Changing the rules of the game

AI-POWERED BROWSING IS INEVITABLE BUT TOOLS SUCH AS ATLAS HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO REDEFINE DISCOVERABILITY

- GEETIKA SRIVASTAVA

OPENAI TOUTS ITS AI-powered browser ChatGPT Atlas as a productivity breakthrough; but for digital marketers, it represents a challenge to decades-old assumptions about how brands are discovered, measured, and monetised online.

Atlas promises to summarise web pages, mimic user clicks, and act as an intelligent research assistant, all without users visiting the underlying websites. AI summarisation means brands will receive fewer website visits and less direct engagement. For an industry built on traffic, impressions, and attribution models, that shift could prove seismic. “Atlas breaks the old internet contract,” says Raghav Gupta, founder & CEO, Futurense. “What used to be a search-land-metricloop will now be a search-AI summary-trust loop.” In other words, organic discovery by the user is displaced by the source that is quoted by AI.

The implications are not exactly palatable. Chandan Sharma, general manager of digital media at Adani Group, says “it’s bad news” for marketers, though not immediately. His team started preparing for this shift last year, focusing on ensuring the brand appears in AI-generated summaries rather than relying solely on traditional traffic metrics.