Trust, transparency and AI-driven discovery

Digital advertising is still growing — projected to add over $400B before the decade is out. But that growth is masking a structural reset. Four forces are reshaping how brands get found at all: AI-driven discovery, retail media's expansion, the shift to streaming and CTV, and a widening crisis in measurement. TMA's take, drawn from EMARKETER's Ad Buyer Strategies Summit, is on the first of those: what happens to a brand's visibility when the entry point to the market stops being a single search box.

Search stops being the front door

Google, Meta and Amazon still capture roughly 75% of digital ad spend, but they are now competing with each other across funnel stages that used to be separate — Amazon is becoming a product discovery engine in its own right, Google is defending share against retail media erosion, and Meta is pushing further into late-funnel commerce.

The clearest signal of the shift: in 2026, Google's share of total search ad revenue is projected to dip below 50% for the first time. Discovery now routes through retail platforms, social feeds, streaming environments and AI interfaces — not one dominant channel a brand can simply optimize for.

AI adoption is outpacing everything — but not where you'd think

ChatGPT became a top-5 global website in under two years, and AI usage is forecast to reach 23 minutes a day per US adult by 2027, with AI expected to influence 14% of ecommerce by 2029. That's the fastest platform shift in consumer behavior on record.

But the money isn't where the hype is. 82.5% of AI-related ad spend today sits in AI-adjacent Google search ads and emerging "AI mode" search environments — not chatbot ads, which stay a small segment (~8%) even by 2030. Real-world conversion is lagging the technology, largely on trust and logistics.

What LLMs actually reward

This is the part that should worry — or motivate — every brand's marketing team directly: traditional media metrics don't translate. LLMs prefer organic sources — influencers, reviews, independent web content — over anything that reads as paid placement. There's also a strong regional bias in what gets surfaced (US-heavy today), no reliable lever to directly optimize an LLM's answer, and a data-cutoff problem that means outdated brand information can persist in outputs longer than anyone would like.

From SEO to GEO to ecosystem credibility

Visibility inside an AI answer is becoming its own marketing battleground, and owned content alone won't win it — LLMs prioritize third-party reviews, creator content and external authority signals over anything a brand says about itself. There's no reliable ROI measurement for this yet, which is exactly why most competitors haven't moved on it.

Three practical moves stand out: balance paid and organic rather than defaulting to paid, partner with creators specifically because their content ranks organically in ways brand content doesn't, and let paid search teams lead the AI advertising effort rather than treating it as a separate discipline. The biggest immediate opportunity for ad buyers, notably, is still traditional Google paid listings — not chatbot placements.