The advertising industry has spent decades figuring out how to insert itself into the moments when people are looking for something. Now it is preparing to do the same when people are talking to something.

WPP's latest advertising forecasts, released Monday, included projections for AI search spending for the first time — a tacit acknowledgment that the category has graduated from curiosity to line item. The holding company estimated that advertising within conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT, which began accepting ads less than six months ago, would account for 39.2 percent of all search advertising revenue by 2031, generating roughly $100 billion annually. This year, the figure is a rather more modest $301 million, or 1.9 percent of search revenue.

(One imagines the traditional search engines are taking this as calmly as a homeowner watches a crack spread across the foundation.)

The appeal, according to practitioners, is contextual richness. "AI search can understand far more than a traditional keyword query: the conversation, the user's intent, the decision criteria," said Andy Arnett, head of search at Incubeta, a media agency that is running tests on ChatGPT. Mr. Arnett suggested that this deeper understanding could make each advertising impression more valuable — assuming, of course, that users do not find the intrusion off-putting.

A separate forecast from the consultancy Madison & Wall, also published Monday, projected that global advertising revenue would grow 8.3 percent in 2026, with search accounting for 9.3 percent of that growth. Neither forecast registered significant concern about geopolitical turbulence, a posture that Luke Stillman, managing director at Madison & Wall, described as "not totally irrational" while acknowledging it was "still surprising."

Mr. Arnett offered a note of caution. "A major scandal around unsafe AI answers would slow spend quickly," he said. The challenge for OpenAI, he added, is demonstrating that advertisers can achieve performance without compromising brand safety or user trust.

Which is to say: the money is ready to pour in, just as soon as everyone is sure the machine will not embarrass them.

Original story published in Digiday: "WPP forecasts AI search to become fastest growing ad channel", by Sam Bradley