Conversational AI is changing how people search, evaluate information, and move through digital journeys, says Matt Shenton of Croud. These interactions don’t behave like traditional queries, and raise new questions about how search can be monetized.
We can expect different approaches to the task of search monetization, explains Shenton
Conversational AI is reshaping how people find information online. Interactions inside tools such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and AI Overviews are more exploratory and less predictable than keyword-led searches. They often sit earlier in the funnel and convert differently, pushing platforms, especially Google, to rethink how these moments are measured and monetized.
As AI-first interfaces become more central to discovery, Google is entering a new monetization era. The behavior inside AI Overviews and conversational surfaces is not the same as a traditional, intent-rich search. These interactions tend to be open-ended, creative, or evaluative. They help people understand a topic rather than choose a product.
That creates a structural challenge. If these moments are bundled into existing search campaigns, they can’t support scale. They also won’t deliver the conversion rates advertisers expect from classic keyword auctions. To unlock meaningful revenue, Google will need to separate them.
A new campaign type, or a dedicated toggle, is the most likely outcome. It would give advertisers a way to buy into exploratory or conversational moments with the right expectations, rather than holding them to the benchmarks of traditional search. It would also allow Google to manage measurement in a controlled environment and create new budget rather than shifting spend across formats.
This mirrors past shifts in Google’s ad evolution. When behavior changes, the ad product changes with it.
Meanwhile, not every AI platform wants to become a search engine. While Google builds pathways to monetize AI surfaces, other platforms are taking a different direction. ChatGPT, despite becoming an important information access tool, is unlikely to introduce anything that resembles search ads. Its value is rooted in productivity, workflow acceleration, and paid utility rather than intent harvesting.
Advertising risks weakening the tool’s role as an assistant, and clashes with the subscription-driven model that underpins its growth. The more likely path is deeper integrations into work: richer paid tiers, workflow automations, and premium features that save time rather than monetize queries.
Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum
This divergence marks the emergence of two parallel AI economies. One is built on advertising, while the other is built on productivity.
From ‘search’ to ‘productivity’
For years, debate focused on whether LLMs would replace search engines. But as these tools embed themselves in everyday work, the more relevant question is how they will reshape productivity. AI is becoming a layer that sits across tasks, documents, and decisions, not just queries.
The key metric is shifting from the number of searches performed to the number of minutes saved. Platforms are competing to become the default workspace for summarizing, drafting, analyzing, and augmenting tasks. This changes what success looks like. Competition moves away from share of search and toward share of work.
For marketers, this shift will influence everything from content creation to discovery paths. AI-driven summarization will affect how audiences engage with long-form content. Personalized recommendations will reshape early-stage consideration, and enterprise subscriptions will pull more interactions into closed ecosystems where workflow value becomes the main driver.
Reinventing work
Across the industry, these changes point to a broader reset in how people navigate information and how brands reach them. Google will continue building monetizable pathways around AI-first behavior. ChatGPT and others will deepen their push into workflow utility, and the narrative will evolve from ‘AI replacing search’ to ‘AI reinventing work.’
The next era of digital advertising will sit at this intersection. It will be less about bidding on keywords and more about understanding where attention lives, how decisions are made, and which platforms control the moments that matter.
English (US) · 
