Advertising in AI Models: How the Zero-Click Internet Threatens Free Markets and Free Speech

Conversational AI products are commercial applications that use chat-based interfaces to serve users AI-generated content and services, ranging from finding information to interacting with AI companions designed for human-like relationships. Applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini change how the internet works.
Conventional search engines are currently organized as a marketplace of clicks, sending traffic through a ranked list of websites in response to user queries, reflecting not only relevance and popularity but also marketers’ explicitly labeled sponsored placements. Conversational AI is transforming this model into the “zero-click” internet, in which users spend most of their time and monetizable interactions within an AI environment that distills all information into a single conversation thread, monetized according to the priorities of the controlling corporations. This seemingly minor change has significant social implications, as corporate interests may be able to shape conversations via hidden prompts and steer users’ behaviors without the user knowing it. Whereas merging ads into AI environments may appear to be a convenient marketing tool, this commentary contends that the zero-click internet threatens free markets and consumer autonomy.