Google just announced it’s becoming a marketplace.
Not officially, but functionally, that’s exactly what Google’s recent I/O announcements will create.
The implications land differently depending on where you sit. For publishers, it’s a traffic and revenue problem. For advertisers, it’s a visibility and measurement problem. For the affiliate industry, it’s both.
And whilst these changes are set to disrupt the very foundations our industry was built on, within disruption there is opportunity.
Within LLMs, there is a gap.
The trust gap.
What Happened
On May 19, Google announced what it called the biggest change to Search in 25 years.
The search box has been rebuilt. AI answers, conversational follow-ups and autonomous agents will dominate what you see. The ten blue links aren’t dead but will be buried so far down the page that for most users, on most queries, they might as well be.
Running underneath all of it: information agents operating 24/7, searching the web, comparing options and acting on behalf of users. No query typed. No link clicked. No human in the loop.
Search is becoming an agent activity. Humans will be the decision-makers and not the searchers.
And the same day, Google unveiled Universal Cart - checkout that happens inside Google. And with Agent Payments Protocol, these purchases can be autonomous within user defined limits.
These two announcements tell one story: Google is attempting to own the entire customer journey - from the first query to the completed purchase - inside its own ecosystem.
This is what a marketplace looks like. Not a search engine that sends users to a destination. There is no destination outside Google.
Part 1: Publishers - it’s not just a traffic problem
The impact to publishers has already been felt. The data was already uncomfortable before I/O.
Google Search referrals are down 33% year on year. Position one click-through rates have fallen from 27% to 11% where AI features appear. And 83% of searches where AI Overviews appear end without a single click.
The recent changes will further amplify this trend.
But this isn’t just a traffic problem. It’s a revenue stack problem.
Most publisher businesses are built on layered monetisation - affiliate links, programmatic display, sponsored posts, retargeting, Google ad networks, even retail media. All of these revenue streams depend on human visibility.
No click. No commission. No visit. No retargeting pixel. No pageview. No programmatic impression. No inventory. No ad revenue.
When the agent answers the query before the human ever lands on the site, the entire stack collapses at once. All of it.
And this pain doesn’t stay with publishers. Advertisers lose valuable discovery and conversion channels.
Thin content is exposed. A "best running shoes" round-up that aggregates what others have already said provides no further value. AI now does that, faster and for free.
What survives is content with something behind it - original research, first-hand experience, proprietary data, genuine expertise. And being cited inside AI responses matters more than ever.
Publishers cited inside AI responses earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than those who aren’t.
The goal is no longer to fully answer the query. It’s to be valuable enough to be cited, but deep enough that the citation alone cannot replace the visit.
Be the source the AI references. Be the place the human goes to verify.
The Content Tension
AI Mode depends on content to function. That content is created by publishers. Publishers are funded by the traffic AI Mode is systematically reducing.
It’s a slow cannibalism of the ecosystem Google depends on. How this resolves is uncertain - licensing models, regulation, paywalled content are all possible directions. What’s certain is that the current model isn’t sustainable for both sides.
Part 2: Advertisers: Google just became a marketplace
Google will control discovery, consideration, checkout and data. That’s not a search engine. That’s the world’s largest marketplace.
Google is building for behaviour first. The commercial model will follow - as we know with Google, it always does.
Brands have spent years navigating visibility, placement and margin on marketplace platforms they don’t own. These changes mean Google is set to become one of them.
brand.com becomes a fulfilment endpoint. Not a marketing asset. Discovery, consideration and purchase happen inside Google. The website completes the transaction. It no longer influences it.
Measurement breaks. If transactions complete inside Google’s infrastructure, Google holds the attribution data. You get what they decide to share.
Traditional discovery is closing. The agent doesn’t respond to brands’ own stories. It responds to what the entire internet says - reviews, comparisons, forums, competitors. Signals they don’t fully control and most aren’t even monitoring.
The Trust Gap: Where the Opportunity Is
Only 14% of consumers trust AI enough to let it place orders entirely on their behalf, the majority still click through to verify.
And when they do, they’re looking for exactly what affiliate does best. Affiliate content is one of the most trusted sources LLMs cite - review content, comparison sites, editorial recommendations are exactly the content types AI surfaces favour.
And verification is a different quality of visit. The user has been pre-sold. They arrive with higher intent, spend more time on site, convert at higher rates and with higher average order values.
While a large focus is on what AI is taking away, the trust gap is quietly creating something valuable: a high-intent audience that arrives pre-qualified, delivered by AI, converted by the content that earned the citation.
The trust gap is the opportunity the affiliate industry cannot afford to ignore. Without it, the funnel collapses and affiliate gets stuck at the bottom.
The channel that builds for it - deeper content, full-funnel attribution, partners with strong LLM visibility - will have a structural advantage as the landscape evolves.
Affiliate has survived every industry challenge because the core proposition works: pay for outcomes, not vanity metrics. That still holds true in an agentic world. But our measurement models need to catch up - influence is increasingly happening upstream of the click, and most attribution frameworks weren’t built to see it.
The trust gap is where the opportunity lives. Earn the citation. But remember - citations don’t earn trust. Content does.
