If it works out then enterprises planning to use AI to help with their purchasing decisions, say, or to deliver services to their customers could be more confident about their results.
However, Zeyuan Gu, CEO of AI analytics company Adzviser, said there will still be questions over the quality of content, saying that it’s not clear how the value will be determined. “In the traditional web, value was observable. A publisher could see views, clicks, session time, and get paid through real-time bidding based on real traffic,” he said. “In an AI-first world, that signal gets very blurry. If a user asks a question and an AI gives a great answer, it’s extremely hard to know which publisher’s content influenced that answer.”
One possible issue for companies is whether Microsoft uses the same crawler for its AI content that it uses for its search function. If it does, then information providers will find it difficult to block content from use by Microsoft AIs without becoming invisible to its search engine. There is no confirmation it uses the same crawler for both functions, although it is widely believed to be the case, according to a paper from Akamai. Search and AI rival Google uses separate bots to feed its search index and its Gemini AI, according to Akamai.
