There are many articles and opinions covering the future of search and AI’s effects on marketing and journalism.
This is an ongoing curation that is updated throughout the week.
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Forbes - 5 Costly Marketing Technology Mistakes Businesses Will Make In 2025
Generative AI summaries and algorithmically curated knowledge boxes often contain all the information a searcher needs. But the search could still have purchase intent, so adapting to this new paradigm is the aim of zero-click marketing.
SiliconANGLE - Qualified adds video and full-funnel features to its AI ‘superagent’ sales rep
The new features enable it to conduct face-to-face conversations via a digital human avatar and carry context over between website interactions and email responses. The company said the update expands the agent’s scope to cover every stage of the lead nurturing process from qualifying inbound leads to managing prospects across the sales funnel.
The Media Copilot Substack - The future of media is agentic, and Dappier wants publishers to win it
As AI agents and bots reshape how audiences find and consume content, Dappier is helping publishers go from defending against scraping to playing offense. From creating branded AI experiences on publisher sites to opening new revenue streams from AI search, Dan and Krish break down how the next wave of AI distribution can be sustainable for media.
The Media Copilot Substack - Bots vs. publishers: The coming clash over internet economics
Perplexity didn’t waste time issuing a rebuttal. In its own post, the company claimed Cloudflare was overstating its reliance on third-party tools. More significantly, it argued that Cloudflare fundamentally misunderstood (and thus misrepresented) how its bots function. Because Perplexity's agents respond to specific user requests—rather than performing broad web crawls—the company insists those bots should be given the same level of access a human would have.
Diginomica - AI uptake – what does marketing’s embrace of the technology tell us?
But second comes the real surprise: this US-centric survey finds China’s DeepSeek on 13.4% marketing adoption — neck and neck with Claude and eclipsing Grok, all from a standing start. So, it seems that China’s lower costs are persuasive, despite the security concerns.
Forbes - Chrome As The Next AI Battleground? Experts Weigh In
“If an AI front-end controls the experience, it controls which brands and businesses get surfaced,” Fawkes said. “That’s the power play here — it’s not just about owning a browser, it’s about owning the point of access to the internet in the AI age.”
Forbes - Quality Clicks: Google Rebuts Its Critics Sans Data
“Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year,” Reid wrote Aug. 6. “Additionally, average click quality has increased and we’re actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago (by quality clicks, we mean those where users don’t quickly click back — typically a signal that a user is interested in the website).”
Diginomica - Marketing is shifting in a big way…and CMOs aren’t pausing for thought to tap into the changes, says HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan. Here’s why
We're figuring out how to show up in AI answers. When people ask questions in LLMs, they want specifics, data, quotes, real insights. That's what gets cited. Our Marketing team is testing, innovating and leading here. We're now cited in LLMs more than any other CRM, and we are driving conversions from this emerging channel. This is a major shift in how companies get discovered, and we're not just adapting, we're helping our customers lead through it
Forbes - Grok And The Death Of AI Neutrality: The Sponsored Mind
If the answer is the product, what happens when the logic is for sale? When persuasion is automated, agency becomes collateral damage. You’re not deciding; you’re being chosen for it. Google sells you access to pages, while Grok sells you the conclusion. This is an entirely different control mechanism, where influence is not about click-throughs but belief formation.
Computerworld - The dark side of AI monetization
OpenAI recently announced plans to monetize product purchases made through ChatGPT by integrating an in-chat checkout experience and earning commissions from sales. The new system will allow users to discover, select, and buy products directly within ChatGPT without leaving the chat interface, with merchants paying OpenAI a small percentage as a commission for each transaction. CEO Sam Altman reportedly mentioned a potential 2% affiliate fee on sales generated this way.
SiliconANGLE - Search.com launches AI platform with rewards for users and revenue share for media
The new service combines AI-powered chat with a cash-back and monetization model, allowing users to earn rewards for purchases while providing publishers with revenue sharing and attribution for content integrated into AI results.
CognitivePath Substack - What 3 Major Reports Reveal About the State of Marketing AI
These comprehensive reports surveyed over 4,000 marketing professionals, offering the clearest picture yet of where AI adoption actually stands. Of course, there is a mutual reflection on the current state of the inevitable AI "revolution” across the reports, but the data reveals a more nuanced story—one that's both more promising and complicated than the industry narratives suggest.
Forbes - AI Is Making Cold Calling Cool Again
Lead generation company Martal.AI recently performed a “data driven” report to assess cold-calling’s business utility. It produced two key takeaways: “Over 50% of B2B leads still originate from cold calling in 2025, making it a foundational channel in outbound strategies” and “49% of B2B buyers prefer to be contacted via phone first, and 82% accept meetings from cold outreach, confirming buyer openness to calls.”
Forbes - AI Kills SEO As The Whole World Watches
“Now that AI-generated summaries are being integrated into search results, anyone looking for information has less reason to click through to the websites where that information originates,” wrote Klaudia Jazwinska at the Columbia Journalism Review July 31, including estimates from Pew and other parties. “For media publishers whose business models rely on referral traffic to bring them advertising revenue, this shift feels nothing short of catastrophic.”
Forbes - Publishers Brace For A Shock Wave As Search Referrals Slow
It is too early to be certain, but we could be seeing the early signs of another disruptive platform shift. This one is not driven by marketplaces or social media, but by AI-powered search and chat interfaces. Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral - and Google’s own AI Overviews - now intercept the user before they can make a revenue-generating click.
Forbes - Why Your Brand Is Your Only Defense Against AI's Sea Of Sameness
Imagine discovering that 40% of your potential customers never see your website, never click your ads, never even know you exist because an AI answered their question first. This isn’t fiction, it’s happening today: traffic to company sites has dropped up to 30% as consumers skip Google for ChatGPT. But here’s what separates tomorrow’s market leaders from today’s casualties: In a world drowning in AI-generated sameness, your brand becomes the life raft. When machines evaluate options for humans, only brands that have prepared for an AI-first world will thrive. The rest become invisible.
eWeek - ‘Google Zero’ Looms as AI Search Results Crush Publishers’ Traffic
Media companies are now scrambling to adapt as referral traffic from Google continues to drop. Some call this looming crisis “Google Zero.” The phenomenon refers to a future where Google Search no longer sends meaningful traffic to publishers, as users increasingly get their answers straight from Google’s AI without clicking through to source sites.
Forbes - AI Lacks Full Capability To Replace Journalism
“Theoretically, you could over-develop and still pump water out of the lake and make electricity out of it, but Google didn’t understand any of that,” he added, explaining how the model also missed the context. It reminded me of some of an LLM’s other misunderstandings: neural nets can typically render a frisbee or a ball, but have trouble figuring out how those items move in real time.
Forbes - New Study: AI Cuts Costs, Adds 13 Hours For SMB Marketers
The time and cost benefits are clear, but what stood out is how uneven adoption still is. While most marketers, 82 percent according to the survey, have used AI for at least one task, only 23 percent say they use it throughout the campaign cycle, from planning through execution and measurement. That means many businesses could still unlock greater value. Notably, 77 percent of users say AI gives them more confidence in their work, and three-quarters believe it helps them compete with much larger brands.
Blood in the Machine Substack - Inside the escalating struggle over AI in journalism
This divide, between media executives, enamored with tech companies’ promises of new efficiencies and labor savings and eager to embrace AI, and journalists, who work for them and must abide by their directives, and are tasked with using the often unreliable automation software on the ground, often in high-stakes situations, is only widening. While media executives make headlines with sweeping declarations about the AI future, frustrations, anger, and tensions among many rank-and-file journalists are rising.
Forbes - AI-Powered Search: The New Digital Front Door For Healthcare Practices
AI is the engine that sifts through all this information to present a personalized recommendation. It doesn’t just show a generic list of practices anymore. An algorithm might notice a patient has been searching for information on running injuries and then prioritize orthopedic specialists who have excellent reviews for sports medicine. If a practice isn’t showing up in that curated, intelligent search, it could be invisible to that patient.
The Media Copilot Substack - Redrawing the AI copyright battle map
For the media’s relationship with AI, sometimes I think we’re all just waiting for the courts to rule definitively on whether it’s OK (well, legally justifiable) for AI to consume and repurpose “publicly available” content. Of course, it’s never as simple as a single answer, but a couple of recent courtroom decisions have started to better define the edges of the issue. Although they broadly appear to favor AI companies, they also reveal weak spots in their “fair use” defense that content creators and publishers might exploit.
ZDNet - Your Google Discover feed is about to get AI-ified
While I'm usually not opposed to features that let us take in information more efficiently, it's tough as a writer to get behind something that bypasses actually reading someone's work -- especially if it minimizes where the information came from in the first place. Most major news sites saw a noticeable decline in traffic when Google introduced AI overviews to Search, some as much as 40%, so you have to wonder if further AI integration will funnel away readers even more
The Verge - Google’s Discover page now summarizes news with AI
This is the latest of several AI features Google has been toying with that discourage users from clicking on web links, following AI Overviews, Audio Overviews, and AI Mode being tested in Search. This is cause for concern across the publishing industry, which has seen a dramatic fall in website traffic and referrals now that AI is pulling information out of articles and negating the need for readers to click through to original sources
Forbes - AI Agents Are Killing Brand Loyalty And Reshaping How We Shop
With research papers like this one starting to delve into the mysteries of how and why agents make buying decisions, a picture is starting to emerge. And the indications are that brands may no longer be able to rely on time-tested social and psychological levers; from fulfilling lifestyle aspirations, to aligning with customer values, to human-centric visual branding.
The Media Copilot Substack - The secret flaw in the internet of agents
This isn’t just a thought experiment; it’s a good analogy of what’s happening to publishers right now. Bot traffic to media sites has surged over the past three months, according to fresh data from TollBit’s first-ever State of the Bots report for Q1 2025. What’s worse, top AI search engines are choosing to disregard long-established standards for blocking bots, in some cases arguing that when a search “agent” acts for a human, it should be treated like a human.
Forbes - AI Is Ending Marketing As We Know It — So What Comes Next?
IDC predicts that by 2028, three out of five marketing functions will be handled by AI workers, while businesses will spend up to three times more on optimizing for AI systems than traditional search engines by 2029. This isn't a gradual evolution but rather a complete reimagining of how brands and their marketing teams will connect with customers.
AI Workplace Wellness Substack - What Rapid AI Expansion in Marketing Is Doing to Teams
The 2025 State of Marketing AI Report by the Marketing AI Institute paints a vivid picture of a profession accelerating AI adoption, but also stumbling under its weight. The data doesn’t just show advancement; it shows anxiety. It reveals a workforce caught between innovation and overwhelm, hope and exhaustion.
In other words, it reveals a rising tide of AI-induced technostress.
VentureBeat - Why subscription leaders are shifting to indirect growth with multi-service bundlers
The latest Bango report, Gravity Shift: Subscribers, bundles, and the acquisition black hole, based on insights from 201 subscription leaders across sectors like streaming, productivity apps, health, fitness, gaming, and retail, reveals a market hitting a turning point. Leaders are facing rising customer acquisition costs (CAC), diminishing returns on paid channels, and changing consumer expectations — and they’re rapidly reallocating spend toward indirect acquisition strategies.
ZDNet - The future of business isn't about AI - and this report proves it
45.7% of all Google searches in the US are branded. Nearly half of all searches people type into Google include a brand, company, or product name. This is based on total search volume, so it counts every time someone searches, even if different people repeat the phrase multiple times.
AI Supremacy Substack - The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Advertising
As text-to-video improves, emotive promoting in audio refines itself, small businesses and brands will have more options for automated Ads that could cut down the need for Ad managers and salespeople in advertising drastically. I believe that 2026 is the big year for this, literally just months away. Generative AI will change how Ads are made, where they are seen and how personalized they are to us and even their delivery timing in social commerce journeys.
The Verge - Here comes the AI sponcon
AI creep in the influencer industry has been a steady development: advertisers already have the option of using synthetic characters (sometimes resembling real people) to do things like read scripts to promote brands and products. This new set of features brings an interactivity, with virtual avatars essentially acting like human influencers by using and modeling products. or advertisers, the appeal is a mix of automating processes and cutting costs — an AI avatar can’t demand specific rates or terms in a contract, and a brand can generate an endless amount of content without recording each video separately.
ZDNet - SEO for chatbots: How Adobe aims to help brands get noticed in the age of AI
The Adobe LLM Optimizer can be thought of as a window into a brand's performance across a suite of generative AI tools, including (but not limited to) ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Crucially, the platform also allows SEO leaders, digital marketers, and others to make quick adjustments to their online publishing strategies to help their brands stand out more conspicuously.
The Media CoPilot Substack - Why AI risk threatens publishers like Business Insider the most
Looking at the media industry for the past two years, it sometimes feels like it’s just been one long season of layoffs. While the rise of AI hasn’t directly led to many of the issues the media is dealing with today, Business Insider made it plain that it’s certainly a big factor, committing to being “all-in” on AI in the same memo that announced it was cutting 21% of its staff. The move might be the right strategic choice, but it also shows that the class of publications BI belongs to—digital-native and born in the age of scale media—will have the hardest time adapting to an AI-mediated world.
eWeek - Meta to Fully Automate Ad Creation in ‘Redefinition’ of Industry, Says Zuckerberg
Not everyone is excited about Meta’s plan to automate ads; the traditional advertising industry is already feeling the heat. As The Guardian reports, Meta’s move “sent shock waves through the traditional marketing industry,” raising fears that agencies could lose control over the ad creation process.
ZDNet - Why the end of Google as we know it could be your biggest opportunity yet
Owning your traffic means building direct relationships with your audience so you're not dependent on Google, social media algorithms, or any third-party platform to reach your people.
Diginomica - AI is reshaping martech – here's why marketers may not be ready
The biggest growth occurred in five categories: advertising and promotion, content and experience, social and relationships, commerce and sales, and data and management. These categories grew by between seven percent and 10% each.
Big Technology Substack - Ads Are Coming to AI and None of Us Are Ready
A truly sustainable business model for LLMs should value platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube or X, and publishers like Conde Nast, Dotdash Meredith, The New York Times, Reuters and Forbes, which deliver verified facts and foster human conversation. It’s ironic that the editorial authority that defines traditional publisher brands is exactly what generative AI needs for fresh, relevant content, yet many of those same outlets are the most under pressure from the collapse of traffic.
Diginomica - When Simpro put an AI email agent in its biz development team, here’s what happened next…
She also devised what she calls “moon shoots” for fiscal year 2025. Each quarter now has identified plans to be worked on for incorporating AI. Q1 was all about automating outbound communications. Q2 is outbound and supporting BDRs through AI email agents and AI-based research tools. Q3 will focus on their next phase of AI maturity related to content and SEO, while Q4 will focus on lifecycle communications, determining where they can leverage AI more effectively for post sales.
VentureBeat - Reddit, Webflow, and Superhuman are already customers—now GrowthX has $12M to grow
“Most companies chase traffic by guessing. We don’t,” said Santilli. “We help brands become reliable publishers that answer real, specific questions. The kinds of questions that people and, now, AI-driven search engines actually ask.”
Forbes - Navigating The Future: Adapting To B2B Sales Disruption
AI sales agents will be onboarded and trained to co-sell. With AI and automation driving this supercycle, 75% of B2B automation decision-makers in Forrester’s Automation Survey, 2024, indicated that they expect their organization to invest in sales automation in the next 18 months. Indeed, AI will automate selling tasks and customer touchpoints; it will also co-sell with account executives.
Forbes - Doing More With Less: The Rise And Risks Of The Solo Marketer
But solo marketing is not just about reducing costs. It’s about giving the marketer more power and a sense of agency. Prepping for this article, I chatted online with more than a dozen solo marketers in different industries and different countries. Most regularly use AI, to varying degrees of sophistication, and love the clout they’ve earned by becoming the sole resource of all things marketing.
VentureBeat - Anthropic launches Claude web search API, betting on the future of post-Google information access
The new capability arrives amid signs that traditional search is losing ground to AI-powered alternatives. Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, testified today in Google’s antitrust trial that searches in Safari fell last month for the first time in the browser’s 22-year history. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep thinking about it,” Cue said regarding potential revenue loss from Google’s estimated $20 billion payment to be Safari’s default search engine.
Myles Younger Substack - Zuck Says AI Will Make Advertising So Good Its Share of GDP Will Grow. Is That Really Possible?
This is a common fallacy that the “performance advertising” crowd falls into. There is an assumption that intrinsic improvements to ad effectiveness (e.g., hyper-targeted, zero-waste ads) will have some extrinsic effect too. This is far from true. Advertising has been getting steadily more efficient and innovative for the last 100 years and yet these gains haven’t caused any extrinsic effects where other parts of the economy have shrunk in favor of a bigger ad industry. This is why I pointed out three inherent macro limitations on advertising. More efficiency or “effectiveness” doesn’t change these limitations.
TechCrunch - Mark Zuckerberg’s AI ad tool sounds like a social media nightmare
“The basic end goal here is any business can come to us, say what their objective is — we get new customers to do this thing, or sell these things — tell us how much they’re willing to pay to achieve those results, connect their bank account, and then we just deliver as many results as we can,” he explained. “In a way, it’s kind of like the ultimate business results machine. I think it’d be one of the most important and valuable AI systems that gets built.”
eWeek - Zuckerberg’s Take on AI-Driven Ads Could ‘Wipe Out Entire Ad Industry’
Up until now, Facebook’s AI functionality has primarily focused on improving ad targeting; in a recent interview, Zuckerberg discussed the idea of using AI to generate ads from scratch. Not only that, but Zuckerberg wants advertisers to pay his team to generate AI ads on their behalf.
Forbes - A Business Leader’s Guide To Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Most business leaders haven't noticed yet, but the way that people find information online has fundamentally changed. A recent Bain & Company study found that 80% of consumers now rely on AI summaries for at least 40% of their searches, reducing traditional website clicks by up to 25%.[^1]
The Verge - Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry
Now, Meta makes a lot of money selling ads to small businesses that can’t afford big agencies and fancy media campaigns, so these infinite creative AI tools might help them all out, and the big agencies might move their dollars elsewhere. But it’s also clear that the platform economy is about to change in seismic ways as these tensions rise, while the rest of us are forced to contend with a world full of AI-generated ads.
Adobe - What is artificial intelligence marketing?
Artificial intelligence marketing uses customer data from online and offline sources, coupled with concepts such as machine learning, to predict what users will do on websites or apps. Businesses can then target specific users with personalized content on the right channel at the right time.
These two articles show some new innovation in the marketing area.
Diginomica - Never mind the copilots; make marketing the air-traffic controller! Consequential AI takes flight
Loomi then builds the entire campaign. It creates the segment, writes the content and creates the design assets, builds the workflow and triggers, the channels, the variants, the reporting and dashboards, and all the analytics. Cole says the only thing it doesn't do is press the Send button (which it could do, but Bloomreach doesn't think we are there yet).
This offering shows again the value of having good data, which is giving them an advantage. It will be interesting to see what they decide to charge and how many jobs does this replace or augment.
Diginomica - LinkedIn enhances advertising capabilities, Salesforce reaps the rewards
LinkedIn's first announcement concerns Accelerate, its AI-powered campaign type. Accelerate was launched in beta last October for lead generation and website visit ads.
You only have to give the AI a URL to a product you want to advertise. The AI will analyze the website page, your company page, and prior LinkedIn ads and recommend an end-to-end campaign. It builds the creatives, the audience, and the messaging, all of which you can adjust to your liking. Once launched, the AI will automatically optimize the campaign to ensure it reaches the right audience by adjusting bids and shifting budget to the best-performing placements and creatives.
This tool is geared towards LinkedIn advertisements. I have done some LinkedIn ads as well as Google ads and always confusing. My assumption is that this tool is for companies with deep marketing budgets and not for small businesses. But, sounds like it could be helpful.