• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Traffic is down overall, and costs per click (CPCs) and invalid traffic are up. With the rise of AI search and search outside of historic channels, marketers are being forced to navigate in a new environment where Google is becoming less relevant and Gen Z is turning to platforms like TikTok, YouTube, ChatGPT, and Perplexity to answer questions about brands and products.

Marketers need to adapt to this new world and figure out what it means for measurement, said Zac Grubb, associate director of search at Harmelin Media, when introducing the panel Wednesday at the MediaPost Performance Marketing Insider Summit.

Traditional search is being replaced by AI-based searches. In case you missed it, ad spend for AI-based search is expected to rise from slightly more than $1 billion in 2025 to nearly $26 billion by 2029, with the media expected to contribute 0.7% of total search ad spending this year, according to Emarketer’s first estimates, released Wednesday.

Sixty percent of searches following the Google AI Overview rollout resulted in Zero-click behavior, said Brooke Hess, vice president of paid media at NP Digital, citing data from Ubersuggest. “ChatGPT searches are up more than 150%, and Perplexity is up more than 430%, so we need to think about other platforms.”

Hess questioned whether marketing departments require a new role -- someone to look across all performance paid media to oversee search efforts across all these platforms, including Pinterest and TikTok.

Measurement tools also will need to be improved to understand this new consumer journey. Today, it's something of a black box, she said. Some marketers have created their own tools.

Ryan Jones, senior vice president of SEO at Razorfish, said SEO has been redefined, and most experts in the field use phrases like semantic relevance and cosine similarity. He said AI is the real meaning of personal results. 

“Someone on day one [of the summit] said multichannel attribution needs to die and it needs to be about total success,” Jones said, “That’s what we need to be doing.”

Companies need to stop talking about traffic from Google search, he added. Advertisers don’t know whether they get traffic from billboards, but they do know that if they stop them, they get less sales in the area. The metrics need to be about overall sales, business goals, awareness and visibility.

“I wasn’t joking when I said I’m coming for your brand dollars,” he said, pointing to TV and out-of-home. “Search needs to be considered in that funnel. It’s a philosophical change. Don’t stop measuring cost per click and things like that, but in addition, we need to start thinking about it as brands, too.”

Brands used to measure clicks and conversions, when SEO meant lower-funnel, “but guess what? SEO is no longer lower-funnel,” Jones said. “It’s full-funnel. And we need to do real marketing, and it’s an opportunity to reinvent the industry.”

It’s no longer just about measuring a click -- it’s an awareness thing. This is a change. The brand may not get that click from the user.

“When I Google, 'how old is Taylor Swift?,' I just want a number,” he said. “I don’t want your website with a cookie consent notice, popup ad, newsletter signup, autoplay video and scroll down through 3,000 words of text to get the number. We were spoiled for so long that we could run an ad or rank and get a click, but the user never wanted that.”

If the user wants a concert experience, AI cannot provide that, but a human can. And that’s where AI and humans need to work together.

Keeping up with AI is the only way forward, said Sam Clarke, managing director and head of search at Crossmedia, pointing to multimodal models.

“We use AI to build out ad messaging and expedite it,” Clarke said. “There’s a time saving and increase in quality, but there also needs to be a human element. It reduces [the creation] from three days to an hour and a half. The output takes about 15 minutes, but the human element requires the rest.”

Clarke said they are still prone to hallucinations and bias, depending on the data used to train the models. Brands have a specific nuance and that must come from humans.

“You can write prompt sequences to help them understand brand guidelines, especially if you have clients in a market heavily regulated,” Clarke said.

Using a line from another speaker during the summit, Clarke confirmed the industry has turned into a pinball funnel and people will go wherever they find the best experience.