Google, Meta, Unity, and Moloco spend their days trying to take advertising dollars away from each other. This week they did something that makes no competitive sense: they collectively wired more than $1 billion into a single Israeli company, at a $2.7 billion valuation, on terms that guarantee none of them will ever control it.

The company is AppsFlyer, founded in Herzliya in 2011. It is not a household name, because its job is invisible: it tells advertisers which ad actually caused a sale. That sounds dull until you realize it is the question the entire digital ad business is built on, and that artificial intelligence is quietly making it impossible to answer.

Here is the mechanism, because it matters. For thirty years, online advertising rested on one humble event: the click. You saw an ad, you clicked, you bought, and a cookie stitched those three moments into a clean line a marketer could read. AI is severing that line at both ends.

At the top, people have stopped clicking. In the first four months of 2026, fewer than one in three Google searches sent the user to any website at all (68 percent ended with no click, up from 49 percent in 2019). The answer now arrives inside the chatbot or the AI overview, and the visit that used to be measurable never happens.

At the bottom, the buyer is increasingly not a human. AI agents now research and check out on your behalf: OpenAI and Stripe shipped an in-chat checkout last........

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