They go something like this:

Half-kidding aside, there are serious ramifications, here. Let’s break it down.

In the Google era, digital advertising became, if not quite rote, at least routine. Success boiled down to your creative, messaging, brand awareness and, of course, your bidding strategy. You could A/B test your way to clicks and engineer your post-click marketing journeys and funnels behind them.

You can still do all the traditional marketing tactics, of course, including offering journeys to engaged human buyers who want them. If you pick up a prospect via click, it’s probably a good sign that it’s someone doing their own digging instead of sitting back and letting an AI agent or chat or marketplace interface run discovery for them. There’s real revenue opportunity with a direct line to the buyer there.

But AI is the first post-click layer you don’t control. Your buyer clicks your ad and then asks AI what it thinks about you. And about your ad claims. (This is important, but we’ll come back to it later).

With AI sitting side-saddle with that buyer, you’re not simply buying a hand-off to an owned experience as you’ve done in the past. You’re also buying an entry into an audit.

That’s right. You not only have to pass the traditional test (creative, bidding, etc.), but you also have to pass the AI test that follows. Let’s call it an “AI Ad Tax.” An AI Ad Tax is the portion of spend consumed, and potentially derailed, by AI review that occurs between click and conversion.

The shifts in buying behavior AI Revenue Institute (AIRI) has been covering in surveys, research reports and briefs apply to your paid ad channels like they do any other channel.

A few examples:

Any of these factors, along with the others discussed here, can change how companies think about cost-per-click. One useful metric may be “cost-per-surviving-click,” calculated by dividing total click spend by the number of clicks that ultimately became customers. (Ad pros may choose to think of AI scrutiny costs contextually in terms of the “wasted spend” concept, covering budget consumed by clicks that never had a path to conversion. This isn’t quite on the nose because the traffic can be well-targeted and content delivered without issue, but you still lose the prospect after the click has been paid for.)

You can think of it as a narrower version of customer acquisition cost (CAC), focused specifically on advertising spend and the prospects who make it through buyer AI scrutiny and convert.

AI will also affect other key metrics, such as customer lifetime value (CLV), especially as it plays a larger role in renewals. Companies that adapt early to AI-powered buyers will gain an advantage over competitors that are slower to respond.

Meaningful, differentiated content is more important than it has ever been now that generic, AI-generated content is rampant. This means the potential to achieve competitive advantage through content is greater today than it has ever been. Conversely, failure to meet buyer demand for strong, original content will penalize you at all levels of buying scrutiny, including post-click vetting. Buyers are already telling us this in surveys.

Revenue teams, particularly those in B2B, have been dealing with what’s now broadly considered a “dark funnel” for years. Dark social is most discussed, but the overarching concept of addressing all the “shopping” that happens outside of measurable channels is both vital and the source of many arguments over attribution. (You didn’t think you could get through this brief without running into the “a” word, did you?)

The consensus, by the way, is that AI has made the dark funnel darker. That’s true from a certain view, and we don’t argue against it. We’ve called AI the silent deal killer for a reason. But the centralization of buyer behavior around AI assistance also provides funnel visibility opportunities you haven’t had before. We’ll cover this soon in another blog, but for now, let’s stay with the “darker funnel” lens because AI has given the dark funnel a verdict. It still obscures a buyer’s research activity, but it also hides the moment they ruled you in or out.

Depending on where in the process your buyers use AI assistants, your click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and conversion tracking could appear to be healthy while leaks happen in AI conversations your analytics never see. A buyer who clicks and converts on a landing page and is subsequently disqualified by a conversation with AI may show simply as a marketing qualified lead (MQL) that didn’t progress. There’s no moment where your dashboard alerts you that you lost the lead because AI found discrepancies between your claims and available evidence online (e.g., your on-site or ad claims and the off-site public record). If your effective CAC rises, attribution models may assign blame to the wrong funnel stages.

Signs that AI is disrupting your revenue motions appear according to where in the process buyers use their assistants. If it’s before a form fill, you may see a dip in leads per click. If it’s after the form fill, you may see an increase in CAC (potentially with blame assigned to an earlier funnel stage). In practice, you’ll probably experience changes in both as buyers in your target market lean more on AI for assistance.

As mentioned earlier, there’s real opportunity when human prospects land on your website. You have opportunities to influence them with multimedia, clever creative and other differentiating assets that land well with real people.

But AI, the new member of the buying committee, turns up at your landing pages, too. As we frequently address at AIRI, you need to withstand AI scrutiny across your digital footprint. Your landing pages are no exception. They’re still conversion assets, of course, but they’re also AI-audit fodder.

And here’s where a little marketing hyperbole can create a lot of risk. Ads and landing pages are often provocative because that’s typically what works, depending on the audience and all the other qualifiers you’re thinking right now. (Yeah, I know, there are stick-in-the-mud audiences. No, accountants. We’re not talking about you. Pinky swear.) The point is that your ad and landing page claims need to be defensible to AI assistants that are operating in vetting mode. And, just like all of your core revenue pages, those landing pages need to deliver complete sales arguments.

Here are some steps you can take:

We called AI’s new influence over buyers an AI Ad Tax because it can hurt your ad ROI and increase your CAC. But the outcome is entirely dependent on the gaps between your claims and what you can prove when AI audits them. Reducing the gap increases conversions and reduces your tax.

Download AIRI’s B2B AI Buying Behavior Survey Report, “The AI-Powered B2B Buyer Has Arrived,” to learn more about how buyers are using AI.