Publication
Following up on my CIPR 2026 video updates 🤨
One of the sessions I moderated at CIPR focused on AdTech and autonomous demand. Here are several figures that are exciting—and may be shocking to some.
Following up on my CIPR 2026 video updates 🤨
One of the sessions I moderated at CIPR focused on AdTech and autonomous demand. Here are several figures that are exciting—and may be shocking to some.
The age of SEO is not over, but a new era is arriving: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization. Like it or not, AI has come to transform marketing too, and generative optimization is growing at extraordinary rates:
- Traffic from GEO has grown 3.3× since autumn 2025
- Revenue from GEO traffic has grown 6×
- Its conversion rate is 2.5× higher than organic search
GEO is currently the fastest-growing marketing channel.
Consumer demand is also changing: it is becoming autonomous.
- 35% of buyers use AI to choose products (RBC + Yandex, December 2025)
- 50% of internet users regularly use AI assistants
- 10% of requests to Alice are direct product searches
Across industries, AI is involved in roughly 10% of decisions on average. Depending on the category, the figure ranges from 6.4% to 14.4%. In absolute terms, traffic from LLM tools is still modest, but its growth rate suggests that once this flywheel gets going, it will be off to the moon 🚀
This new reality presents the industry with serious challenges.
Models need user data to give accurate recommendations. We surrender some of it ourselves by accepting terms and conditions without reading them. Other information—such as a person’s purchasing history or content-consumption profile—is available only to retailers, telecom operators, banks, and similar companies, which are not eager to share it. Solving this problem may require a third player in the market: a data aggregator.
But there is another question to which I do not yet have an answer. Perhaps we can think it through together 🤔 If LLMs can weigh data objectively, how important is brand equity? Do we still need brands in the traditional sense, or should a brand become clear, machine-readable information backed by arguments? It is as if consumers were no longer looking at labels, but choosing products by their attributes—as they already do with marketplace filters 🛍
The conclusion seems obvious: whoever controls consumer attention controls the cash and the margins of everyone further down the value chain.
How do you search for products? Do you still Google them, or do you go straight to ChatGPT or Gemini? ❔
P.S. The polished slides with all the figures are below.