The End of the Hyperlink Economy: What Future Awaits Online Advertising?
9 experts shared their view
For three decades, the web has been sustained by the hyperlink, that delicate blue hinge always pointing elsewhere. It was the connective tissue of discovery, the skeleton upon which the entire economy of visibility was erected. With the advent of AI Max and the insertion of Ads in AI Overviews, that very ontology begins to fracture.
For hospitality, a sector long confined to the precarious margins of the search page, this collapse is both a threat and an opening. Visibility is no longer defined by positional ranking but by the capacity to be absorbed into a machine-generated narrative. The funnel dissolves, as discovery and transaction are compressed into a single utterance inside Google's closed ecosystem.
If we are indeed entering a zero-click web, a world in which information, intention, and monetization fuse into the same breath, and where advertising is no longer adjacent to content but embedded within the answer itself, the deeper question emerges: how do you imagine the landscape of online advertising evolving over the next decade?
My prediction is that advertising will evolve into three distinct forms.
The first is pay-per-impression and pay-per-click, formats that will survive for users who still choose to navigate websites. Banners, displays, and sponsored slots will not disappear immediately, but they will increasingly feel like the background hum of an older web.
The second is pay-per-mention, the true battleground of tomorrow. In this model, brands no longer fight for a slot around the answer but for the privilege of being inscribed within the answer itself.
The third is post-metasearch advertising, where metasearch does not die but fades from sight, reduced to a silent backbone that supplies ARI directly to conversational models. Discovery and conversion do not unfold sequentially here, they collapse into a single act.
And then comes the fourth layer: self-generating campaigns, designed and optimized by AI engines themselves. From AI Max to Meta, the gameplay will change. It will be better for users and hotels, more transparent and immediate, though perhaps worse for those who once built campaigns manually. But perhaps that is how it should be.
This is not the end of advertising, but its logical evolution. And it might be a lot of fun...