• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 20, 2023

Brands can expect more targeted ads closer to the point of sale as generative artificial intelligence (GAI) continues to roll out at Google and Microsoft, according to insights from Insider Intelligence.  

Evelyn Mitchell, an analyst for Insider Intelligence, wrote in a post that ads within chat answers are prominent, and fewer high-impact placements could cause ad prices to rise.

“Despite being labeled as sponsored, these ads may also get confused for chatbot responses by users,” Mitchell wrote. “That could be good for brand marketers, whose advertisements will now look more organic. But it also clutters the search experience, and may lead to users hesitating to click any links.”

And as of today, she says advertisers on Google can’t opt out of showing ads within the search generative experience (SGE).

NP Digital Co-Founder Neil Patel in an interview in April said AI will be a huge part of the future -- especially search and content.

But companies that are concerned about misinformation have good reason to be. Much of the information that is being spit out in queries is scraped from the web.

“If your inputs are off, the outputs will be off,” he said.  “If they haven’t been able to figure out what’s misinformation, and that’s being inputted into AI, for a portion of the queries and responses, you’ll get misinformation, as well as inaccurate, wrong and whatever it may be.”

Companies are advertising around this information. The real revenue, Patel said, will come from the transitional keywords. It’s not “how does Google’s algorithm work,” he said, adding that NP Digital manages billions of dollars in ad spending for companies and the majority is for transactional keywords for search.

Patel also outlines in a post the seven top misunderstandings when it comes to how companies use AI, which he writes is often due to lack of understanding of what technology and what it can do.

The company surveyed 1,000 digital marketers in the U.S., including those who actively work in digital marketing, including 229 freelancers, 394 who have in-house digital role, and 377 who have an agency role.

Lack of search engine optimization (SEO) is a major concern. There were a lot of answers for “what do you think is the biggest risk/issue of using AI technology in digital marketing?” The biggest, according to 149 respondents (14.9%) is the concern that content would not be optimized for SEO. In fact, it is a concern for all from freelance, in-house, or those within an agency.

Of our respondents, 12.66% of freelancers, 16.75% of in-house marketers, and 14.32% of digital marketing agencies felt similarly that SEO was the biggest risk.

The biggest risks in AI marketing include:

• 14.9% – content not optimized for SEO
• 11.8% – AI providing incorrect information
• 12.1% – content sounding too similar
• 12.8% – content sounding too robotic
• 14.8% – legal and ethical
• 14.5% – over dependence on the tools
• 9.1% – lack of personalization
• 10% – other