How would an ad model made for the LLM era look like?

(I originally posted it in r/ownyouritent. Reposting ‘cause cross posting not allowed. Curious to know your thoughts)

AI is breaking the old ad model.

• Keywords are dead: typing “best laptop” once meant links; now AI gives direct answers. Nobody is clicking on links anymore.
  
• Early experiments with ads in LLMs aren’t real fixes: Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity’s sponsored prompts, Microsoft’s ad-voice — all blur the line between answers and ads.
  
• Trust is at risk: when the “best” response might just mean “best-paid,” users lose faith.
  

So what’s next? One idea: intent-based bidding — where your need is the marketplace, sellers compete transparently to fulfill it, and the “ad” is the offer itself.

We sketched out how this works, and why it could be the structural shift AI commerce actually needs.