The Google Trial Was a Wake-Up Call But AI Raises the Stakes in New Ways

Stephanie Famolaro, General Manager, ANZ, The Trade Desk. 

The U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google may revolve around exchanges and auctions, but for most publishers and marketers, its revelations feel familiar. It simply confirms what the industry has long understood: digital advertising has been shaped by a small group of dominant platforms with disproportionate influence. Whatever the verdict, the trial highlights a structural imbalance that has defined online advertising for years.

 

Yet even as regulators scrutinise the past, the future is accelerating far beyond the courtroom. Artificial intelligence is no longer an emerging disruption on the horizon.

 

It is already reshaping how people search, how media is bought, and how brands earn attention. And if the industry is concerned about concentrated power today, the rise of AI has the potential to make those concerns look modest by comparison.

 

During the trial, Google argued that AI already “changes the course of this case.” The implication was simple: if AI Overviews, conversational discovery, and generative search is reshaping consumer behaviour, the company’s dominance in traditional ad display market becomes less relevant. 

 

But that framing misses a critical truth: The models behind AI Overviews and conversational answers depend largely on the content and signals created by publishers, broadcasters, and brands on the open internet. 

 

Even when AI becomes a starting point for consumers, people still compare, browse, research, and engage across premium environments from BVOD and streaming audio to news, podcasts and more.

 

These channels build the trust and familiarity that directly shape AI-generated recommendations. 

 

And in Australia, that value is now a live policy issue. The federal government is proposing a levy on major tech platforms that don’t strike deals with local news organisations, potentially redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars back into local publishers.

 

Whatever form it takes, the proposal recognises that premium news and content create far more value for platforms and advertisers than is currently returned to the businesses that produce it.

 

AI has rewritten the rules of discovery and the reality is even with tools like Generative Engine Optimisation emerging, marketers still can’t muscle their way into an AI-generated answer. There’s no media buy, no clever bid strategy, no “slot” to secure. 

 

Algorithms surface the brands that already command consumer familiarity, meaning strong brands don’t just win in the market, they influence the very signals AI learns from. 

 

This puts new urgency on brand building, with the upper funnel becoming the battleground where familiarity and trust earn the attention of AI algorithms. And this is exactly where premium environments matter. 

 

High-quality content that drives trust, attention and memory amplifies the cues AI relies on. 

 

The IAB consistently finds that premium media delivers stronger brand lift and more meaningful attention than non-premium placements. And the payoff is real: a decade of Kantar data shows brands with strong equity generate four times more value share than weaker brands.

 

If brand building is the strategy, data is the infrastructure that powers it. AI has shifted digital advertising from reactive optimisation to predictive planning, deciding who to reach, where, and with what message before spend is deployed.

 

This evolution calls for a more disciplined approach. AI tends to perform best when it can learn from clean, consented signals that move easily across interoperable environments. Equally crucial is transparency: AI cannot learn what drives outcomes in opaque, walled garden platforms. 

 

To build accurate predictive models, brands need to activate data in premium, measurable environments where real signals of attention, trust, and performance feed future predictions.

 

The next competitive edge won’t come from amassing more data, but from strengthening the signals that matter. Brands that unify consented data, connect it across channels, and feed consistent, privacy-safe insights into their media planning systems will be well placed to benefit to benefit from AI driven planning. 

 

The Google trial exposed how fragile parts of the advertising ecosystem have become while AI shows how quickly it must evolve. In an AI-shaped discovery world, the brands that win won’t be the ones shouting at the point of conversion, they’ll be the ones consumers already trust, recognise, and remember long before the machine delivers the first answer.