When AI search compresses the open web, advertising budgets move beyond clicks toward data-led media strategies.
For years, search was the front door to the internet and the gravity well for digital budgets. Marketers could buy intent, capture clicks, and measure outcomes with familiar mechanics. But the behavior that made search so reliable is being rewritten in real time as conversational AI turns “search” into an answer, not a journey.
Marketers already see this coming. Nearly two-thirds of worldwide marketers (64%) say reduced use of traditional search engines like Google will be the top AI-driven shift affecting digital advertising in the next few years. And consumer habits are moving quickly: Daily AI search users in the U.S. more than doubled from 14% in February 2025 to 29.2% in August 2025.
Even before AI is fully “in the loop,” traditional search shows signs of strain. Google search clickthrough rates declined for both paid (down 3.6 points) and organic (down 1.2 points) results from October 2024 to September 2025, even when AI Overviews were absent, suggesting a broader shift toward speed and fewer steps.
Spend Doesn’t Disappear. It Relocates.
As search becomes less click-driven, budgets are flowing toward channels built for discovery and attention at scale, where audiences already spend time and where outcomes can be engineered through targeting and measurement.
Connected TV is the clearest example. U.S. CTV ad spending is expected to approach $46 billion in 2028 and surpass linear TV ad spending for the first time. That matters because it signals more than a format shift. It marks a reallocation toward environments where advertisers can combine premium video storytelling with increasingly addressable buying.
DOOH is also gaining share as brands chase reach in the physical world with digital flexibility. DOOH is expected to account for 45.2% of total OOH ad spending in 2028, up from 22.0% in 2016. As more inventory becomes digital, DOOH capabilities are evolving to become a programmatic, data-driven channel that can complement video, mobile, and commerce media.
Data Strategies Have to Move With the Money
When budgets shift away from search, the bigger challenge is not channel selection. It’s continuity. Search-centric strategies were built around intent signals and click-based attribution. Streaming, social, and DOOH require marketers to recognize audiences across more surfaces, activate with privacy in mind, and measure performance in ways that do not assume a single deterministic path.
That raises three new requirements:
- A stronger identity and data foundation that can connect signals across environments, not just within one platform.
- Higher expectations for data quality, recency, and transparency as optimization becomes more automated.
- Flexible activation that allows marketers to follow attention wherever it moves, without rebuilding the strategy each time a channel mix changes.
The Channel Mix of the Future Needs the Right Data Partner
To adapt to this post-search reallocation, marketers need data partners that can enable privacy-forward audience strategies designed for omnichannel activation. As spend migrates toward CTV, streaming, and DOOH, brands and agencies must be able to translate data into audiences that can be deployed consistently across partners, so performance doesn’t depend on a shrinking supply of clicks.
The shift away from click-led search is not a loss of control. It’s a reset toward marketing that works the way people live now: watching, scrolling, moving through cities, and asking AI for answers in the moment. In that world, advantage goes to the teams that stop treating channels as separate plans and start treating data as shared infrastructure.
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The shift away from click-led search isn’t a loss of signal, it’s a redistribution. The brands that win will be the ones with the data infrastructure to keep up.