H/L's Jeremy Cobb on Winning Attention in the Age of AI Search
September 2, 2026
AI-generated search answers have ended the paid placement journey before the first impression and killed publisher revenue. It's time to be more strategic. By Jeremy Cobb, VP of Digital Platforms at H/L.
You’re halfway through Sinners when the question hits you: Does Michael B. Jordan actually have a twin? You’re already on Reels. You switch to search, and AI answers in a single sentence. Window of curiosity closed.
Three years ago, that same question would have launched a small advertising odyssey: a results page with paid placements, a Variety profile surrounded by display and native, half a dozen brand impressions before the answer arrived. Today, an AI-generated sentence ends this journey before the first impression renders. The collapsed detour killed publisher revenue first. It is now reshaping something bigger.
Consumer behavior has shifted to the point where the largest screen in the house is the secondary device in the room. The phone is what people search on, message on, shop on, and look at. The television is still where content plays, but the attention has moved to a smaller screen. The TV dollars of old, built on a model where that screen got the most attention, won’t produce the same results today.
The answer is not to dump CTV into social and YouTube. CTV still does real work, and there are pockets of the medium where attention holds. But the dollars need to be spent more strategically. The awareness spent that once carried is now competing with other priorities, and the planning has to catch up.
CTV owns the screen, not the attentionAI search has gotten faster at answering questions and curing curiosity. Zero-click rates on AI-Overview queries are north of 80%. Pew Research finds that click-through rates to traditional links roughly halve when an AI summary appears, and Ahrefs reports that AI Overviews reduce click-throughs to the top organic result by 58%, nearly double its April 2025 level. None of that, on its own, is a CTV story.
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