Taboola study finds advertisers want AI beyond walled gardens

MUMBAI: The bots are buying media now but advertisers seem tired of keeping them locked inside the same digital walls. A new study from Taboola suggests that marketers are becoming increasingly comfortable handing performance advertising decisions over to AI systems but many now want those capabilities to stretch beyond the tightly controlled ecosystems of search and social giants. The research, titled The Agentic Advantage in Performance Marketing: Securing Incremental Growth Beyond Search and Social, found that 76 per cent of advertisers are already seeing meaningful performance gains from AI-powered advertising solutions, particularly across search and social platforms.

But the honeymoon with the so-called “walled gardens” may be showing signs of strain.

According to the study, 80 per cent of advertisers said they would immediately increase spending on the open web if similar agentic AI capabilities were available outside the dominant platforms. Even more notably, 86 per cent said they would be willing to redirect up to a quarter of their performance advertising budgets towards such solutions.

The findings point to a growing shift in advertiser thinking as AI-driven media buying evolves from optimisation tool to autonomous decision-maker.

The report highlights how marketers are increasingly chasing “incremental growth” beyond the crowded confines of search and social, especially as competition and acquisition costs continue to intensify inside those ecosystems.

However, while AI may be accelerating campaign performance, integrating these systems into real-world workflows appears far less frictionless than the pitch decks suggest.

Interestingly, the biggest advertisers seem to be struggling the most.

The study found that workflow integration has emerged as the single largest challenge in adopting agentic AI tools. Only 9 per cent of advertisers spending between $300,000 and $499,000 per month identified integration as a major hurdle. But among companies spending between $1 million and $4.9 million monthly, that figure shot up sharply to 74 per cent.

In other words, the larger the advertising machine, the harder it appears to retrofit it with autonomous intelligence.

Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda said advertisers are increasingly looking for AI systems that can continuously learn, adjust campaigns in real time and optimise every impression towards measurable outcomes.

The research also arrives shortly after Taboola introduced Realize+, its own agentic advertising platform launched in April 2026. The system combines the company’s supply infrastructure, first-party data and AI-powered automation through tools such as a Decision Engine that reallocates budgets dynamically and an Element Generator that automates creative production and targeting.

The company has now rolled out the beta version of Realize+ as it pushes deeper into the growing battle for AI-led performance advertising beyond traditional search and social strongholds.

And if the industry’s latest mood is anything to go by, advertisers no longer just want AI to place ads, they want it to think, react and spend like a media buyer that never sleeps.