Discovery is shifting fast: New insights on AI, apps, and the fight for attention

Summary

AI is fundamentally altering how consumers discover products and services, with significant implications for advertising operations. Moloco and BCG's AI Disruption Index maps industries by disruption risk and customer relationship strength. The latest data shows a stark divergence between web and app performance: website traffic is tumbling where AI can directly answer users' queries. News fell 26%, education 22%, and health/fitness 16%, while transactional sites like travel are relatively insulated. This is the 'Google Zero' phenomenon—when a chatbot provides answers, the visit never happens.

In contrast, mobile app usage is far more resilient. Monthly active users grew across most categories, with retail up 6.1%, gaming 9.4%, and traditional finance 4.5%. Education saw a 22.6% jump, driven by AI-native study apps even as legacy players decline. Critically, paid installs are rising in every industry—sports and prediction +20.3%, finance and news +8.4%, on-demand and dating +5.3%—as brands double down on owned channels. Apps offer stickiness, first-party data, and controlled acquisition, making them the strategic priority.

For ad ops decision-makers, the message is actionable: (1) Rebalance spend from SEO-driven web to app install and engagement campaigns. (2) Invest in AI-powered personalization and agentic experiences (e.g., Priceline's Penny) to meet consumers where they are. (3) Build direct relationships through push notifications, loyalty programs, and deep linking to reduce dependence on algorithmic discovery. The industries most exposed are those whose core offering is information; the safest are those with strong transactional relationships. As AI adoption accelerates, the competitive advantage will belong to brands that own their customer relationship end-to-end.

Analyst Note

What's notable here is the clear bifurcation between web and app as discovery layers. The article's data shows AI substituting for the web's informational role, driving traffic declines in verticals where content queries were the primary use case. Meanwhile, app engagement remains resilient—and paid installs are rising in every industry, suggesting apps are increasingly viewed as an owned-channel hedge against AI's decimation of organic web discovery.

The key implication for UA and monetization teams is that the core metric is shifting from web sessions to installed, activated, and retained app users—but this transition is happening as acquisition costs likely climb, given the universal uptick in paid share. Also worth watching is the travel example: the response involves AI-native partnerships and agentic experiences, indicating future discovery may occur inside LLM interfaces rather than within the traditional ad ecosystem. The most exposed industries are those where information is the product; teams dependent on SEO-driven web traffic should consider how their product is represented in AI-generated answers. This is a timely signal that the web-to-app migration is not just a consumer preference shift—it's a structural response to AI-driven discovery.