Right now, audiences trust leading AI tools for their research queries. But adverts being pulled into their answers may wreck hard-earned marketing reputations.
TL;DR: feed AI search with earned visibility sources.
AI search’s expansion is ramping up so fast that nobody has quite worked out how to pay for it.
Google has in fact reported its quickest growth in search queries for five years, yet its search and revenue growth has slowed to around 12%. The company says queries in AI Mode earn less than ads from traditional results pages, so Google and OpenAI are both responding by pushing more advertising into their agents’ conversation answers.
Similarly, Reddit has reported a steep and continuing fall in referral traffic as Google’s AI summaries answer questions before users click through to sites.
The tension created here, though, is one of trust; a commodity of maximum importance to fund marketing. Around 70% of regular AI search users in the US and UK say that they do currently trust AI-generated answers, where heavier commercialism could impact that negatively.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Financial products are, surely enough, one of the most sensitive categories an AI assistant has to give answers for. These will become an obvious target for paid placement.
Retail-facing managers may be tempted by sponsored slots inside AI responses, while institutional managers could find their earned brand visibility competing with paid content for that tiny space at the top of an answer box.
And in long institutional sales cycles, a prospect who built a first impression based on an AI answer may not visit your site until months later, or never, where falling sessions might not mean falling interest.
Compliance-wise, there are the FCA’s Consumer Duty considerations to heed. Meanwhile, the SEC Marketing Rule applies to any adviser advertisement whatever channel it is distributed to. Formats where the answer is generated on-the-fly makes controlling their context tough. Compliance teams must understand exactly where an ad will appear and what will sit beside it.
On the other side of the coin, managers that pride themselves on earned authority may see a potential upside. Like many new tools, audiences may grow wary of sponsored AI answers, choosing to source valuable, independent coverage more than they did before.
AI ad placements could be treated as a pilot for now, but compliance should be involved in the brief – with policies for approving generated ads and contexts in place. As always, it is key to monitor how your own sponsored content is benchmarked against competitors for any answers given by AI search tools.
Earned visibility takes years to gain, and fund managers should still double down on this using PR, bylines and third-party citation to feed AI answers. This could ensure credibility is maintained while paid units multiply.
Sources
Forrester, “AI Search Is Growing Faster Than Its Business Model”
Social Media Today, “Google says AI chatbots are hurting its bottom line”
Marketing Dive, “What Reddit’s Q3 earnings mean for marketers amid major traffic shift”
(via TLDR Marketing)
