AI Upends Digital Marketing

A seismic shift is underway in the digital realm, upending the very foundations of how businesses connect with their customers online.

For years, the Holy Grail of marketing lay in the hallowed halls of Google’s search results, where coveted top rankings promised a steady stream of eager consumers.

Businesses poured millions into intricate search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, meticulously crafting content to ensnare human eyes with a compelling link.

But those days, it seems, are rapidly becoming a relic of a bygone era, victims of an algorithmic revolution.

The culprit? Artificial intelligence, specifically the burgeoning prominence of AI-generated search summaries from titans like Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.

These intelligent systems are not merely directing users to websites; they are, in an unprecedented move, delivering answers directly, often eliminating the need for a single click.

The data is stark: a staggering 60% of searches on platforms like Google no longer culminate in a click-through, as users simply absorb the AI’s succinct summary.

This has triggered an existential crisis for digital marketers, with companies like travel site Kayak and edtech giant Chegg experiencing noticeable drops in search traffic.

One cybersecurity firm reported a 10% decline this year alone, with an executive lamenting, “The industry is really turned on its head because traditional ways of eventually SEO just don’t work anymore.”

This isn’t just a tweak; it’s a “true Game of Thrones power shift,” as James Cadwallader, cofounder and CEO of the AI SEO startup Profound, starkly puts it.

“We’re entering this inflection point where humans no longer need to visit websites on the internet… These systems are hijacking that relationship with the end user entirely.”

The battle for digital visibility has moved from the search page to the AI’s summary box, and a new breed of startups is emerging to arm businesses for this novel digital battleground.

Profound, co-founded by Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, sprung from their own realization last year that their research was increasingly conducted on AI search engines.

They quickly grasped the looming implications for businesses.

Less than a year old, Profound has already secured over $20 million in funding from heavyweights like Kleiner Perkins, Nvidia, and Khosla, valuing the company at more than $100 million.

This rapid endorsement underscores the urgency of what Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman terms a “hair on fire” problem for companies.

Profound’s approach to this brave new world, dubbed Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), is both innovative and intricate.

Serving over 100 customers, including U.S. Bank, Docusign, and Indeed, Profound’s software generates thousands of “synthetic prompts”—queries like “cheap football cleats” or “best phone for a teenager”—and feeds them into various AI search engines.

The objective is to map which brands consistently appear in the AI’s responses.

Simultaneously, the software integrates with a client’s website to monitor, in real-time, which pages are being most frequently crawled by these AI bots.

Beyond mere presence, Profound also tracks “sentiment,” identifying phrases that might carry negative connotations, thus gauging a brand’s reputation within AI-generated content.

Based on these insights, Profound offers recommendations akin to a traditional marketing agency: optimizing keywords, suggesting formatting and layout adjustments, and adding metadata specifically designed for AI scraping.

In a pioneering move, they are also leveraging AI models to generate content custom-made for bot consumption, rather than human readability.

For the cybersecurity company struggling with declining traffic, Profound is now a critical ally, helping them track competitors’ performance in AI search results and churn out content tailored for the new AI landscape.

An SEO specialist at a major job search company admitted that before Profound, they had a “blind spot” regarding their content’s presence in AI search.

“We were completely in the dark,” he confessed.

While traffic directly from tools like ChatGPT remains modest, influencing how AI discusses the brand is where the market is irrevocably headed.

Yet, influencing these mercurial AI search engines is no simple feat.

The underlying models are in constant flux, leading to ever-changing responses.

The same question can yield different answers depending on the prompt’s phrasing, timing, or even the identity of the questioner.

“That’s why there’s such value in being able to distill, disambiguate and communicate how things like ChatGPT are surfacing information to real people,” explains Keith Rabois, a partner at Khosla Ventures and a backer of Profound.

“It’s personally impossible to track on your own company’s behalf.”

Profound is not alone in this emerging frontier.

New York-based Bluefish AI, with $5 million in seed funding, assists companies across travel, pharmaceutical, and retail sectors in monitoring their appearance on Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.

CEO Alex Sherman highlights that the transformation of tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft into AI companies has served as a “wake up call” for the entire marketing industry.

While most websites are built for human eyes, the future demands optimization for large language models if businesses hope to be cited in AI responses and reach customers directly.

As OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy ominously tweeted in March, “99.9% of attention is about to be LLM attention.”

Bluefish AI offers a bird’s-eye view into AI responses, revealing surprising insights, such as Reddit being a high-ranked third-party source influencing brand perception for many of their customers.

Another contender, Athena, co-founded by Andrew Yan, formerly of Google Deepmind’s generative media team, employs its own AI search model trained on millions of data points to generate comprehensive dashboards of AI metrics, including sources, mentions, and referral rates.

Yan observes that AI search significantly broadens the scope for marketing, drawing from a much wider array of sources than traditional Google search, which typically prioritizes the top three linked websites.

Cadwallader of Profound remains remarkably optimistic about this radical shift.

He envisions AI search engines fostering a superior method for consumers to discover products and make informed decisions perfectly aligned with their preferences.

As AI systems autonomously surf the internet on behalf of shoppers, sifting through hundreds of websites to deliver curated answers, businesses are realizing they must now captivate a new, paramount “VIP customer”—the bots themselves.

“Eventually we believe in the zero-click future where consumers will only interact with the answer engine and agents will be the primary visitor of websites and it’ll be a good thing,” he predicts.

The internet is evolving, and with it, the very nature of discovery and commerce, forever altering the digital landscape for businesses and consumers alike.