Pioneering research and actionable insights on Generative Engine Advertising, AI search optimization, and brand visibility in the age of conversational AI.
From understanding LLM behavior to optimizing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude — the Smalk blog is where marketing meets artificial intelligence.
Meta's October 30 update lets it crawl your site for free. Google is paying 400 publications. If you are not one of them, here is how publishers actually get paid when AI uses their content.
A federal judge conceded the AI Overviews harm and sent it to Congress. Legislation produces funds, not prices. Here is why only a market can pay the publishers AI cites.
Licensing and Google's AI payouts are growing fast from a tiny base. They are royalties paid by platforms, not media revenue paid by brands. That is why they cannot replace advertising.
Meta’s Muse moved from answering to acting. Amazon’s block of the agent from its site is the first visible crack in the assumption that humans still show up to see sponsored listings.
Google is paying Reach for original reporting as ChatGPT drops explainers for primary sources. AI content licensing now decides who gets cited, and brands have no seat.
Most pages cited by AI Overviews no longer rank in Google's top 10. Here is how Google, Perplexity and ChatGPT actually pick their sources, what gets a publisher into the pool, and why being there is the new distribution contract.
Publishers finally have AI buyers but no say on price. The open web solved this once, and it wasn't with a coalition. It was with more bidders.
Publishers turned GEO into a paid add-on for branded content. The money is real, the visibility fades in weeks, and the old web already showed how project-sold visibility ends.
Google finally pays for AI answers. The first numbers show what a citation is worth when Google is the only buyer: often under a tenth of 1% of a site's ad revenue.
OpenAI says Sponsored Agents are the future of AI ads and that links repay publishers. Brands now pay for the pitch. The proof still comes free.
The new AI Search KPI frameworks track brand mentions, LLM traffic and branded search. All three are outputs. The lever, and the next media market, is the publisher pages that build the answer.
Publishers want AI bots to say who they are and why they came. The bill treats identity as a lock. The open web's history says identity is what makes a market.
CMOs are winning bigger media budgets by pointing at AI search. The extra dollars go to TV, CTV and social, and reach the AI answer only through publisher pages nobody pays for.
Google now pays publishers when their content shapes an AI answer. It also decides what that contribution was worth, in private. A number set by the only buyer is a payout, not a price.
Stacker tells brands to run ChatGPT ads and GEO as two paths. They are two inventories. Only one is for sale, and it is not the recommendation.
Amazon wired its DSP into ChatGPT on September 10. Demand for AI answers now has a pipe worth $76bn a year behind it. The publishers whose pages build those answers still have no exchange, no seat and no price.
ChatGPT is now millennials' second product-discovery tool, ahead of Amazon. Every other channel in that ranking has an ad market at the point of consideration. This one does not.
Agents polluted the retargeting pool, CPMs rose 20%, and budgets fled to Meta and Amazon. Filtering the machine audience is the wrong fix. Pricing it is the right one.
ChatGPT ads hit a $1bn run rate and Google took keyword control away. The advice is to build earned authority instead. That authority sits on pages you do not own.
Attribution is breaking because its billing event, the click, is disappearing. Share of Model is the heir apparent. But a metric nobody transacts on is a dashboard, not a currency.
Brussels classified ChatGPT as a search engine one week after ChatGPT Ads reached 31 European markets. It regulated the ad slot, not the answer's supply chain.
ChatGPT's $60 CPM is reviving a fight Netflix already fought and lost. The fix isn't a sixth category. It's an off-platform model that finally pays the publishers behind every AI answer.
Digiday’s post-traffic briefing is right that sessions are no longer the asset. The part still missing is a brand-funded layer that pays publishers when machines consume their authority.
You do not write ads in Google AI Mode. Gemini writes them from Merchant Center, and checkout is moving inside the answer. That is a closed loop, not a new campaign type.
PPC Land's explainer lays out the record. Read it from both sides and one fact stands out: buyers and publishers lost their controls on the same surface, in the same year.
HackerNoon’s August 2026 piece correctly flags that AI citations rarely produce measurable clicks. The mistake is treating residual traffic as the success metric. Citations are the new inventory unit.
ChatGPT Ads land in 31 European markets. Media buyers now face two inventories: the labeled unit under the answer, and a still-unpriced fight to appear inside it. The old playbook is finished.
The standard answer to AdSense is another display network with louder formats. It optimizes yield on the audience that is leaving, using ad units the arriving audience cannot see.
Kosterina starts creator casting in Claude. Agencies are writing AI visibility into briefs. Creators are now cited inventory in two markets at once, and priced in neither.
OpenAI is launching ChatGPT ads for Free and Go users across the EEA in August 2026. That is on-site revenue. The publisher content powering the answers remains an off-site input with almost no share of the new money.
Competition among AI engines is accelerating the collapse of the link economy. Traffic is falling, citations are rising, and neither brands nor publishers yet have a payment rail built for the shift.
The first agent-ad pilot triggered accusations of spam and cloaking. The machine audience is too large to ignore. The model that lasts serves agents and humans on the same page, in the right place.
The New York Times priced half a million works at close to $2bn a year. The supply side of the answer economy finally has a unit cost, and still no unit price. Here is what closes the gap.
Marketers now route 24% of search budgets to AI visibility, and performance teams are the biggest funders. The spend behaves like brand media. The pocket it comes from decides what gets built next.
Newsweek says AI Search is pushing publishers toward a new business model: buying their audience back. It is the open web's oldest arbitrage, aimed at a unit that is deflating.
OpenAI is testing ads that open a business agent instead of a website. The click survives, the landing page doesn't. What brands hand over, and what publishers should read into it.
Machines now generate 57.5% of web requests, yet ad budgets still assume every visitor is a person. The next media plan needs a machine-audience line, and a price for it.
ChatGPT's share of generative AI visits fell from about 76% to 53% in twelve months. Attention fragmented. The ad layer did not follow it.
Time just sold the first ad built for an AI agent, not a human, through markdown pages built with an outside ad-tech partner. Ally Bank and PMI bought it. Here's what the deal proves, and what it doesn't.
A sharper content brief earns citations, but 84% of what AI cites is earned media it can't buy. The paid lane forming beside AI answers has no publisher payment rail yet.
ChatGPT cited sources in 22.6% of travel answers and 4.8% of education answers in May. That spread is not an optimization problem. It is a platform deciding how much value to route outward.
Two out of three Google searches now end without a click. The industry calls it an attribution crisis. It is a pricing crisis, and the difference decides who pays whom.
Legal tech spent a decade buying efficiency. The next spend is visibility inside AI answers. New 2026 citation data shows that layer is already occupied.
Search traffic to publishers fell 33% in a year. The industry's answer is to relabel bought placement as earned media. The citation data does not agree.
Publishers can finally block Google without vanishing from search. But an off switch is leverage, not revenue. Here is the payment rail the answer economy still needs.
Google déploie les Aperçus IA et le Mode IA en France ce 22 juillet 2026. Deux ans après les États-Unis, voici ce que le marché français peut anticiper, et le nouveau contrat à écrire.
Google taught millions of businesses to get found with a simple listing. AI chatbots are rewriting that playbook — moving discovery from clicks to citations, on both sides of the market.
Ozone data shows publisher ad supply fell up to 40% in Q2 2026 while prices rose. Scarcity pricing is buying time, not a future. Here's the economy forming inside the AI answer.
Publishers can finally count what AI engines cite. Nobody's built the market to pay for it — and OpenAI's own ad math proves the gap is real.
OpenAI's ad pilot hit $100M ARR in six weeks and is expanding into France, Germany and Ireland. Its own exec confirmed publishers get none of it. Here's the gap Smalk AI closes.
AI chatbots build recommendations from other people's content, not your homepage — and almost no one gets paid for supplying the evidence that wins the recommendation.
Fifteen domains control 68% of what AI engines cite. The governance debate is real, but without an ad model that pays publishers for feeding the answer, transparency alone changes nothing.
A field experiment confirms AI Overviews cut publisher clicks by 40%. But lost traffic is only half the problem — the quality signals that made content discoverable are disappearing with it.
VideoKristofer Moisan, Founder & CEO de SMALK AI, revient sur le 3e mind Retail Day consacré à la maîtrise de l’accélération de l’IA en 2026. Plus de 100 personnes étaient réunies à l’espace Onepoint à Paris le jeudi 25 juin 2026, pour assister à cette matinée de débats... Un événement du groupe mind.
eMarketer says 80%+ of US AI advertising in 2026 runs beside AI answers, not inside them. The money found the new surface — but not the native format, or the rail that pays publishers.
VideoSmalk AI part d’une constat : à l’ère de ChatGPT, Perplexity ou AI Overviews, ce ne sont plus seulement les internautes qui visitent les pages… mais des agents IA délégués par les humains. Et ces visites ont une valeur économique à monétiser. Explications avec Kristofer Moisan, cofondateur de la société.
Twenty years of Cannes argued about the ad. This year argued about whether brands and publishers even appear inside the AI answer. My highlights, decoded.
ChatGPT is monetizing demand keyword search was never built to reach. But the new ad economy runs on publisher content — and not a cent flows back to the source.
Publishers are now modeling life with no Google traffic at all. The smart ones aren't waiting to find out if Google Zero is real — they're re-architecting for a web where citation, not the click, is the unit of value.
Google brought Preferred Sources into AI Overviews and AI Mode. It's a visibility upgrade for incumbent brands — not the payment rail the citation economy actually needs.
Preferred Sources, carousels, and Highly Cited badges aren't features. They're Google assembling an owned-and-operated AI Search network — controlling discovery and monetization while publishers supply the content.
AI chatbots aren't just draining publisher traffic — they're quietly eroding the open internet's ad inventory. Media buyers who haven't repriced this shift yet are running out of time.
Microsoft is begging publishers to let AI crawlers in. Google's AI Mode keeps eating the clicks that funded them. The link economy is collapsing into a citation economy with no payment rail. That's the missing layer.
For 20 years the contract was simple: create content, attract audience, monetize. The audience is now agentic — and pay-per-crawl is not the ad model the open web needs.
DNVB conquered Shopify. Social-first media conquered the feed. After Google I/O 2026, AI-first media — built to be ingested and cited by LLMs — is the next native-distribution category.
Publishers are not panicking about Google's AI Search overhaul. They are resigning. That is the tell. Here is the parallel economy taking its place.
Google I/O 2026's Gemini Spark searches the web for you overnight. When the clicker is a machine, the ad economy built on the human click has no billing event.
