How will AI affect this industry?

The above image was created by – you guessed it – AI. Column written by a human, Mar 7, 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) has finally made the leap from science fiction to your smartphone, your web browser, and – sooner or later – your toaster (we’re not joking). Apps like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot promise to write your business emails, make dinner reservations, create software and give you authoritative answers to all your pressing questions.

This is all cool stuff, and some of it even works (a good chunk doesn’t), but the distance between the promise of AI and what it can currently do is pretty substantial. That hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm for the technology, and it hasn’t kept companies from adding the letters “AI” to just about anything they’ve got sitting around. It’s the new “New” and it’s guaranteed to attract attention and investment dollars – the latter likely in the trillions.

What does it mean to you? Maybe a little, likely a lot. Your movie and TV recommendations might get better (then again, they might not) and a lot of mundane tasks like writing emails or producing slide decks can be largely automated. A good deal of the internet, which is already mostly garbage content produced for search engines to read, will now be replaced many times over by even more such articles, but this time written by AI. Instead of humans writing for machines, we’ll have machines creating for other machines, which is an awfully strange outcome.

For folks in the promotional products and custom apparel industry, the impact of AI will be felt in a number of ways. You may find it easier to source the exact product you need for a particular customer, and a flurry of tools to help you create quotes and presentations with AI are bound to hit the market in the next few years (although many of them will be glorified algorithms dressed up as AI). But the biggest effect of AI in the near term is going to be on the main site that your customers use to find things on the internet.

Hard Times at Google

Although Google wasn’t first to market with publicly-available AI tools, they’ve been working on the technology for years, and it’s begun to take over Google Search itself, with nearly half of all search queries now answered with an “AI Overview”. Google has cited a number of reasons (including the standard “we don’t know if this is going to be dangerous” line) for slow-rolling consumer AI tools, but the real reason is that the vast majority of the company’s revenue comes from Google Search and Google Ads. While both of those products can benefit enormously from AI, their revenues are threatened by what AI has to offer.

Think about how Google Search has worked for decades: You enter one or more keywords and hit search. You see a lot of ads, all of which advertisers have paid money to show when those keywords are used. In addition, you see “organic” (non-sponsored) results, which Google doesn’t earn money from but are so valuable that a multibillion industry exists just to help businesses show up in the first 10-20 results for any given term.

We’re all used to sorting through the ads and the organic results, visiting some of the links, hitting the back button a few times, maybe changing our keywords, and then – hopefully – getting to the information we wanted to find. All the while, Google is earning money every time an ad is displayed and even more if it’s clicked. Product results and local results are often mixed in, and those may be sponsored or highlighted as well, putting more money in Google’s coffers. It’s sort of chaotic, but it’s a chaos we’re all used to. And it earns Google hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

The problem with AI for Google is that the technology promises, at its root, to give you the right answer, or at least the best answer, when you ask a question. You can see how this is a problem for a company whose revenue is based on providing a patchwork of different answers, some sponsored and some not, every time someone asks a question. If there is a single best answer and the answer isn’t your business or product, why would you want to pay for that?

Product Searches are Different, But….

In a complex industry with thousands of companies selling tens of thousands of products, you can see how this could be a problem. If someone is looking for your business and they already know the name, that’s easy – just show the answer (you’d be surprised at how many people search for a business name instead of just trying the most likely URL for that business).

But if you’re looking for, say, a “custom logo traveler mug,” Google isn’t going to tell you “this is the best one” or “this is the best company to buy it from” – this would be suicide for their ad business. Those searches will still bring up product and business results (many of which continue to be paid ads and paid product listings) so a user can shop the same way they’ve always shopped. If you’ve spent money on paid ads or SEO to get your business on that first page for traveler mugs, the good news is you’ll probably still be there, and it’s unlikely Google will show an AI summary for that search.

The bad news is that the AI overviews seem to be exerting downward pressure on everything else, even the non-AI results. While a few “knowledge”-oriented categories are seeing higher click-through rates (that is, the measure of how often someone clicks on a link or ad to visit your website) overall click through rates are down, even in the shopping category. No one knows why yet, but maybe if you train your users to expect an AI-generated “answer” for a lot of questions, they’re going to expect it for all of them.

It’s too early in the AI race to make any long-term predictions about how all this will affect promo products and apparel companies that use advertising and SEO for customer acquisition. But all the tried-and-true formulas for ranking – indeed, for customer acquisition on the internet in general – will need to be reevaluated in the coming months and years.

AI’ing your AI

One funny side effect of this latest gold rush is that a lot of tools to help you advertise, rank and acquire customers in the face of AI are now powered by – you guessed it – more AI. There are AI SEO content writers, AI optimization tools and, in a strange bit of irony, Google is slowly replacing its ad sales teams with AI assistants. In an effort to not be left behind by ChatGPT and others, Google has become a snake eating its own tail.

Meanwhile, it’s likely that your CRM software, your order management software and even your accounting package will soon be crowded with AI features of possibly dubious value. Many will try to charge you extra for these improvements (and some, like Microsoft, will backpedal on this) or use them as a justification for charging you more for your existing plan. Like it or not, AI is going to “enhance” (some might say “infect”) nearly every aspect of your business life for the next few years, so you might as well get used to it.

What do we recommend in the face of this onslaught? First, be cautious and skeptical. The “next level” AI upgrade that your software vendor or SEO/SEM company is selling you might not be worth the extra bucks, so press them on the actual ROI. We’ve seen some promising “grunt work” applications – like automating the application of a logo on a virtual sample or writing new product descriptions for your company store – that might be genuine timesavers, so keep an eye out for things that might save you money instead of promising to make you more.

Second, you’re going to have to keep a closer eye on your key online metrics: Click-through rate (CTR) is easy enough to measure in ad platforms, but your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) may bounce around as you find your way through all the technology changes. Be prepared to make changes quickly if those online leads take a plunge with the latest Google update.

Finally, it’s likely that the internet in general is going to become a more volatile customer acquisition channel, at least until we settle in to the “new new” of an AI-powered online shopping process. Consider playing things conservatively until all the dust settles, or at least until the broader outlines become clear. We may be in a new era of knowledge processing and fast answers, but people still gotta buy those travelers mugs….