WASTING 50% OF YOUR ADVERTISING
Why AI has become the most important marketing channel you’re not measuring.
If you know one thing about John Wanamaker it’s probably his famous line from 1900 when he said “Half of my advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half”.
Like Moore’s Law, his proclamation held well into the 21st century when Google got us closer to answering his question. You invested in paid search and content strategy. Measured CTRs and traffic. Then came AI.
The click that never comes
In the past 18 months something fundamental has shifted in how we find information. According to Bain & Company (February 2025), 60% of all searches now end without the user clicking through to any website. When Google’s AI Mode is the interface, that figure rises to 93% (Semrush, September 2025).
Your SEO ranking, your paid search, your content strategy — all built for a click that increasingly never comes. This is not a temporary dip. It is structural.
The top of the funnel has a new top dog
The more consequential shift is happening before search even begins. According to Similarweb’s Market Research Panel (January 2026), 35% of US consumers now use AI tools at the product Discovery stage versus just 14% who use traditional search. At Evaluation, AI holds a 33% to 15% advantage.
AI has taken over the top of the funnel. The shortlist is being built in ChatGPT and Perplexity before a single Google query is entered. 85% of those users will then go to Google to verify — but to verify a decision already substantially made. If your brand isn’t in the AI answer, it’s absent from the consideration set before the funnel starts.
You take myself, you take my self-control
AI doesn’t cite your website the way Google does. It doesn’t read your brand guidelines or your positioning statements. Brands are 6.5 times more likely to be cited through third-party sources than their own content (AirOps -October 2025- analysis of over 21,000 brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity). Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, review platforms: these are the sources AI trusts. This is a profound inversion of the logic governing brand communications for decades. Brands have spent enormous resources controlling the narrative. AI has handed it back to the crowd.
But the crowd converts
When AI does refer traffic to your site, that traffic is dramatically more valuable. AI-referred sessions convert at five times the rate of Google organic’s (14.2% vs 2.8% respectively, Frase GEO Playbook, March 2026). Visitors from AI platforms also spend 68% more time on site than those from conventional search (SE Ranking).
The channel most marketing teams aren’t measuring is outperforming the one they’ve spent years optimising.
Visibility is no longer about ranking
The brands winning in AI search are not necessarily those with the strongest domain authority or the most backlinks. They are the brands with genuine third-party credibility — consistent mentions across trusted platforms, authentic community presence, earned editorial coverage.
Today only 16% of brands track their AI search visibility in any meaningful way (McKinsey, September 2025)
The new question
Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, demands different questions. Not “how do we drive traffic?” but “how do we earn citation?” Not “where do we rank?” but “what does AI say about us?”
Are you doing all you can to make sure AI knows your brand exists, and says what you want it to say when it does?
Those are two different problems. Both are solvable. Neither can be ignored.
