When you're deep in conversation with an artificial intelligence chatbot, does it seem

kind of rude to get interrupted by advertising?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Megan McCarty-Carrino.

Most every service we use on the internet is basically a platform for advertising, especially

search engines.

Advertisers pay to get their sites at the top of the list, have their business show up on

a digital map, or their products populate the shopping carousel at the top of a page,

the search engine companies get paid, and get useful data about what users want and what

works to draw them in, which they can then use to turn around and sell more advertising.

But how does all this work if search results become less like a big list and more like

a one-on-one conversation?

That's where it looks like Microsoft and Google are headed with their Bing and Bard chatbots,

and the new approach could really shake up the online ad space, says Garrett Johnson.

He's an assistant professor of marketing at Boston University.

The chat interface is kind of like a Goldilocks approach.

The traditional search results page with four sponsored and ten organic links, I think

is going to become a thing of the past, but then the other extreme would be like a voice

assistant, which is typically providing a single answer.

A chat-based search is more amenable to multiple options than voice search because of the

relative speed of reading versus speaking, and we all know that chat-based search also

has a phibbing problem, so search engines, users and advertisers want this information,

but also like footnotes and links to make it easier for users to be able to check the

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