanked Claire for her time. I knew she wouldn't give me a list of sites where Google ads are distributed, but I had to take a shot. Nevertheless, I didn't get an answer to my main question, which was "Do I pay for clicks on ads that are scraped into the results page of metacrawlers like Dogpile?". Anybody out there know?