By Jason Bier, general counsel and chief privacy officer at Adstra
The advertising industry spent the past five years fretting about Google’s plans to sunset cookie support in the Chrome browser. When Google ultimately abandoned its long-gestating plan, it was as if a switch flipped across the advertising and marketing industry. Instead of cookies, AI is now the topic that gets all the airtime.
Google plays a major role in these conversations as well, but from a slightly different position. Usage of AI-powered answer engines is booming, as visits to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Anthropic have all grown more than 80% in the past year.
Yet all of those are still small compared to Google’s search share, and AI-powered answers already appear in 5 billion Google searches, according to the latest data. Google has owned traditional search to the point that it has been declared a monopoly by the judicial system, and whatever Google decides to do with cookies makes the entire industry shake. We can’t let Google dominate ad-supported AI in the same way.
The best way to counter this is to ensure that the layer of anonymity that has historically powered online advertising is thoroughly utilized within answer engines—through the strategic ingestion of an “identity spine.” This foundational infrastructure acts as a secure, privacy-first backbone for identity management, enabling answer engines to monetize their traffic while maximizing user value and trust.
Ads Are Inevitable—and an Identity Spine Makes Them Smarter
Answer engines are reaching a tipping point where they need new monetization strategies in order to continue their growth trajectories. These companies do not have the funds to settle multiple 10-figure copyright lawsuits while also attracting new users. They need to carefully balance revenue growth with intellectual property needs.
Advertising represents one of the clearest opportunities, and it’s a well-trod path. After insisting for years that it would never have ads, Netflix finally relented in 2022. That ad-supported tier now has nearly 100 million active users, potentially saving the company.
Answer engines follow this route. OpenAI is making it clear that it will turn ChatGPT into an advertising powerhouse. Meanwhile, Perplexity is re-examining its advertising plans after some challenges and executive losses.
The crop of challenger AI answer engines seems to be facing a distinct disadvantage when it comes to data. Google’s advertising dominance comes not just from search, but from the way it can connect online activity through its many different businesses. Search can be connected to browsing activity which can be connected to email—and most users probably have a YouTube account as well. Google can give consumers relevant advertising because it connects an individual based on data across multiple channels.
This has been an advantage for a long time, but it’s also the biggest weakness when it comes to this next era of search. Over-reliance on pervasive tracking erodes user trust and invites regulatory scrutiny, especially as privacy laws tighten globally.
Answer Engines Can Win Through Privacy-Fortified Identity
One of the biggest benefits of using ChatGPT over Google is that OpenAI does not know who a user is through its anonymous access because it doesn’t tie anonymous sessions to a named user profile. There is no web of connected accounts or a user profile built over years of activity. This level of data minimization and pseudonymity is a major advantage for ChatGPT and the rest of this wave of answer engines. It’s also their best bet to stave off Google in the race for ad dollars in the AI-powered search sector.
For answer engines to win, they need to leverage the layer of anonymity and pseudonymity that is already in place across the more traditional digital advertising ecosystem outside the walled gardens. This includes clear privacy policies and the ability for consumers to opt out of targeting.
Enter the identity spine: a robust, standards-based framework that allows answer engines to ingest anonymized user signals securely and at scale. By integrating this spine, platforms can enhance advertising monetization strategies in several key ways:
Precision Targeting Without Compromise: Pseudonymized data—where identifiable information is replaced with temporary, non-reversible tokens—enables contextual and behavioral ad relevance based on aggregated insights, not individual profiles. This drives higher click-through rates and ROI for advertisers, potentially increasing revenue by 20-30% over basic display ads, according to industry benchmarks.
Scalable Growth with Compliance Built-In: Anonymization techniques ensure that no personal data is stored or shared, and strengthens persistency when consumers exercise choice mechanisms, aligning with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This reduces legal risks and operational costs, allowing answer engines to invest more in product innovation rather than compliance firefighting.
Privacy by Design as a Competitive Edge: Embedding privacy safeguards from the ground up—such as differential privacy mechanisms and zero-knowledge proofs—builds user loyalty. In an era where 70% of consumers say they’d switch services over privacy concerns (per recent Deloitte surveys), this fortifies trust, boosts retention, and differentiates challengers from Google’s data-heavy model.
This means deploying identity solutions that allow answer engines to securely pull data in for advertising opportunities while maintaining strict privacy protocols. It’s the rare moment where answer engines can deploy existing infrastructure, rather than try to rewrite everything from scratch. In doing so, they could not only grow their revenue to ensure they provide consumers with a beloved, beneficial product—they could also build a new chapter of digital advertising that isn’t completely dominated by Google.
And that would benefit everyone, from platform to brand to consumer.
