‘Avoid reinventing the wheel’: How marketers are approaching AI search
Amid a flurry of recent AI updates to search, marketers are being urged to “double down” on brand fundamentals, while still adapting to the changes.
It’s been a big few weeks for AI search.
On 31 October, OpenAI launched its long-awaited search feature within ChatGPT. Allowing paid users to receive links to relevant web sources without needing to visit a separate search engine, this update brings ChatGPT into more direct competition with traditional search engines.
Google also recently expanded its AI Overviews – AI-generated summaries at the top of search results – to more than 100 countries, following the rollout of ads in these overviews in the US at the start of October.
At the same time, new figures from the Advertising Association (AA) and WARC show ad spend on search increased by 12.7% between April and June. Across the first half of the year, search advertising grew at more than twice the pace of H1 2023, according to the IAB. Search remains the dominant player in digital ad spend, drawing £7.87bn in investment for the year’s first half alone.
What does all of this mean for marketers and how should they navigate these shifts?
