In many ways, the modern internet has been powered by search. It’s how we find things, it’s by far the most effective advertising channel, and its ad revenue has turned Google into a $2 Trillion company.

It’s also in the midst of a massive change.

Before we had effective search engines, the internet was a mess. It was a universe of random webpages that could only be accessed by typing in their exact URLs, or by following a link from one page to another.

Companies like Google, Yahoo, and Netscape gave us a way to navigate that mess. They unlocked the ability for websites to get discovered, without which the modern internet would not have been possible.

Search engines had a good run, but it’s entirely possible that 5 years from today we look at them the same way we now look at AOL: A useful, but outdated way of accessing information.

TikTok and AI tools are now a lot better at giving us relevant answers to our questions. 74% of Gen Z already use TikTok for search, and a recent Gartner study found that 79% of people expect to use AI search within the next year.

Internet users are not loyal to any one service or technology. When a better tool comes along, we change our behaviour.

Businesses, on the other hand, are often less adaptable. We tend to hold on to what has worked in the past; we have systems in place; our reports, roles, and projections are all built with the assumption that we would continue to use the same tactics.

The reality is that, when shifts like this happen, it’s often the early adopters that get the greatest rewards. Imagine if you could go back to the days when brands were just starting to realize that search advertising was more effective than print. Cost-per-click was as low as $0.05, and you could buy a thousand impressions for $1.

Even Facebook ads were massively lucrative for at least 5 years after they were introduced. Cheap social ads spawned an entire industry of D2C brands that became household names, seemingly overnight, because they were able to lean into the opportunity before the big brands could make the shift.

Today, search and social ads are no longer the bargain they once were because the demand for inventory matches (or exceeds) the supply of attention.

The good news is that there are new advertising opportunities popping up as we speak, where the attention is plentiful and the demand has not yet caught up.

TikTok Search

TikTok is one of those opportunities. The platform identified that it has become the search engine of choice for millions of people, so it is beginning to roll out keyword-targeted advertising. Until now, TikTok ads operated in much the same way as Meta ads: You upload some content, pick an interest group, and hope that they see your ad at a time when they’ll consider your product or service.

With the introduction of keyword advertising, TikTok will serve your ads not only to people who might fit your target audience, but in the very moment that they are searching for a solution to a problem that your business can solve for them.

Last year, advertisers spent $88 Billion on search advertising, but the majority of that money will not be able to quickly pivot away from Google, so there is a window of opportunity for those of us who can be more nimble.

AI Advertising

AI is the next frontier for marketers. Millions of people now get answers to their most pressing questions via ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, and others, and until now brands had no way to insert themselves into that interaction.

As we shared last week in The Brief, Perplexity AI is the first platform to change that. While they may be a smaller player in the world of AI, Perplexity is the only major service that is positioned as a search engine alternative, so it makes sense that they’d be the first to introduce ads.

The formats of these ads are different than traditional search. Rather than complete control over the ad copy, brands are buying the opportunity to be a part of a sponsored answer, which will include a link to their website.

That loss of control will be challenging for many brands, but their hesitation is our opportunity.

When emerging platforms like these come along, they lack many of the things we’ve come to expect from the incumbents. There aren’t established best practices or case studies that we can learn from, but what we can do is get to know them from a user’s perspective. What do they want to see? What types of content would be legitimately helpful? How can we put the tools to use in a way that is a genuine attempt to reach out and connect with people?