Advertising Is Coming to AI Chatbots — and It Could Influence the Answers You Get
On 16 September 2026 four marketing and management scholars published an analysis in The Conversation arguing that advertising inside AI assistants is structurally different from anything the web has done before, because the ad sits inside the generated answer rather than beside it. The piece opens with Brin and Page’s 1998 warning that advertising-funded search would be inherently biased toward advertisers. This article covers what OpenAI, Google and Perplexity have shipped, the four risks the underlying research identifies, why fact-checking and media literacy do not reach private ephemeral chats, and what a policy response would have to cover.