Subject: Re: AI threat to internet advertising
“Advertising relies on people actually reading web pages . . . if they all assume that a human being is reading the web page, but the LLM is reading it and the human is not, then we have a problem.”

Advertising does not rely on people actually reading web pages. Most advertising occurs at the point of search (produced by the search agent itself, not the website target) rather than when people are reading the web page. The model he is thinking about was in popular use 20-30 years ago (banner links within websites).

When future LLMs interlace/combine more narrowly targeted advertising within the LLM result, owing to the user's query being more detailed than before, then the auction rates of advertising will rise. It is astonishing for me that this point is never articulated.

Google will need to retain its center-of-attention position for mainstream search, and part of that requires making sure its LLM models are on par with the best. They don't have to be the very best at all times, but at least on par, because they have so many other types of results integrated, with tremendous momentum of search habits having formed, that I believe they will remain the center of search attention 10 years from today. With the higher auction rates, Google will be bringing in a lot more income than they are today.

- Manlobbi