Jay Bhatti has 20+ years of experience across SEO, NLP, machine learning, and large-scale data systems. He was an early founder in semantic search and spent nearly five years at Microsoft.
Last week, Mitch Stoller made the case for the problem. This week I’m making the case for the opportunity.
Because the four declarations that follow aren’t warnings. They’re signals. The same kind of signals I’ve been trained over 20 years of systems-building to recognize: the early architecture of a new platform that hasn’t yet been priced by the market.
Declaration V: The Duopoly Is Broken — And the Window Is Open
I spent nearly five years at Microsoft, and one thing I internalized there is how platform transitions actually happen. Microsoft didn’t dethrone Google in search. They didn’t try to. They waited for a new interface layer — AI — and built for that instead.
From my view, the same thing is happening in marketing. Google and Meta built their moats on a world where consumers discovered through search boxes and social feeds. Both moats have been compromised — Google by AI Overviews cannibalizing its own click economy, Meta by Apple’s privacy framework destroying its attribution machine.
The AIM landscape that has emerged looks nothing like the duopoly it’s replacing. Three to five foundational models — OpenAI, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot — competing for users, none yet dominant, all building ad infrastructure that is in the equivalent of its 2004 or 2015 development phase.
I’ve had early access to OpenAI’s ads beta. The CPCs look like early AdWords. The contextual relevance is unlike anything the previous era produced. The competition is thin. This is what a window looks like when it’s open.
Declaration VI: This Is Not a Channel — It Is a Paradigm Shift
I want to be precise about this one because I see the misframing constantly in agency pitches and marketing conference panels.
Adding an ‘AI strategy’ to your existing marketing mix is not AIM. Experimenting with Perplexity ads while maintaining your Google and Meta spend as primary channels is not AIM. Optimizing your existing content for AI Overviews while leaving the rest of your marketing architecture unchanged is not AIM.
A paradigm shift means the underlying model of how marketing works has changed. The signal type has changed. The matching mechanism has changed. The optimization discipline has changed. The measurement model has changed.
The brands that won Era One didn’t add AdWords to their Yellow Pages budgets. The brands that won Era Two didn’t add Facebook to their TV spend while treating it as a supplementary channel. They rebuilt their marketing around the new reality.
That’s what AIM requires. Not an addition. A reconstruction.
Declaration VII: Whoever Defines the Vocabulary Owns the Category
This one is about the competitive dynamics of the category itself, not just brand marketing.
Every new marketing era has been defined by the people who named its concepts first. The practitioners who coined ‘quality score’ and ‘CPC’ shaped Era One. The practitioners who coined ‘lookalike audience’ and ‘creative fatigue’ shaped Era Two.
Era Three is still naming itself. AIM. AIO. AEO. GEO. Bot’s Journey. Recommendation Share. Paid AIM. Conversational insertion. CPR — Cost Per Recommendation. These are not established standards. They are contested definitions. The organizations that publish and proliferate the winning vocabulary will own the intellectual framework of the category.
This is why we publish the AIM Glossary. Why we write the AIM Manifesto. Why we name things precisely and defend those names in public. The category definition is still being written.
Declaration VIII: First Movers Will Build the Empires of the Next Decade
I want to close with data, not rhetoric.
The advantage of moving first in a new platform is not just about lower CPCs and less competition — though those matter. It’s about the compounding data advantage that early movers accumulate.
The brands that ran early Google campaigns built keyword-level performance data that their competitors spent years trying to catch up to. The brands that ran early Meta campaigns built audience models and creative libraries that compounded for years. The brands that run early AIM campaigns right now are building LLM performance data, entity authority signals, and organic recommendation share that will compound the same way — in a market where those advantages will eventually be very expensive to buy.
The first movers aren’t just getting early access to a channel. They’re building the data assets that define their competitive position for the next five to ten years.
The window is open. The question is whether you walk through it.
Next week: Mitch closes the series with what we’re building — and our commitments.