Not everyone welcomes the new AI overlord to Bing search, especially companies that work in open web advertising markets, where money flows to publishers after a web searcher clicks over to a website. But if consumers get all their answers from an AI chatbot, the publishers could get nothing.
Earlier this month, Microsoft fused Bing with the AI technology that is used in ChatGPT, the experimental chatbot developed by OpenAI. Early testers don’t just search Bing but chat with it.
Advertising experts wonder how the AI will change search ad specialties that have evolved over the past three decades—entire companies have grown up to handle keyword advertising and search engine optimization. Publishers also lean on search as the portal for the web, providing all of their clicks.
Related: A generative AI guide for brands
“There is great cause for worry about what these AI chatbots will mean for the open web over the next five to 10 years,” said Andrew Casale, president and CEO of Index Exchange, the programmatic ad tech firm. “An AI that can endlessly articulate anything you wish to know about a given subject, over time, will lead people to use the open web less.”
Add that to the growing list of concerns for publishers who count on website visits to serve targeted ads to readers and make their money. Publishers already are dealing with the deprecation of cookies on web browsers—Apple blocked them on Safari and Google intends to follow suit in 2024—which degrades the ability for a website to target ads. Cookies have been a cornerstone of programmatic ad auctions, relied upon by publishers to derive higher ad rates, because cookies are repositories of personal information that inform the ads. Also, search has been one of the main sources of referral traffic for publishers and retailers, by capturing web users through sponsored links and images in search queries.