A billion people now turn to AI daily to search, decide, and discover, quietly reshaping referral traffic for publishers and inventory access for advertisers. David Goddard, SVP of Business Development at DoubleVerify, has watched that shift ripple through the entire ecosystem.

The tension he’s tracking sits inside the content itself: consumers trust AI to help them decide, but grow wary the moment it starts producing what they consume, flooding feeds with “AI slop.” His bet is that knowing which bots add value — and which just add cost — will define brand safety for the next decade of media.