Generative AI Advertising Taxonomy

Generative AI Advertising as a Problem of Trustworthy Commercial Intervention

This paper argues that generative AI fundamentally transforms advertising by enabling interventions on the generative process itself rather than discrete content placement. The authors introduce a taxonomy of influence tiers—product mentions, information framing, behavioral redirection, and long-term preference shaping—and analyze how these manifest across RAG and agentic pipelines. They find that deployed systems focus on the most observable tier while more consequential, latent forms of commercial influence lack detection, measurement, or disclosure frameworks. The central challenge posed is whether commercial influence in generative systems can be made attributable, measurable, contestable, and aligned with user welfare.