This post was created in partnership with Moloco
Are Google AI overviews wreaking havoc on your brand’s discovery strategy? How likely is it that AI might make your brand’s offers obsolete?
During a CES 2026 ADWEEK House session co-hosted with Moloco, Jenny Rooney, chief brand and community officer at ADWEEK, sat down with Paul D’Arcy, Moloco’s CMO, to preview his firm’s AI Disruption Index and what it means for the traditional marketing funnel.
Doing battle with the AI overview
“When an AI overview on Google is shown, 80% of the time, there is no click,” D’Arcy said. “That’s a rate of behavioral change that really is unprecedented.”
Another concerning stat? D’Arcy shared that 75% of consumers believe agents and large language models (LLMs) could help them find better deals than they can find on their own.
These findings prompted Moloco, in collaboration with BCG, to develop the AI Disruption Index, a framework that shows how exposed brands are to AI-driven disruption in discovery and core services. Based on the strength of customer relationships and the likelihood that AI could replace or intercept key business functions, 15 verticals were mapped across four quadrants.
According to D’Arcy, the “most worrisome” quadrant includes industries with weaker customer relationships and a higher risk of AI disruption. Examples include travel, retail and commerce, education, and news.
Industries that have customer relationships that aren’t as strong as others, but a lower risk of AI disruption, are found within the “undefended” quadrant. “Gaming is a great example of this,” explained D’Arcy, since it’s not yet being disrupted by LLMs. “Here, the key strategies are often figuring out how to build more loyalty and longer-term relationships.”
Meanwhile, industries with strong customer relationships and less disruption are labeled as “secured,” at least for now. Financial services and social media sit here because they typically have long-term consumer loyalty and haven’t been as susceptible to disruption from text-based content, he explained.
The last quadrant, D’Arcy shared, is “contested,” and features productivity tools like Slack, Microsoft Office, and Dropbox. Here, loyalty is high, but so is AI disruption risk. “These organizations are quickly becoming AI-first in a lot of their offerings, so that there aren’t alternative solutions to compete with them.”
Marketing maneuvers in the matrix
Brands that traditionally relied on organic search traffic for discovery have been hardest hit. “These businesses have been feeling this pain for more than a year at this point,” he said.
Where consumers used to go to different sites, read reviews, and look at buyer’s guides, now they just ask a single question of an LLM and get an answer. “It’s replaced that entire discovery process,” D’Arcy explained. “It’s a very strong, disruptive product experience that’s leading to deeper and deeper adoption at a very rapid rate.”
