Zero Clicks #32: The Search Advertising Diaspora

Every two weeks in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media and commerce. Here’s your TL;DR for what awaits this week: 

• The big picture: Where will the Google and Amazon ad budgets go? 

• Job posts: Answer engine optimization strategists wanted 

• One more great read: The Onion endures 

• AI tool of the week (new section!): Your always-on professional avatar.

But first a word from our sponsor, eAccountable.

“While tools, channels, and buyers evolve, the fundamentals of marketing remain: understand your customer, deliver value, and get your message in front of decision-makers — robotic or human.”

In a candid and far-ranging conversation, Michael McNerney, Publisher of Martech Record, sat down with Mike McFadden, President of eAccountable, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping marketing, search, organizational structures and agency operations. Yes, this newsletter has a thing for Mikes….. :)

What follows is a deep dive into both the philosophical and practical shifts facing the industry. It’s essential listening for anyone pondering the transformation of search.

Stream the full conversation here.

The advertising diaspora

As AI eats the world, it’s easy to forget that while Google has the best business model in the history of capitalism, LLMs have to burn gargantuan hoards of Saudi cash just to keep the lights on. Luckily, there’s always Softbank money in the banana stand!

For all its missteps along the way, Google (and to some extent, Amazon) deserve a lot of credit for facing the innovator’s dilemma head on. As AI upends the fundamental search schema of the web, Google is messing with the most lucrative piece of digital real estate ever conceived, effectively reducing the surface area that is available for ads. In much the same vein, every time a user fires up Rufus on Amazon, there are fewer sponsored squares for them to see. 

All of these search and retail media dollars have to go somewhere…and they can’t go 1:1 into AI answer engines. To say that advertising in LLMs is nascent would be generous – ads make up .1% of Perplexity revenues, and OpenAI still hasn’t publicly come out of denial about its advertising ambitions. So what happens to the billions of dollars earmarked for ad spend where the inventory is slipping away and becoming prohibitively expensive?

In theory, we should see a massive first principled reallocation of budgets towards mediums that influence answer engines. In practice, it’s nearly impossible for marketers to get creative that fast when there are budgets to spend and 2025 growth KPIs to hit. Thus, in the short term, the dollars that are now harder to spend efficiently on Google and Amazon will go towards things that look and function the most like Google and Amazon’s ad networks.  

However, without the crutch of mastering search engine arbitrage, marketers will have to fundamentally rethink what it means to influence purchasing journeys online. As they do so, four big winners will emerge: 

Meta: Eric Seufert’s first rule of the internet is “everything is an ad network.” Mine is that Zuckerberg always wins. The marketing equivalent to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is that a hell a lot of growth leaders got promoted for just pumping more money into the Facebook machine.

As Meta stock touches $2T, it’s easy to forget just how lost the company seemed three years ago when Zuck was spending his days making himself an Animal Crossing character in the metaverse. Now he wears a gold chain and cuts $100M checks to cracked devs to build the world’s best slop optimization algorithms.

Meta has fully abandoned the concept of being a social network, metaverse, or really any consumer product at all to effectively just be the best possible growth engine for SMBs. More specifically, Meta is solely committed to being the best channel for turning existing demand into dollars.

Whatever feed experience serves that end is what it will be. Meta’s mission is to serve purely performant ads adjacent to vapid slop — nothing more, nothing less. 

This is GREAT news for advertisers. There’s a straight line between Meta poaching Open AI’s best engineers and ads driving higher ROAS. A Meta that is solely focused on delivering down funnel performance will offset some and maybe all of the disturbance in the Google force.

I’d also argue that this iteration of Meta is better for society in aggregate. A news feed that is surgically optimized to get you to buy shoes doesn’t nicely lend itself to incendiary videos designed to unravel democracy. 

The Facebook and Instagram feeds of the future are less political content, damn near zero posts from friends and generally less human-generated content. Instead, we’ll get a whole lot more AI-generated gardening tips, sourdough starter videos and America’s Funniest Home Video-style reels of dudes getting kicked in the nuts by their nephews…all meticulously served up to create the best possible organic content adjacency for ads. It will probably work – while an individual person appreciates the finer things, at scale, humans have abysmal taste.

I suppose this is ultimately a saner vision than trying to connect the whole world.

Offsite Commerce Media: Silicon Valley has an odd fantasy where all human involvement in shopping ceases and advertisers influencing a purchase is magically abstracted away and reduced to trying to persuade an LLM to take a certain action. In so far as this version of agentic commerce does come to pass, it’s a small and mostly commoditized share of the overall market.

The far more interesting slice of agentic commerce is the seismic reordering of both backend technologies and front-end interfaces for advertisers to influence the journey. Product listing ads as we know them today – squares under rectangle search bars in Amazon and Google – will decline. But the underlying business model of how to monetize intent will not change. Agents orchestrating additional data inputs for personalization will just make product recommendations for a more powerful ad unit and a larger aggregate market.

But where will those product recommendations live on the web if they show up less on Google and onsite retailer search? Put quite simply, they’ll be in every other consumer product you use.

Reddit: Reddit is the biggest wildcard in the zero-click era. Its ad product should be a beneficiary of the answer engine era and since their ad offering is still rudimentary, Reddit has a lot of room to think first principles about how agentic ads should work.

That said, Reddit’s rise is mostly predicated on the goodwill of Google dialing up the traffic spigot. If Reddit Ads become a worthy adversary to AdWords or if the company gets too cheeky with its own search and discovery ambitions, Google will rethink its benefactor status.

But by this point, Google may have already made a strategic misstep. Its prioritization of Reddit results in both conventional search and AI overviews has red pilled millions of new normie users onto the platform. If they like what Reddit continues to build, they may well never leave.

Affiliate Publishers: On the surface, affiliate is the biggest loser of AI eating search. The end of referral traffic and obfuscation of a publisher brand in AI engine overviews is an extinction level event for many media companies in the space. So how the hell are publishers a net winner?

Ultimately, it depends on how OpenAI and others build their ad products. No matter what Sam Altman says about a “2% affiliate fee model,” folks with saner capitalist tendencies at OpenAI aren’t going to let the company take possibly the greatest intent engine ever built and value its monetization potential at 2% of a last-click transaction.

Pontificating on how ads will work on Chat GPT and OpenAI’s pending browser would take many more words than I have here. But suffice to say, it will be a lot harder to brute force buy your way into search results than it is on Google or Amazon. Brands will have to get a lot more creative about how they try to effectively influence both the underlying training data of LLMs and agentic purchase logic. If you can’t just pay Google for more ads, you might have to give publishers and other affiliate entities some of that Google budget to try and influence how you show up in the agentic purchase funnel. 

For now, one underrated strategy for growth marketers is to pay close attention to which publishers are inking deals with OpenAI and Perplexity – this is a place to invest flat-fee dollars. While thousands of LinkedIn charlatans will tell you otherwise, it’s still very hard to tell what LLMs value on the content side, so looking at the companies they have manually partnered with is your best heuristic.

Here’s the fun thing about our business right now — I say with no hyperbole that I believe the continued growth of the entire LLM ecosystem will require true first principles thinking around creating new business models for rewarding the best content creators. But we truly can and will come out the other side with something better than knife-fighting for the first blue link.

This will be the central H2 theme of this newsletter. 

Search Manager, SEO & AI, Rho
If there was ever a Zero Clicks job of the year, this is it. Here are three of the core responsibilities:

- Create and execute strategies to improve ranking and visibility on AI platforms, including Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama.
- Analyze search patterns across traditional and AI search engines to identify trends and opportunities.
- Oversee affiliate marketing programs related to search discovery

This is where the world is headed, folks.

Strategic Partner Manager, Acquisitions, YouTube
Amidst the glut of junior roles currently open, this creator acquisition opportunity at YouTube is (mercifully) only asking for one year of experience.

In this current zeitgeist, I can’t fathom a better place to start your career than YouTube – props to Google for still opening true entry-level gigs.

Channel Manager, YouTube, CNN
Last week, I highlighted Warner Bros. staffing up a newsletter leader for CNN. This week, it is YouTube, the perfect microcosm does not exi—

Substack and YouTube, welcome to the dual power centers of media in 2025.

Founding Engineer, Icon & Cluely
7-day, 100-hour workweeks. Up to $1M compensation and free Hinge Pro subscriptions for cracked devs.

If you want to understand the current vibe at the frontier of AI, these two job posts tell you everything you need to know. 

Peeling Back The Onion, Status

As the internet becomes overrun with slop, The Onion is experiencing a full-on renaissance as a print publication that is crafted with painstaking human creative elbow grease. If ever there was a truly heartwarming narrative violation that gives you hope for the world, this is it.

Delphi

Even with all the tomfoolery in AI, I don’t think I’ve ever had a more viscerally negative first reaction to any product than I did with Delphi. At first glance, this looks like a fully Black Mirror tool to create a slop version of yourself for…well I don’t know what reason, really.

But then I read the blog post the founder wrote for Delphi’s Series A fundraising announcement, which was anchored in a deeply human story about his grandfather and preserving his institutional knowledge and I started to change my mind. A solid reminder of the power of a great story. At this point, it seems inevitable that one of the “digital clone” companies will hit massive scale, and these guys seem thoughtful.

I think this is a crazy idea but we need our builders taking crazy swings.