Insights on the future of search-related advertising and artificial intelligence

Call for Papers

Insights on the future of search-related advertising and artificial intelligence

Journal:Journal of Advertising Research

Manuscript deadline: 7 September 2026

This special issue focuses on how generative AI, zero‑click results, conversational interfaces, and AI‑mediated recommendations are transforming search and, with it, search-related advertising. It asks how AI is changing search from a user‑initiated “pull” activity into AI‑led, ambient, and sometimes autonomous experiences—and what this means for targeting, consumer psychology, metrics, pricing, and ethics in advertising.

Special Issue Editors

• Kirsten Cowan, University of Edinburgh

• Yang Feng, University of Florida

• Seth Ketron, University of St. Thomas

• Aidin Namin, Loyola Marymount University

Key themes (examples)

• Advertisers’ strategies in AI-generated and zero‑click search environments

• Effects of AI‑generated content on search results, attention, memory, choice, and bias

• New SEO and ad placement logics under AI‑driven ranking and summaries

• AI’s role in reshaping consumer journeys, interfaces (voice, image, multimodal), and experiential search

• Differences across cultures, segments, and contexts in AI‑mediated search use

• Paid vs organic influence and disclosure inside conversational AI; trust and autonomy

• Impacts on ad pricing, revenue models, competition, and brand visibility

• Transparency, explainability, ethics, privacy, and environmental sustainability of AI‑driven search and ad ecosystems

Submission details

• Submissions open 1 June 2026 and close 7 September 2026, via the JAR submission portal.

• Target length: about 7,000 words (excluding references); online appendices are encouraged for supplementary materials.

• The issue welcomes conceptual and empirical work (experiments, surveys, modeling, qualitative, mixed methods) that makes a substantive theoretical and practical contribution to advertising research.

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