The Economy Is So Off the Rails That They’re Trying to Figure Out How to Make Ads Specifically Targeted at AI Bots

As artificial intelligence ruins the economy and takes over the world, Google is quietly working to change the advertising game in a mind-bending way.

As Semafor reports, AI has so utterly altered the way search engine advertising works that Google is now being forced to rewrite the script it forged itself.

Chief among its new directives: creating a new ecosystem where advertisers compete for the attention of AI agents rather than humans — a shift predicted at the very beginning of this year by Aravind Srinivas, the founder of the so-called "AI search" company Perplexity.

Google, as the world's biggest search company, thinks it needs to build this new ecosystem to remain relevant, and it's already started pushing out new protocols to retain its position.

In its new protocol called Agent2Agent, Google is essentially training bots to communicate with each other and execute tasks, including financial transactions. As Semafor notes, that protocol will likely be the first step in building a brave new ad industry where AI agents become the consumer, since humans have delegated such menial tasks like "buying stuff" to them.

If you're confused by how such an arrangement is superior to the admittedly broken advertising model we have now, we are too — but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone involved in the creation of this new search advertising ecosystem from powering ahead.

Underlying this confusing new paradigm, of course, is the massive economic elephant in the room: that we're hurtling headlong into a recession exacerbated by greedy CEOs firing human workers in favor of AI (some of whom end up being rehired as contract workers when the tech proves too shoddy to do comparable work.)

To try to claw back some of the revenue inevitably lost from an economic downturn, advertisers seem willing to throw anything at the wall and see what sticks — even if it means participating in a lose-lose scheme that will likely earn them pennies on the dollars they used to make.

Google's vice grip on advertising has, to be clear, been a problem since long before AI began infiltrating every aspect of our digital lives. Now, it appears that Google may start reaping what it so aggressively sowed — but we humans will, unfortunately, be trapped in the middle of the upcoming upheaval.

More on AI and the economy: Applying to Jobs Has Become an AI-Powered Wasteland