AI’s emergence has created ecommerce marketing opportunities, yet the fundamental tactics remain.
Consider four traditional promotion channels: search engine optimization, sponsored content, email marketing, and advertising.
- SEO has generated organic traffic over the past decade.
- Sponsored content is the go-to brand play, amounting to a paid endorsement from a respected, trusted publisher.
- Advertising is retailers’ primary revenue driver.
- Email marketing spurs conversions, data collection, and personalization.
Each of these techniques predates the breakout of AI. Yet each has a role in AI search, chat-powered product discovery, and agentic commerce.
The channels are changing, but the underlying marketing problems are familiar. Merchants still need visibility, trust, customer relationships, and profitable traffic.
SEO
In May 2026, Google published guidance on optimizing for generative AI in Search, and it looked pretty familiar.
Traditional SEO remains relevant because both search engines and large language models use similar signals.
The recent buzz around the French AI startup Smalk helps to make this point. Smalk promotes its product as a Generative Engine Advertising, but its features resemble SEO: A clear structure, concise summaries, useful context, and crawlability that help LLMs understand a page’s purpose.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored or branded content is paid promotional posts presented in a style similar to a publisher’s regular editorial content.
For the advertiser, the benefit is twofold. First, the post serves as an endorsement to build trust or provide social proof. Second, sponsored posts make excellent landing pages for other types of ads.
Smalk’s “Advertising” is much like sponsored content with a third benefit: the ability to influence LLM answers. The company’s GEA product inserts structured, relevant promotional content into articles that LLMs are likely to return in response to a specific chat query.
It is an old technique in a new AI way.
Advertising
Smalk’s GEA, then, is buying ads for bots to read. But AI offers broader opportunities to advertise to humans.
Advertising pre- and post-AI search is similar. AI platforms have created ad products that resemble paid search, contextual advertising, sponsored recommendations, and social ads.
- OpenAI has started testing ads in ChatGPT for logged-in U.S. adults on Free and Go plans. Ads appear at the bottom of answers when relevant to the current conversation and are clearly labeled.
- Microsoft is bringing ads to AI surfaces such as Copilot Search and Copilot Answers through its “AI Max for Search” campaigns.
- Perplexity began testing ads in 2024 as sponsored follow-up questions that appear beside AI-generated answers.
- xAI / X has discussed ads in Grok responses, with Elon Musk telling advertisers that paid suggestions could appear when users ask Grok to solve a problem.
For merchants, the opportunity looks a lot like paid search in a new interface. A shopper asks an AI assistant for the best carry-on bag, trail camera, or running shoe, and the platform inserts a relevant, labeled sponsored result.
Email Marketing
One of the oldest and most reliable promotional tools, email marketing is experiencing a renaissance in the AI era. The medium is familiar, but the process is changing.
Here is an example. Zero-click search results have reduced site traffic to most websites. Advertising can supplement, encouraging would-be customers to visit, but at a cost.
Instead, some merchants and publishers are experimenting with anonymous email retargeting. The idea goes like this:
- Use an identity resolution service, such as Retention.com, Audience Bridge, or Customers.ai, to convert an otherwise anonymous site visitor to an email address in a privacy-compliant way.
- Generate AI copy that’s optimized and personalized to the visitor.
- Pass the content and the visitor’s email address to email advertising networks for retargeting.
The strategy is familiar. A shopper visits a product page, leaves without purchasing, and later encounters a relevant message in an email newsletter from a publisher or media partner.
Still Marketing
AI marketing, while new, relies on tried-and-true techniques. The tools are changing, but not the challenges.
