Written by Brook Schaaf

AI has ushered in a new cohort of search engines. Aside from the longtime king of the hill — Google — SearchGPT, Claude, and Perplexity (about which I’ve written a lot) are now prominent and growing. And no surprise: Reddit Answers was just announced. 

Because these answer engines, as they are sometimes called, provide the sought-after response on the results page, traffic to referenced sites may drop dramatically. Indeed, we are in the so-dubbed Zero Click era, meaning that if you want to get traffic from a platform, more and more you’ll have to buy it; otherwise, the platform will keep the user to itself.

But when there is something to buy, information alone won’t suffice when the user is ready to transact (excluding shopping bots, which I’ll comment on another day). There is an obvious, well-paved advertising opportunity here, in particular keyword targeting, which can neatly match the search intent to a specific product or merchant. 

For platforms to capitalize on this, they must have a database of engaged advertisers bidding on terms directly or through agents, including — possibly — the platform. This database must be huge if the platform wishes to cover the vast number of possible relevant destinations, recreating the advertiser base of Google, Meta, and Amazon. This daunting task will not be so easy. It seems a dubious proposition that a given small business would be able to double or triple the number of platforms it advertises through.

I would like to propose a solution to this problem that will make for a fair exchange for both AI platforms and publishers as well as a positive user experience. Publishers could tag commercial links (e.g., monetized merchant links from a deals listicle) with parameters indicating shareability terms.  

For example, if it is a URL, it might look like:

https://affiliatelink.com?aff_id=123&offer_id=23&subid=xU4&1share=x37 

The “1share” parameter indicates whether or not the link can be reposted in an AI summary and, if so, under what terms. The platform, in turn, could append its own parameter to the sub ID with an accepted breaking character, e.g., “subid=XU4*AIsummarytool3pu.” 

In this scenario, the shareability parameter functions as a machine-readable micro-contract. A participating network could even allow the AI platform direct access to reporting and a merchant could allow for direct payments. Bing has already successfully taken steps that go very much in this direction. A universal structure could allow this to expand to many more participants and perhaps alleviate some litigation.

The platforms will, undoubtedly, each prefer to have their own walled garden advertising ecosystems, but affiliate links are in no way mutually exclusive. 

It is unlikely each player in the fracturing market will be able to recreate the advertising ecosystem currently enjoyed by Alphabet/Google and Meta/Facebook and, in a different way, Amazon.

A universal framework would serve at least two critical functions: 

1) A massive expansion of relevant, available commercial links to the point of being exhaustive

2) Providing fair revenue share for publishers who create the referenced content to begin with 

This approach could be a critical pathway for the future scalability of the affiliate channel.

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