First, until recently, it has been impossible for marketers to reach answer engine users, as none of the most popular products had yet integrated advertising.
In recent weeks, OpenAI has begun a cautious rollout of a limited advertising product, but the ecosystem remains largely impenetrable to brands. With retargeting, these brands can now target users as soon as they leave a chatbot, giving marketers an opportunity to influence users as they exit the space, presumably motivated to take some action now armed with new information.
And though the audience is still a relatively small percentage of total users, these particularly meticulous browsers exhibit a high level of intent, making them of heightened value to marketers.
Second, brands have only a limited ability to shape how they show up in answer engines’ answers. (Influencing how companies appear in chatbot results is the primary function of GEO, which is SEO for the answer engine era.) By advertising to these users as soon as they leave these conversational walled gardens, brands can reinforce positive messages, rebut negative ones, or introduce themselves if they were omitted from the organic results entirely.
There is a key caveat. As of now, Evertune is able to tell marketers what specific webpages users end up on based on a probabilistic research method, which entails running thousands of simulated prompts, finding the pages that are cited most frequently, and then selling inventory on those pages. As a result, the product is currently better understood as a contextual buy, rather than an audience-based one.
But in the next month or so, according to Stempeck, Evertune will unveil the next iteration of its offering, which will enable marketers to retarget users specifically.
Publishers already know the referral source of their traffic, according to Index Exchange chief customer officer Marybeth McGaugh. By combining the referral source (ChatGPT, for example) with the specific webpage they landed on (Best Family Friendly SUVs Under $40,000), the publisher will be able to determine what the user had searched for in the answer engine. Working backward from that, marketers can then retarget those users based on their chatbot queries.
The technology is less a quantum leap forward in advertising technology than it is the latest in a series of incremental gains. But for many marketers, that is welcome news: Much of the industry has spent the last two years holding its breath, waiting to see what advertising in answer engines might look like.
For better or for worse, the advertising infrastructure now emerging appears to be largely similar to what came before it. As always, this is both a comfort and a missed opportunity.
“We believed it was inevitable that the answer engines would roll out ads,” Stempeck said. “What we think about now is: What happens next?’”
