Here’s a reality that should give every marketer pause: consumers now trust AI recommendations more than almost anything else they read online. When someone searches for a solution and an AI suggests your product, they’re increasingly likely to purchase—regardless of whether they’ve ever heard of your brand. The authority that businesses spent years building through content marketing and SEO is quietly transferring to artificial intelligence.
This shift represents one of the most profound changes in digital marketing since the advent of search engines themselves. And yet, as Garrett Hammonds, Partner at Hammonds Media & Marketing, explains, the fundamentals of great marketing remain remarkably constant—even as the landscape transforms beneath our feet.
The Paradox of Constant Change
Hammonds has witnessed the digital marketing evolution firsthand. Having managed over $16 million in annual ad budgets and helped businesses generate more than $100 million in revenue, he brings a practitioner’s perspective to the AI revolution currently reshaping his industry.
“We get a new update every single week, every single day sometimes,” Hammonds observes. “OpenAI is now trying to throw their hat in the ring. And you see innovations across platforms where these new competitors are starting to come up.”
Yet amid this turbulence, Hammonds identifies something counterintuitive: the principles that drove marketing success decades ago still apply. Website development, SEO, and digital advertising are all being disrupted by AI, but the core question remains unchanged—who is your audience, and what do they need?
“One of the things that I’ve found the most interesting is through all of that, really some of our core principles, it always stays pretty constant,” he explains. “We’re gonna have stuff that changes, but we also need to remember the things that don’t change as those come along, which is easy to get caught up in the hype.”
The Customer Journey Gets Compressed
The traditional marketing funnel—awareness, consideration, decision, purchase—has long served as the framework for customer acquisition. But AI is fundamentally disrupting this linear model. Stages that once happened sequentially now occur simultaneously.
Consider how consumers interact with AI assistants today. A potential customer can learn about a product, receive personalized recommendations, compare options, and even begin onboarding—all in a single conversation. The neat stages of the buyer’s journey are collapsing into compressed, multi-dimensional experiences.
“We don’t shop that way. We don’t think that way anymore,” Hammonds acknowledges. “It’s totally different because of the technology that is available to us, the AI innovations. We’re going to be having AI agents go out and do shopping for us as soon as we know what we want.”
This compression creates both challenges and opportunities. Marketers can no longer assume they’ll have multiple touchpoints to influence a purchase decision. But those who understand their customers deeply enough can create experiences that resonate across compressed journeys.
The Authority Shift
Perhaps the most significant transformation lies in how authority is established and perceived. Traditional SEO operated on a clear premise: create authoritative content, earn rankings, demonstrate expertise to visitors. But when AI becomes the intermediary between consumers and businesses, the dynamics shift dramatically.
“The authority is less on you to prove that you have authority and more on how are we going to get AI to validate that they are the authoritative figure in this conversation and they’ve validated our product and brand for us,” Hammonds explains.
This creates a fascinating paradox. Consumers trust AI recommendations even though, as Hammonds points out, these systems still make mistakes—including generating links to pages that don’t exist. Yet users accept AI guidance with remarkable faith.
“AI gets it wrong a decent amount of the time still. We have these even hallucinated links leading you to 404 pages,” Hammonds notes. “But I’m exactly like that. Whatever it puts out, I’m like, yeah, that’s all I need right now.”
The Browser Battle and Privacy Reckoning
OpenAI’s announcement of a new browser represents more than another entry in the browser market—it signals a fundamental shift in how we interact with information online. While Google maintains roughly 90% market share, the emergence of an AI-native browsing experience could reshape consumer behavior in ways that ripple throughout digital marketing.
“This is probably one of the bigger moves that we’ve seen in about a decade from a competitive browser,” Hammonds observes. “Google published the paper on Transformers that started the movement for LLMs that we have today. It’s not like they’re behind in actual functionality. But every single time, Google has AI mode… OpenAI says, well, let’s make an AI assistant focused browser and try and push that out first.”
Yet this innovation comes with significant privacy implications. When AI systems capture browsing history, search queries, and behavioral data in real-time, the potential for exploitation grows. The conversation about data privacy needs to evolve into a conversation about data ownership.
“We need to get into not just a privacy conversation, but into a data ownership conversation,” the discussion revealed. “I own my data—how can I monetize my own data? You want my search history, you want to know what I’ve been doing, then pay me for that.”
From Targeting to Context
The industry’s obsession with hyper-targeting—identifying specific audiences based on demographics, behaviors, and affinities—may be approaching its limits. As privacy regulations tighten and third-party cookies disappear, marketers are rediscovering the value of contextual approaches.
“I’m really pushing folks towards trying to have more contextual marketing models even online,” Hammonds advises. “If you’re selling a sports product, why in the world wouldn’t you want to go to a website related to sports to be able to sell the sports product?”
This represents a return to fundamental marketing wisdom. Rather than hunting down individual consumers across the internet—Hammonds notes that “targeting” itself is a hunting term—contextual marketing meets audiences where their interests naturally take them.
Knowing Your Customer—Really Knowing Them
Despite all the technological change, one principle stands out as increasingly important: deep customer understanding. Not the surface-level personas that get passed around marketing teams, but genuine insight into how customers make decisions, what they value, and what motivates their choices.
Hammonds uses an unconventional exercise with clients: asking them to imagine what their ideal customer keeps in their pockets. It’s a simple prompt that often reveals surprising insights about customer lifestyles and priorities.
“We need to really know how people are making decisions throughout a buyer’s journey, what they do for fun. What they may keep in their pockets is a fun exercise I do with some of my clients,” Hammonds explains. “It’s not gonna tell you everything, but it surprises you sometimes.”
This depth of understanding becomes even more critical as the customer journey compresses and AI mediates more interactions. Brands that truly know their customers can create experiences that resonate even when traditional touchpoints disappear.
The Path Forward
As AI continues to transform digital marketing, success will belong to those who can hold two seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously: everything is changing, and the fundamentals remain constant.
The tools will evolve. Browsers may transform into AI assistants. Search engines might become conversation partners. Customer journeys will compress further. But the businesses that thrive will be those that never lose sight of the essential questions: Who are we serving? What do they need? How can we deliver genuine value?
“We have to focus in on how do we connect in a genuine and authentic way with our customers,” Hammonds concludes. “Part of that’s just having real conversations… we have to actually learn about their stories.”
In an age of artificial intelligence, authentic human understanding may be the ultimate competitive advantage.
Listen to the full conversation on The Chris Hood Show, available on YouTube and all major podcast platforms.