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- Issue #63: New AI Winners
Issue #63: New AI Winners
The fastest way for digital marketing pros to look smart in the weekly stand-up
☕ Morning, media movers
Sip your coffee and catch the adtech and digital marketing stories shaping the week.
🗞️ Top Stories
Trustpilot emerges as an AI winner
Trustpilot says AI search is becoming a meaningful growth driver, with its reviews increasingly surfacing in LLM-powered answers.Smartly moves to buy INCRMNTAL
Smartly has signed a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, adding always-on incrementality measurement to its creative and media platform.Publicis reportedly tells clients to avoid The Trade Desk
Publicis has reportedly stopped recommending The Trade Desk after an audit dispute over fees and data practices.AUDIENCES adds heavyweight advisor as first-party activation grows
AUDIENCES has created a strategic advisory board, bringing in former Uber and Sky leader Paul Wright the first senior stakeholder announced.UK programmatic DOOH spend is forecast to rise 41%
Research from VIOOH suggests UK programmatic DOOH spend will grow by 41% over the next 18 months, due to stronger advertiser confidence in the channel.
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💭 60-Second Take – Trustpilot emerges as an AI winner
Trustpilot’s surge in AI-driven traffic is a clear sign that AI search is starting to reward a different type of publisher. The big winners are not traditional media brands but platforms built on trusted, structured, high-intent consumer content. These platforms are becoming more visible in AI, while others are at risk of ongoing decline.
Why is Trustpilot winning?
Trustpilot sits in a sweet spot for AI discovery, with clear consumer intent, huge volumes of structured review content and a strong trust signal around real customer experience. Trustpilot have reported click-throughs from AI search tools rose 1,490%, suggesting LLMs are increasingly leaning on sources that help answer commercial questions with evidence from consumer experience. That makes review platforms especially useful when users ask what to buy, who to trust or which option is best.
Who else is winning?
Reddit is the obvious parallel bringing scale, fresh data and lived experience, with millions of human discussions helping AI answer open-ended questions with social proof. That has already translated into licensing deals with both Google and OpenAI. Within the technology niche, Stack Overflow is another useful example whereby community Q&A is structured, expert-led and highly reusable for AI systems. The pattern is the same - platforms built on trusted, human-created answers are becoming more valuable as AI search looks for credible sources it can summarise with confidence.
How can brands capitalise?
Brands should treat AI visibility as an opportunity to optimise for trust and authority. That means earning credible reviews, showing up in places where real consumers leave useful signals and publishing clear, structured content that helps AI systems understand brand quality, product value and customer proof. The brands that win will not just be the loudest, they will be the easiest for AI to discover and summarise, backed by real, positive consumer experience.
Overall, Trustpilot’s AI traffic jump is a useful clue about who wins in AI discovery. As search shifts from links to answers, platforms built on trust, structure and real consumer signal can start to pull ahead.
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See you next time,