Voice mode is the future for AI, not browsers

John Ebbert

Mike Walrath

LLMs & CHATBOTS

On the latest episode of the Risk Reversal podcast, current Yext CEO and Chairman of the Board Mike Walrath discussed AI browser wars and agentic assistants. Mr. Walrath is a programmatic OG and – among several claims to fame – was the CEO of Right Media Exchanger (sold to Yahoo in 2007 for $680 million).

On AI, Walrath had several “hot takes” and isn’t convinced that the current, rumored AI browser wars are going to matter in the future. He said:

“I think voice mode is going to take over.

And voice mode is not just talking to it. To me, it’s what’s going to take over and that’s going to create this massive inflation in the number of questions that get asked… and you already see this.

For example, if I’m driving in the car and I’m talking to ChatGPT – what’s happening is it’s continuing the conversation. It’s saying, ‘Would you like me to talk to you about this?’

And so that conversation… it’s not even about questions asked anymore. It’s about how many ‘legs’ are there in that conversation. Maybe I’m dead wrong about this, I don’t see the browser as the key battleground here. I see the experience as the key battleground here. And as more and more people get accustomed to talking to their AI, then I think (…) that’s going to be the thing.”

Listen to the Risk Reversal podcast on the Apple Podcasts app. (July 23)

Also, see the video on YouTube.

From tipsheet: One AI insight after another from Mr. Walrath in this podcast.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

AI Overviews and referrals

A new Pew Research report studying user interaction with Google Search and its AI Overviews was released this week.

The five key takeaways from the survey data originally collected in March included:

  • Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one.
  • Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary.
  • The most frequently cited sources in both Google AI summaries and standard search results are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit.
  • Overall, around one-in-five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary.
  • Google searches that contain more words, ask questions or use full sentences tend to produce AI summaries more often.

Read the entire report on Pew Research’s website. (July 22)

This report’s data was also used for a broader review of AI chatbot referrals like ChatGPT. That report was published in May.

From tipsheet: Considering how fast things are moving with AI these days, it seems logical to wonder how results would differ in comparison today – only 4 months later.

BRANDS

Performance Max and the black box

New coverage of marketers’ experience with Google’s Performance Max repeated a familiar refrain yesterday – the black box needs to open.

Digiday reporter Krystal Scanlon began:

“Google’s slow updates to Performance Max continue, offering just enough to suggest progress without ever fully handing over the keys to marketers. The latest addition, dubbed Performance Max Channel Performance, is the company’s attempt to address one of advertisers’ longest-running frustrations: not knowing where exactly their dollars are working across Google’s sprawl.”

Read more on Digiday. (July 23)

BRANDS

Survey: AI is about efficiency – and growth

Survey insights published by marketing engine GrowthLoop and their research firm Ascend tell a story of opportunity and remaining bottlenecks for marketers.

A few highlights from “The 2025 AI and Marketing Performance Index” report:

“AI adoption is accelerating, and so is pressure to perform. 89% of marketers say pressure to deliver better results in less time has increased significantly in the past two years. In response, most are turning to AI for more than just efficiency. 74% believe AI can accelerate growth by at least 10%, with over a third expecting gains above 30%.

Fast growth comes from fast cycles. Efficient marketing cycles are strongly correlated to significant revenue growth. Those who experienced significant revenue growth in the last year are more likely to have “fairly fast” or “extremely fast” marketing cycles (54%), compared to those who experienced less growth last year (28%).

AI works best with a human in the loop. Marketers are proceeding with caution when it comes to AI autonomy. While AI adoption is rising, 86% believe human intervention improves AI effectiveness, especially in areas like personalization, content creation, and predicting customer behaviors…”

Read: Study summary: How high-performing teams are accelerating marketing cycles – GrowthLoop (June 17)

Download: The 2025 AI and Marketing Performance Index – Growth Loop (PDF)

SELL-SIDE

Serving the YouTube creator economy

  • YouTube Shorts is adding an image-to-video AI tool, new AI effects (July 23) – TechCrunch
  • Unlock next level Shorts with new creation tools – YouTube

TECH

Google reports on Q2 earnings, AI

In the announcement regarding Alphabet/Google’s Q2 2025 financial results yesterday, Sundar Pichai, CEO, said: “We had a standout quarter, with robust growth across the company. We are leading at the frontier of AI and shipping at an incredible pace. AI is positively impacting every part of the business, driving strong momentum. Search delivered double-digit revenue growth, and our new features, like AI Overviews and AI Mode, are performing well….” Read more in a press release (PDF).

Wall Street analyst Dan Salmon of New Street Research advised clients post-earnings report:

  • “Management reiterated that AI features cause users to search more, especially younger users, and that AI Overviews are driving 10% more queries for the types of queries where they are shown (e.g., longer, complex and unique ones), and AIOs now reach 2B users in 200 countries.”
  • “Most importantly, monetization continues to run at a similar rate and management noted that this provides a good foundation to “innovate ad formats.” We’ve seen little to no reports of ads inside AI Overview or AI Mode yet, so management seems to be hinting that this is ready to start expanding.”

More:

TECH

AI-first website product

Marketing platform Scrunch AI announced a new $15 million Series A round of funding on Tuesday.

To date, the company had focused on monitoring a marketer’s answer engine or chatbot content. A company blog post discussed the future – AI-first websites:

“While monitoring provides marketers with critical visibility into how they appear in AI search, what they really need is the ability to influence that experience. That’s where we’re headed with the Scrunch Agent Experience Platform (AXP).

AXP is a new infrastructure layer that helps brands deliver compressed, structured content specifically for AI agents and crawlers. While your human-facing website remains unchanged, AXP creates a machine-readable version of your brand, optimized for how large language models parse, interpret, and return content.”

Read more on Scrunch[dot]ai. (July 23)

On that note, Scrunch AI CEO and co-founder Chris Andrew scrunched into the last 8 minutes of daily tech news talk show TBPN on Tuesday.

Mr. Andrew explained a bit more on how his AXP product will work:

“We take your website, we scrunch it… because we literally want to strip away everything on a site that is confusing the AI. These models don’t read JavaScript, they struggle with carousels, they’re not converting your multimedia into text.Large language models want language. It’s critical for businesses to be enabling the crawling on their site and making that content rich and accurate for the crawlers to access and pull through.”

Hear more on TBPN on Tuesday on the Apple Podcasts app [begin 2:43:29]. (July 22)

TECH

ArcSpan adds funds for sell-side tech

Sell-side audience platform Arcspan announced a new $5.2 million “seed extension round” yesterday. Co-Founder and CEO Art Muldoon of ArcSpan said in a release, “This investment enables us to fast-track our AI development and scale new capabilities like contextual quality scoring, audience curation, and turnkey PMP activation, all while putting publisher control at the center.”

Read the release.

TECH

CTV moved to advertising; AI will too

Amanda Martin, CRO of MediaVine, a publisher-side site rep firm, joined the AdExchanger Talks podcast with host Allison Schiff and discussed how AI is colliding with content today.

She sees that AI companies and AI agents will need advertising as part of its business model due to the costs of providing an AI service.

Ms. Martin said:

“I think just like CTV learned, [AI agents] get to advertising a lot faster than you think you’re going to get to advertising because that is how you get paid for the things that people want and aren’t willing to pay a price for.

While these subscription models are great, I think AI agents are going to get to the same place that publishers got to – that CTV providers got to – which is advertising helps supplement the cost of creating content. And I think we’re just in the very early steps of that process, and we’ll have to figure out those commercial models in order for AI companies to be viable.”

Hear more from AdExchanger Talks on the Apple Podcasts app.

POLICY

US AI action plan released

  • The White House unveils the AI Action Plan, seeking to assert US dominance over China, including proposals to ease permitting for AI infrastructure projects (July 23) – Bloomberg (subscription)
  • Winning the Race – America’s Action Plan – The White House (PDF)
  • Action plan – AI[dot]gov
  • Trump’s AI order steers straight into one of DC’s biggest arguments (July 23) – Politico

PROMPT

What new sources of content will LLMs crawl in 5 years?

Response from Claude.ai:

Based on current trends and developments, LLMs will likely expand to crawl several new types of content sources over the next 5 years:

  • Multimodal Content Integration
  • Real-Time and Dynamic Sources
  • Specialized Professional Data
  • Interactive and User-Generated Content
  • Synthetic and Augmented Data
  • Private and Permissioned Sources

Read more details on tipsheet.

MORE

  • Independent agency R/GA acquires an AI company that has worked with Google and others (July 23) – Ad Age (subscription)
  • Informa CEO Bets on AI to Accelerate Growth (July 23) – The Wall Street Journal
  • The AI-driven reputation repair toolkit: What’s working in 2025 (July 23) – Search Engine Land