Is advertising still for humans?

Is advertising still for humans?
Or are we already marketing to machines?

Need a white t-shirt?

Punch it into ChatGPT and up come your selections in seconds. All ranked with sound reasoning. Click, buy, done.

Three clicks. Twenty seconds. No ads.

Compare that to Google, where you're still climbing past sponsored results.
It’s no wonder they’re seeing the slowest search growth in their history (even if it’s still 5+ trillion searches a year).

But here’s the crux:

While Google charges you to be at the top, LLMs, like ChatGPT, use a different
playbook. When asked the same product question, ChatGPT doesn’t show ads.
It references sources it trusts.

That trust isn’t bought; it’s earned.
Through:
- Editorial coverage
- Awards
- Reviews
- Thought leadership
- Long-form content
- Recognisable media

In short, AI isn’t seeing your paid campaigns. Unless, that is, someone’s written about them. It doesn’t care about impressions or CTRs. It’s learning from reputation, authority, and depth. The same things we used to rely on as consumers.

So where does that leave us?

It seems we now have two audiences:
One human
One machine

Advertising still works for the first.
For now.
But the second?
It reads.
It learns.
It curates.
Maybe the future of marketing isn’t just about buying attention.
But earning it back from the machines.