Thank you very much, Andreas. I appreciate the introduction and it's great to be here today talking about AI in a church. So very excited and thank you everyone for coming.

My name is Troy Travers. I'm the co -founder of OAC and my speech today is called Who Pays for the Answer.

The End of the Click

Last time I was here, I spoke about the end of the click. That is the zero click era publishers are going through and if that does happen then who pays for the answer and how do we build the advertising layer for the agentic web

but first some context about that how the internet has worked the last 25 years if you wanted to find something online for example which running shoes should I buy you'd google it right you probably open up about 10 tabs maybe Maybe visit a fitness blog, a running magazine, YouTube, Reddit, your poison of choice, really.

And along that journey of finding your information, maybe you clicked a banner ad affiliate link. And that's how those publishers got paid for the value they've already created.

But now you add AI into the mix. And you ask your fancy prompts to chat GPT or Claude. you say i'm training for a marathon size 11 got flat feet okay i'm talking about myself there you ask your fancy prompt and you get a perfect answer it's amazing right it's amazing for us as users it's also amazing for the ai companies they're making a lot of money who it's not amazing for is the publishers the people that actually made the content they're not getting that website visit they're not getting that click and they're not getting that ad revenue so this is a problem

A Broken Value Exchange

and industry -wide publishers are losing 33 percent website traffic year on year and publishers I've personally spoken to have told me they've lost 50 60 percent website traffic in the last year alone so this creates a broken value exchange and here's the catch -22 we need publishers on the internet they are our source of truth and authority online and AI platforms recognize that as well so ai is stealing publishers content repurposing it and giving it to us as users

that is the broken value exchange but it's not just publishers that are suffering it's advertisers as well before as an advertiser you can track the click you know when someone's going to come to your website with the ai it's a little bit different you might be the leading brand in your your space, but for some reason, AI is recommending your competitors and not you. What do you do then?

Advertisers Lose Visibility Too

This has led to the massive growth of the GEO industry, generative engine optimization, or AI visibility platforms. Who here is familiar with GEO? That's most of the room. And who here is using one of these AI visibility platforms? Okay, which one are you using? In the hotel? in the hotel okay anyone else as well who else had the hand up okay so you're setting up your own ai visibility for your e -commerce business cool that's amazing and a lot of people already

familiar for those who are not geo platforms you have prompt watch in amsterdam pki in germany profound in the us they're basically companies that show your visibility online so before you didn't know if you ranked online how people were finding you now you have visibility visibility.

So these geo platforms have perfect product market fit because everyone was blind before and now you need some sort of visibility and now they're making a lot of money. Good for them.

I'm more interested in what comes afterwards. For me, geo is step one. That's your visibility. Now we know it.

From AI Visibility to AI Advertising

The next step is generative engine advertising. So the paid layer and publishers are already influencing the AI answer. Why can't they benefit upstream from the channel that is advertising in AI.

To give you a little bit more of a sense of the opportunity with advertising in AI, WPP Media estimates that 200 billion or 100 billion dollars will be spent in generative engine advertising the next two to three years alone. That is massive.

And on the platform level, a few days ago, ChatGPT and OpenAI announced that they'd already hit $1 billion ARR in less than 200 days. So advertising in AI is not a channel that's going to be big in five years. This is already massive now.

A Growing Advertising Opportunity

So the question isn't whether the money moves, it's where it lands. Will all of this stay in the pockets of the AI platforms platforms or will some of this revenue move upstream to the publishers who are actually creating the content with their creating the answers with their content and right now publishers

Why Current Publisher Options Fall Short

don't have that many choices and it's not great for them one choice they do have is you can block the bots so publishers can choose to block AI from even scraping in the first place that sounds Sounds reasonable, but there's two things wrong with it. One is, scraping doesn't work, AI is going to scrape you anyway, everyone knows that.

Number two is, if you did manage to block the AI from picking you up, you're losing out on the biggest search channel we've ever seen that's only going to grow exponentially.

So that leaves the next option, which is licensing. If you're in the top 1 % of publisher, maybe you can do a direct licensing deal with OpenAI on Tropic and make some money there. That leaves the 99 % other publishers who are not able to do that and the broken value exchange still remains.

Then we have pay -per -crawl and pay -per -use which is you can pay me to use your content.

Paying for Influence

What I'm more interested in is paying for influence. Influence is something advertisers have always paid for and publishers are already influencing the AI answer so why can there not be a publisher paid participation upstream of the recommendation

OAC's Publisher-Paid Participation Model

and if you hadn't guessed it already that's exactly what we're doing at OAC so we integrate into those publishers we spoke about the running magazine the fitness blogs earlier we integrate

into them so that means when someone asks in their chat gbt window for example I mean I'd like to increase my protein intake what do you recommend the ai will go to scrape these different publisher sites we can see in the exact moment the ai bought a scraping a site and insert a publisher approved snippet from an advertiser that is contextually relevant to this site so in this case it's an article about protein intake we insert a sponsored ad from a protein powder into the html of the page

So that means that AI reads both the summary of the page and our advert and can choose whether to include the ad in the AI output.

This does two things, it gives the publishers a new revenue stream and it allows brands to be found in AI search.

Measuring Brand Uplift

So now it comes back to the GEO platforms, the Promptwatches, the Profounds. We use these AI visibility platforms to track our success and brand visibility.

And our case studies show we can track up to a 33 % increase in AI mentions in Uplift using this. So this is already a viable channel.

The Need for Attribution

And the next step is making it scalable and unlocking massive budgets. And that is with attribution.

So linking this brand Uplift, this AI Uplift to a purchase decision, to a referral.

A New Bargain for the Agentic Web

So the new grand bargain for the agentic web i think there can be a win -win advertisers get found in ai search publishers get a new revenue stream ai platforms keep being able to make the information and the answers from the information so who pays ideally some ai billionaire but more likely the advertiser

the advertiser needs to be where the purchase decisions are happening and more and more this This is AI.

So this is the advertising layer we're building at OAC. Thank you.