Online marketing in the age of generative AI

Businesses invest in all kinds of online advertising to reach their target audiences, drive traffic to their websites and social media feeds, and increase the rate at which they can convert an ‘opportunity’ into an actual customer. Companies – as well as governments, ambitious politicians and the non-profit sector – pay for a host of services with TLAs (three-letter acronyms) like search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC)advertising, not to mention social media marketing, and content creation.

Whether or not you’re a marketing expert, you know what this means as a consumer. It means the influencers you followed for expert advice become all about the brands that pay them or who just sent them the best freebies, and when you search for something using Google you have to scroll through reams of sponsored websites before you find the web page you were looking for.

Search for our own free, completely awesome MAT.engine AI assistant for schools in England and you’ll be directed to subscriber-only alternatives with entirely different names before you find our nifty little helper in the natural search results. Then there’s the unsubtle foisting of clickbait content into your timeline or onto your favourite websites, based on all those ‘legitimate interest’ cookies that were a faff-too-far to reject. And that's not a bad thing: it’s how we found a lot of stuff we were very happy to spend money on and now enjoy.

In a world where the generative AI revolution will leave no corner of the economy untouched, what will happen to all those paid-for clicks and hard-to-ignore sponsored content? We think the face of the internet – and therefore many businesses shop windows – will change for ever.

How significant could this be?

As marketing legend and advertising executive Rory Sutherland puts it, "A flower is a weed with an advertising budget". Effective marketing is how you shape perceptions and drive success.

If you’re not familiar with the world of online marketing and advertising, it's important to understand the sheer scale of the industry and what businesses are paying for. The global online advertising market is projected to reach a staggering $597.10 billion by 2034 – more than the GDP of Sweden. If it was a country, it would be the world’s 20^th largest economy. In the UK alone, retail media spend alone is expected to pass £1billion in 2025, not counting Amazon.

The good news – or bad news, if this is how your business primarily makes money – is that you probably won’t need to remember what SEO or PPC stand for. If your target market is rapidly switching to tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT Search for specific, relevant, and direct answers, you cannot buy visibility unless you are what your potential customer is looking for. You can’t force your way into a search for someone else unless you might legitimately be the answer to the question that was asked. You might come across a Dyson if you look for a hoover, but you might not find Hoover if you look for a Dyson.

You have to have a thing

By mid-2024, half of all searches already resulted in zero clicks. Solutions like ChatGPT Search have continued to improve rapidly, while DeepSeek has turned heads, and Claude keeps getting better too. September 2024 may have been the turning point. In the same month that ChatGPT overtook TikTok on visitor numbers, a survey by Planable revealed that 8% of U.S. respondents now used Chat GPT as their main search engine- up from 1% in June of the same year - while Google's share fell from 80% to74%.

Google admittedly aren’t helped by the trend for highlighting their AI search response fails, and one of our favourites is pictured here. Please don’t try this at home; you rarely need more than a dash of glue in pizza sauce.

In online marketing terms, this means AI is changing web traffic for everyone, everywhere.

The AI platforms people are using prioritise useful and reliable content over sponsored links, and we think that means business will have to create more high-quality, trustworthy information - less bumf*. You need good content, useful products and ideally some evidence of excellent service.

It’s going to be hard to get away with having nothing much of anything when you can’t just roll it in glitter.

The role of SEO in an AI era

As AI tools get more sophisticated in understanding context and user intent, marketers will need to adapt their SEO strategies. We think that means shifting towards creating comprehensive, well-structured content that addresses specific audience questions rather than simply targeting keywords.

Like a blog, maybe.

That shift could also save a few jobs: we know AI can generate high quality content and that’s reducing the demand for some content creators, but AI doesn’t easily generate unique, interesting, human content that draws on lived experience and could stand out as source material in an AI summary response.AI is rarely funny on purpose, and it has no decent anecdotes.

Content partnerships and native advertising – where paid content is weaved seamlessly into the look, feel and function of the platform where it appears – are gaining traction as alternatives to traditional paid placements. These approaches allow businesses to engage audiences more authentically and provide value beyond simple product promotion. If you revisit this blog later, find I deleted ‘Dyson’ and added ‘Miele’, you’ll know what happened.

The good news is, AI is also how we can generate better, richer content – it’s how I can find the time to create a blog like this with actual examples and stats and explanations of specialist terms that I didn’t know yesterday. I had an idea I wanted to write about based on a conversation with one of our founders, and I have Perplexity open in another window.

Targeted online adverts are not dead

“Google is dead” makes for an eye-catching tweet, but it’s a little early to hold the funeral. 2023 marked their slowest annual rise in advertising revenue in over a decade, but they still generated $237.86 billion from advertising. That was a 6% increase from the previous year and still accounted for more than three quarters of Alphabet's (Google's parent company) total revenue of $307.39 billion for 2023. They can’t have spent it all on creating Gemini, and they own YouTube, which is all about that sought-after commodity: content.

AI is also powering more precise targeting through contextual advertising and personalisation. Companies can create highly tailored ad experiences based on user behaviour and preferences, increasing engagement and conversion rates.

Trust and transparency matters

As AI tools prioritise reliable sources for all your potential customers, organisations must focus on building trust with their audience. This involves being transparent about things like data usage, having a real answer to what you’re doing about sustainability or social value, and maintaining ethical standards.

We're still not safe from aggressive social media advertising and those pesky algorithms that drag us into unintended online rabbit holes. But a couple of years ago, your quality content would've been drowned out by competitors with deeper pockets but less to say. In 2025, if you're doing good stuff, generative AI search is one heck of an opportunity.

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*I didn't realise quite how uniquely British-English this word was until it was underlined as a spelling error in US-English, so apologies if it's lost in translation. For the uninitiated, it's a shortening of 'bum fodder' - two equally excellent words. It means written or printed material that is perceived as useless, tedious, or unnecessary, particularly advertising or corporate literature.

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