The Next Frontier: When AI Becomes the Advertising Medium
A lot of marketing content is now being created with AI tools by marketers. That’s table stakes at this point - if you’re not using AI to accelerate content creation, you’re probably falling behind your competitors who are.
But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is what comes next.
It will be only a matter of time when marketing, advertising, and product placement find their way inside the actual AI - inside the responses being created. The shift has already started, and there are some clever tactics for how to make your brand visible inside the information that large language models include in their responses.
The Pattern We’ve Seen Before
Why do I think this change will become inevitable? The pattern is remarkably consistent across technology platforms.
Once again, the trend continues that certain key services are expected to be free to consumers, to some extent anyway. As it has been with email, web search, and social media platforms, AI chats are continuing this pattern. Free email led to Gmail ads. Free search led to Google Ads. Free social media led to sponsored content. Free AI assistance will lead to… something.
I am not saying whether this is good or bad. It is simply an observation. But if you are not paying for it, you are the product. And you will eventually be targeted by mechanisms intended for monetization from the service provider’s side.
The question isn’t whether advertising will enter AI responses. The question is how, and who will benefit from being early.
How It’s Already Happening
There are already emerging strategies for influencing AI responses. Some are straightforward - ensuring your brand and products are well-represented in the training data that models learn from. If your company has strong, well-structured online content, you’re more likely to be mentioned in AI responses about your industry.
Others are more nuanced. The way your product documentation is structured, the way your brand appears in technical discussions, the way your thought leadership is cited across the web - all of these influence what AI models “know” about you and how likely they are to surface your brand in relevant conversations.
This is a fundamentally different game from SEO, though it shares some DNA. With traditional search, you’re optimizing for an algorithm that ranks links. With AI, you’re trying to become part of the knowledge that the model draws upon when generating responses. It’s not about being first in a list - it’s about being woven into the fabric of the AI’s understanding.
The Early Adopter Advantage
There will be a significant advantage for early adopters, before this becomes the norm. Right now, most companies are focused on using AI as a tool - to write content, analyze data, automate processes. Very few are thinking strategically about how their brand appears inside AI-generated responses.
This means the competitive landscape is wide open. Companies that start building their AI-facing brand presence now, while others are still figuring out how to use ChatGPT for email drafts, will have a substantial head start.
The analogy I keep coming back to is early SEO. The companies that understood search engine optimization in 2005 built advantages that persisted for years. The same dynamic will play out with AI brand presence, but likely faster because the AI landscape is evolving more rapidly than early search did.
The Ethical Dimension
There’s an important ethical conversation to have here as well. If AI responses are influenced by advertising, how does the user know? With search engines, sponsored results are (usually) labeled. With social media, paid content is (supposed to be) disclosed. What does transparency look like when advertising is embedded in a conversational AI response?
This is not a solved problem, and I don’t think the industry has even begun to grapple with it seriously. The companies that navigate this thoughtfully - being transparent about commercial relationships while still providing genuinely useful information - will build more sustainable brands than those who try to game the system.
What This Means for Your Strategy
If you’re a business leader or marketer, here’s what I’d suggest thinking about:
Your content strategy now has a dual audience. You’re creating content for humans and for AI models. The good news is that what works for one largely works for the other - high-quality, well-structured, authoritative content. The bad news is that lazy content marketing won’t cut it for either audience anymore.
Thought leadership becomes a competitive moat. If your executives and experts are publishing substantive, original insights in your domain, that content becomes part of the AI’s knowledge base. Generic marketing copy doesn’t achieve this. Original thinking does.
Your technical documentation matters more than ever. For technology companies especially, the quality and structure of your documentation directly influences how AI models understand and recommend your products.
The shift from AI-as-tool to AI-as-medium is one of the most significant marketing transitions since the move from traditional to digital. It’s happening now, whether you’re paying attention or not. The question is whether you’ll be shaping it or reacting to it.
