Advertising is beginning to appear inside AI chats and summaries, opening a new channel for marketers and raising some important questions about trust, credibility and effectiveness.
In this episode of The Engine Room, Laura Pearsall and Christine Clancy explore how advertising in large language models differs from traditional search advertising, and why an ad appearing beside an AI answer may not be enough to influence a serious B2B purchase.
They discuss the potential disconnect between paid visibility and genuine recommendation, the content signals that help brands become part of an AI-generated response, and how marketers can test these emerging formats without overcommitting budget.
The episode also considers whether advertising inside a conversational environment could undermine the trust that makes AI useful in the first place.
