Brands Are Taking Over AI: Soon We’ll Be Dancing to Their Tune

We’ve known for a long time that brands and advertising are the cancer eating away at the internet’s information ecosystem. Manipulating search results through SEO, poisoning content to maximize visibility and prioritizing commercial interests over relevance and quality have been a reality for decades. And it’s ruined our online experience.

Now, with the meteoric rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, we are on the verge of witnessing the same grim process repeat itself: brands are taking over AI, and unless we act, this could sound the death knell for one of the most promising technological advances of our time.

The signs of this appropriation are impossible to ignore. ChatGPT has already replaced Google Search for millions of people, far beyond isolated cases. Gartner predicts that search engine queries will drop by 25% by 2026, driven by the growing preference for chatbots and virtual agents — a quarter of all traffic gone in just two years. Users simply prefer a direct, crafted, contextualized answer from an AI over the tedious task of sifting through links buried under layers of advertising.

This trend is well-documented, and the debate over the future of search has mostly centered on whether Google can adapt. The evolution from queries to prompts is reshaping the entire search landscape. Users are abandoning Google in favor of AI-powered alternatives for one simple reason: better precision, better efficiency, better experience.

And now? Predictably, the advertising agencies, marketing gurus and brand strategists are storming in to hijack the next big thing. According to a revealing article in the Financial Times (“Brands target AI chatbots as users switch from Google search”), companies like Profound and Brandtech are already building tools to “optimize” brand visibility within chatbot answers, measuring AI “sentiment” toward brands, and offering “consulting services” to boost their “presence.” Read that sentence again — but this time, swap out those polite euphemisms for a more honest, vulgar word of your choice: what we’re seeing is the same ecosystem of filthy lies, surveillance, and manipulation that advertising created on the web, now being replicated inside artificial intelligence.

In other words: expect the worst. What could have been a tool for rigorous, impartial, quality-driven knowledge will instead become another space overrun by commercial interests — just like the web, just like the search engines.

And this time, the consequences will be worse. AI’s real strength lies in its ability to filter out noise, to provide answers based on evidence and merit — not on manipulation by the highest bidder. Allowing brands to stick their grubby hands into AI systems will unleash the same old plagues that wrecked the internet: irrelevant content, collapse of trust, normalized surveillance, and systemic data corruption.

Even more dangerously, commercial colonization of AI will be far subtler than anything we experienced with search engines. On Google, at least in theory, you could choose between multiple links. In an AI-driven world, you’re often handed a single, seamless answer — an answer many will trust without a second thought. If that answer is contaminated by corporate interests, you won’t even know you’re being manipulated. No visible ads. No links to check. No obvious alternatives. Just the quiet, invisible creep of influence, wrapped up in a neat, friendly sentence that says: “the AI said so.”

We must draw the line. Now. AI algorithms must be shielded from direct corporate interference. We cannot allow this new technological revolution to be corrupted before it even matures. The companies building these models must resist the temptation to sell privileged access to advertisers — no matter how loudly shareholders or markets demand it.

This is not about naïve idealism. It’s about survival. If we allow AI chatbots to become ad platforms, we will have killed the golden goose before it ever laid an egg. And this time, there will be no “next big thing” waiting to save us.

Keep AI clean. Keep it free. Keep it ours.

UPDATE (29/04/2025): They are already here… “OpenAI adds shopping to ChatGPT in a challenge to Google”.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.