Beyond the Search Bar: How AI Chat Is Redefining the Consumer Search Journey in 2025

For nearly three decades, the consumer search experience remained woefully stagnant. You would type a query into a search bar, scroll through pages upon pages of blues links, and hope to find something relevant. But consumers are tired of the friction, the clutter, and the endless scrolling that rarely leads them to what they actually need. Unsurprisingly, they’ve sought out something new.

As artificial intelligence redefines how people gather information, discover products, and shop online, consumers are increasingly turning to AI chat surfaces. In fact, our recent consumer survey showed a 10-point favorability margin between AI search and legacy search engines. That’s because AI search environments offer more conversational, contextual, and personalized experiences. This shift signals both a challenge and an opportunity: advertisers must evolve to meet consumers in these AI-driven environments without disrupting the seamless experiences they now expect.

Why AI Chat Needs a New Kind of Media

Discovery today doesn’t happen linearly. People ask questions, refine their needs, and receive contextual recommendations all within a single thread of conversation. This means the legacy search engine results page is disappearing, and intent-driven, contextual experiences are rising in its place.

For advertisers, this shift upends decades of search marketing convention. Bidding on keywords is no longer enough; success now depends on understanding and responding to intent signals embedded in AI chat conversations. Gone is the concept of a straightforward funnel. Advertisers should instead be thinking about the path to purchase as a loop, one where they need to be present at every touchpoint where consumers express intent and ready to capture them when they’re primed to purchase.

Introducing AMP Discover: Native Ads for AI Chat Surfaces

adMarketplace’s newest media product, AMP Discover, was built for this exact moment. Designed for AI-native environments, AMP Discover enables advertisers to appear contextually and natively within chat interfaces like Opera’s Aria AI assistant, connecting brands directly to consumers when they express commercial intent.

AMP Discover takes the principles of native search advertising — relevance, transparency, and user-first design — and applies them to our new consumer search paradigm. By powering contextual ads that deliver value to AI chat experiences, AMP Discover media improves and augments the consumer journey, rather than disrupting it. This allows brands to show up authentically in AI-driven search experiences, while publishers can enhance user engagement and generate new revenue streams without compromising trust.

AMP Discover filters through 500 million products in under 20 milliseconds, leveraging advanced vector-based intent matching to ensure ad placements feel native to the surface they appear in and relevant to the conversation. Unlike closed, black-box systems, adMarketplace’s Arena ad selection engine interprets a consumer’s expressed and inferred intent through vector-based search models, rather than relying solely on static keyword matching. 

For example, a user goes to Opera Aria’s AI assistant and asks, “What’s the best lightweight gaming laptop for under $1,000?” AMP Discover then identifies relevant products from adMarketplace’s expansive network of advertisers and surfaces them seamlessly within the chat. With just one click, the user can navigate directly to the brand’s product detail page. No cluttered search results, no third-party checkout, no ads that make you think, “how did it come up with this?” The experience feels intuitive, fast, and transparent, benefiting both consumers and advertisers alike. 

Value for Advertisers: Meeting and Shaping Intent Where It Happens

Advertisers using AMP Discover gain something rare in today’s crowded media landscape: access to high-intent audiences at the moment of consideration, inside AI chat surfaces. This complements existing investments in legacy search and retail media while providing a measurable new channel for incremental outcomes, driving traffic directly to brand-owned sites rather than intermediaries.

Through adMarketplace’s Arena ad engine, advertisers launching campaigns with AMP Discover media benefit from real-time optimization based on consumer behavior, predicted click-through rates, and competitive auction dynamics. Ads are ranked and priced based on real-time signals, including predicted CTR, consumer behavior, and competitive big value, to ensure efficiency and relevancy. Every ad served through Arena is measurable and visible to the advertiser. Brands receive granular site-level reporting, full transparency into where their ads appear, and conversion-level insights that connect media value directly to performance. 

Value for Publishers: Enhancing Consumer Search Experiences & Driving Yield

For publishers, AMP Discover offers a way to enhance AI chat monetization while maintaining full control over user experience and privacy. adMarketplace’s integrations are privacy-first — no third-party tracking, no behavioral profiling, no PII — and are built to align with each publisher’s brand, UX, and data governance standards. 

Publishers like Opera gain access to adMarketplace’s vast advertiser network and predictive ad selection technology, which ensures only the most relevant, high-yield placements appear in-chat. The results: a better consumer experience, higher engagement, and sustainable monetization as AI search continues to scale.

AMP Discover: A Turning Point for Search and Discovery

The rise of AI chat marks the most significant transformation in consumer discovery since the launch of the search engine. With AMP Discover, adMarketplace is helping shape what comes next: building the infrastructure that connects brands, publishers, and consumers in a way that feels natural, trustworthy, and native to the AI age.

Make native advertising in AI chat surfaces your competitive advantage by reaching out to us today.