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Andres's avatar

Hey, what role do you see online paid advertising (paid search and others except for maybe social) having in the context of agentic future?

I think the key factor in this scenario will be trust and thats where I see paid advertising at a clear disadvantage. Paid advertising intrinsically makes up the lack of "trust"/"curation" by having the most attention/best search space etc.

If a human fully trusts that the purchase recommendations of the agent is the one that maximizes its value, I dont see how paying for a premium spot will compensate.

Another thing, is that it seems like most agents might up monetizing via a subscription.

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Kevin Indig's avatar

I think online advertising will also benefit from AI and become a lot more relevant, better timed and better targeted. The interesting question is how to integrate ads with AI Chatbots and potentially, agents. That's where I agree that agents are a better fit for direct monetization as opposed to ads. I could see a scenario in which part of their suggestions are sponsored, and they make sure that the sponsored "results" are a good fit for you. But this is a new "channel," and old ad formats usually don't do well in new channels.

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Salvador Lorca 📚 ⭕️'s avatar

Very good insight 😌. Can I translate part of this article into Spanish with links to you and a descripción of your newsletter?

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Kevin Indig's avatar

Thanks! And yes :)

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Salvador Lorca 📚 ⭕️'s avatar

It´s done.

At the end I included this description about you (in Spanish): Kevin publishes his free weekly newsletter ‘Growth Memo’ on Substack, on the art of Organic Growth (a topic I'm passionate about, by the way).

Subscribers to this newsletter can improve their SEO, CRO and Product Driven Growth (PLG) skills and understand how big trends in technology influence the craft of Growth and Marketing. It is published every Monday morning.

The original article is as follows: (link to it)

https://liderar.substack.com/p/botnet

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Aviel's avatar

Great post and super interesting! I feel better already about doubling down on Technical SEO btw, without currently seeing a good job market for it out there in the wild.

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Kevin Indig's avatar

thank you!

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Nidhi's avatar

Thanks for dealing with this topic, Kevin. So far, we have thought of AI as a creator. For the first time, I could see AI as a content consumer as well.

Quick question: does the website traffic report in Google Analytics also include bot traffic by default?

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Kevin Indig's avatar

Good observation!

You might want to look at the referral traffic report in GA to measure LLM traffic.

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Indraneel Babu's avatar

What is that small local businesses should start doing? Let’s say example local car rental companies. Should they build their own AI which can take bookings from other AI?

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Kevin Indig's avatar

I would start with a custom GPT or lightweight chatbot, but I think besides good technical SEO, it’s too early to do something right now.

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