Here’s a post just to appease my personal guilt about not posting over such a long span of time. I usually write broadly about the topics I am working on professionally but recently, the rate of projects exacerbated by the rate of evolution in the ad industry related to AI trends in advertising.
The Evolution of Search Behavior: Understanding the shift from traditional search platforms and behaviors to the new LLM experiences.
Microsoft and Google are investing billions of dollars to advance these capabilities, accelerating the shift toward long-tail queries and multi-modal search (image, voice, and video). This means that semantic interpretation is the way that algorithms are able to serve ads in these conversational / iterative experiences and keywords are slowly fading as the primary targeting method.
Facilitating this interpretation is of paramount importance. Content is far more likely to appear in agentic and LLM experiences if the crawlers can easily read, interpret, and classify it. This means that, for content to appear in LLM results, most sites require extensive overhauls and unification of back-end, schema, and content structure.
Every major brand seems eager to appear in LLM results at a time when CFO’s are being exceptionally cautious with investment. Achieving this visibility requires coordinated content, engineering, and design expertise which all cost money. And so it goes…
On a more optimistic note: the New England Patriots were impressive in their first preseason game and the Red Sox might sneak into the playoffs. It’s a good excuse to dust off this playlist I made back in May for the Celtics playoffs. A nostalgic mix of songs I screamed along to as a teen at matinees in clubs like the Rat, Middle East, Axis, Avalon, TT the Bear’s, and Mama Kin plus some old standards and new hits. All centered around the city of Boston and featuring plenty of old and new friends. The title comes from a chant my friends and I had in the 90’s and the photo is of your humble narrator on stage with Murphy’s Law sometime around 7th grade.
L U K E 