The Death of Marketing (And What Replaces It)

AI is the biggest user of the internet.

Most emails are read first by AI.

Most websites are crawled by AI before humans.

Most API calls are software-to-software.

Most content is consumed, parsed, and summarized by LLMs, then served back as a short answer.

Within five years, we will go from 70% to 99% all decisions made by AI. We set the goals. AI will figure things out to achieve the goal.

Your customer is now an AI agent with a task, a budget, and zero brand loyalty.

Every marketing playbook ever written assumed a human-in-the-loop. SEO, paid ads, cold outreach, content marketing, brand awareness, funnel optimization. All of it is designed to influence a person making a decision. That person doesn’t give a sh*t anymore.

The Four Channels That Survive

Marketing spend: 2020 vs 2030

  2020                          2030
  ┌─────────────────────────┐   ┌─────────────────────────┐
  │█████████████████ SEO 60%│   │░ SEO 2%                 │
  │████████ Paid Ads    25% │   │███ Paid 10%             │
  │███ Brand            10% │   │██████ Brand 23%         │
  │░ AI Placement        0% │   │████████████████ AI  65% │
  └─────────────────────────┘   └─────────────────────────┘

1. Government-mandated purchases

Governments will create approved vendor lists. Medical, defense, education, and infrastructure. Certain products will be “certified” and AI agents will be required to pick from those lists.

This is the oligarch channel. If you have lobbyists and connections, you get on the list. If you’re a bootstrapped founder, you don’t. Ignore this one unless you’re playing that game.

US federal contract spending (Source: GAO)

  2024:  $755,000,000,000

  Top categories:
  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ Defense & weapons systems          42%     │
  │ IT & cybersecurity                 18%     │
  │ Drugs & biologicals                12%     │
  │ Professional services               9%     │
  │ Construction & facilities           7%     │
  │ Everything else                    12%     │
  └────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  12,600+ pre-approved vendors on GSA Schedule.
  You need certification to even bid.

2. AI picks you because you’re genuinely the best

This is the one that matters most.

Today, AI recommends products based on reviews, ratings, comparison articles, Reddit threads. The obvious first move is gaming this: buy fake reviews on Capterra, Trustpilot, Reddit... And that will work... for a few more years.

Then AI will get smarter. Models will start signing up for free trials themselves. Running actual evaluations. Testing your product against 50 competitors for a specific use case and measuring real outcomes. An AI agent picking a cold outreach tool will sign up for 10 of them, run the same sequence on all 10 for a week, and just pick the one that landed the most replies.

Short-term game: be listed everywhere you can, on all launchpads, directories, listicles, ratings...

The endgame: the best product wins. Every time. For every specific use case.

3. Human identity purchases (the “T-shirt” effect)

You use Notion because you’re a “Notion person.” You use Linear because you identify with the aesthetic. You might be a Mac person, Linux person, iPhone person...You follow a founder on X, admire their journey, and want to support them by using their product. You’re wearing their T-shirt.

This is pure human tribalism. The one channel where personal brand absolutely dominates.

Creator economy revenue

  2020:  $20B    ████
  2023:  $100B   ████████████████████
  2025:  $250B+  ██████████████████████████████████████████████████

  People buy founders. The numbers prove it.

The founders who build in public, share real numbers, tell real stories...or simply are remarkable and interesting human beings... they create a gravitational pull that AI agents will never replicate. Their users are making identity decisions.

4. Paid placements inside AI

This is the new Google Ads.

Since AI agents will make most purchasing decisions, brands will pay to be prioritized in model outputs. Think of it as lobbying inside LLMs. Training data sponsorships. Preferred vendor deals with AI platforms.

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta... they’re all going to build ad layers into their agent ecosystems. Your AI assistant will recommend a SaaS, and that recommendation will be paid for. Just like Google search results today, but invisible. The user won’t even know.

AI advertising market (Source: Business Research Co.)

  2023:  $8.6B
  2025:  $11.2B
  2030:  $36.3B   (CAGR 26.7%)
  2033:  $81.6B

  ████
  ████████
  ████████████████████
  ████████████████████████████████████████████

  Meanwhile, AI search projected to handle 50%
  of all queries by 2028. (Gartner)

  Every one of those queries = ad inventory.

This will be massive. It will also be pay-to-play. The companies spending millions on Google Ads today will redirect those budgets to AI placement. If you’re bootstrapped, you’re priced out of this channel too.

The Founder Playbook

So if you strip away the channels that require lobbyists and ad budgets, you’re left with two that actually matter for indie founders and small bootstrapped teams:

Build the best product for a specific niche. AI agents will do real evaluations. Gaming reviews is a short-term play that dies fast. Being genuinely the best at one specific job is the best marketing strategy in an AI-first world.

The single best strategy here is to go after long-tail niche markets, just so that you reduce the competition and aim at being the best or one of the best among a few.

Build an audience that buys YOU. Personal brand is the strongest moat that’s left. The founder with 100K followers who share their journey will outsell the faceless SaaS with a bigger feature set. Every time.

Everything else, the traditional SEO playbooks, the content calendars, the conversion rate optimization, the paid acquisition funnels... all of it was built for a world where humans do the searching. That world is ending soon.

The founders who figure this out early will own the next decade. Everyone else will be optimizing landing pages for an audience that no longer exists.

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First published here (on X articles).

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