For most of the history of digital advertising, we’ve had a relatively simple distinction between paid and organic. You can pay to appear in front of consumers through advertising, or you can earn the right to appear organically through things like search optimisation, PR, reviews, recommendations and great content.
So far, AI platforms have largely inherited the same distinction. Brands can optimise their presence through Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), influencing the content that AI platforms use to decide which brands they mention and recommend. At the same time, AI platforms are starting to introduce paid advertising opportunities that allow brands to buy their way into the consumer experience.
But something much more interesting is starting to emerge between the two.
I’m calling it Paid Organic.
A Third Category
Paid Organic is when a brand pays to introduce information into the sources AI platforms use, but the AI independently decides whether and how that information influences its answer.
Put more simply: with paid advertising, I pay to appear. With organic, I earn the right to appear. With Paid Organic, I pay for the opportunity to influence how I appear.
This might sound like a subtle distinction, but I think it could become an important new category of advertising and we’re already starting to see what it might look like.
TIME recently started creating alternative versions of its articles specifically for AI agents. People visiting the TIME website still see the normal webpage, but when an AI platform crawls the website, TIME serves a clean Markdown version containing the article and structured metadata without all the fancy code that makes websites visually appealing to consumers.
TIME has gone one step further by introducing sponsored information into these machine-readable pages. Brands can pay to provide information that an AI platform’s crawler can read alongside the editorial content.
In this situation, brands aren’t paying for an advert to be shown to the consumer, they’re paying for information to be made available to the AI platform that is acting on the consumer’s behalf. The AI platform will then decide whether that information is relevant, combine it with everything else it knows, and potentially use it to influence the answer it gives the consumer. This commercial intervention happens upstream from the recommendation.
This is very different from the paid advertising models currently being tested inside AI platforms. A sponsored result in ChatGPT is still recognisably advertising - the brand pays for distribution and a consumer sees an advert.
Paid Organic is completely different and changes this relationship. Instead of buying distribution, brands can now buy consideration. But not consumer consideration, AI consideration.
Buying Consideration, Not Distribution
This is an interesting evolution of something I wrote about at the end of last year when I argued that advertising should exist inside the reasoning process of AI platforms rather than simply being bolted onto their interfaces. Brands could provide structured information which AI platforms evaluate for relevance, with irrelevant options disappearing and relevant ones potentially contributing to an answer.
I called the potential commercial model a cost per thought: brands paying for their proposition to be considered by the AI platform rather than simply paying for a consumer impression. What TIME is doing is different, because the paid information isn’t being supplied directly to the AI platform. But the principle is very similar. The brand is paying to put information somewhere the AI platform can encounter it, which ultimately decides what to do with it.
Paid Organic could create an entirely new advertising ecosystem. Publishers are facing a growing problem as AI platforms consume their content without necessarily sending consumers to their websites. If fewer consumers visit their pages, the advertising inventory and affiliate revenue that traditionally funded that content becomes less valuable.
But those publishers still have something incredibly valuable: authority.
If AI platforms trust, retrieve and cite their content, publishers could increasingly monetise that influence. Alongside advertising inventory designed for consumers, they could start creating inventory specifically designed for AI platforms.
Sponsored product information. Structured brand claims. Machine-readable FAQs. Offers. Specifications. All designed not primarily to persuade a consumer, but to provide useful information that an AI platform can evaluate. This creates an interesting new role for publishers. They stop being sellers of human attention and start becoming sellers of influence.
And it creates an equally interesting opportunity for brands. GEO today is largely about earning influence by ensuring brands are represented accurately and positively across the information sources AI platforms rely upon. Paid Organic creates the possibility of supplementing that earned influence with paid opportunities.
When Paid Becomes Organic
But there is an obvious problem.
If a brand pays to place information into a source that an AI subsequently uses to make a recommendation, is that recommendation really organic? Imagine an automotive company pays a respected publisher to provide structured information about a new electric vehicle. An AI researching cars for a consumer retrieves that information alongside reviews, specifications and other sources. It evaluates everything and independently decides that the vehicle is the best option. The manufacturer didn’t pay for the recommendation. But it did pay for some of the evidence that contributed to it.
Where should disclosure happen?
The publisher can clearly label the original information as sponsored, but that label could easily disappear when the information is retrieved, synthesised with other sources and transformed into an answer. AI platforms will need to understand not just what information says, but its provenance and the commercial relationships behind it.
Without that transparency, Paid Organic could very quickly become problematic. Handled correctly it could however create a genuinely useful new advertising model where brands pay to make their proposition available for consideration, while AI platforms remain responsible for deciding whether it is actually relevant.
For decades, brands have had two ways to influence digital discovery. They could pay to be seen or earn the right to be recommended.
AI is creating something in between.
Brands can now start paying for the opportunity to influence how they appear.
Welcome to the era of Paid Organic.
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson