6 AI Trends Shaping Traffic Buying. Insights from Alex Vasekin

In business, a couple of years rarely feels like enough time to change everything. And yet, that is exactly what we are witnessing today: a technological revolution reshaping how companies operate and how entire workflows are built.

Yes, we are talking about AI.

This July, PropellerAds CEO Alex Vasekin took the stage at Conversion Conf 2026 in Limassol to explain what AI has actually changed inside an ad network over the past few years. His insights are backed by what we see every day at PropellerAds: an ecosystem reaching 2 billion+ monthly active users and thousands of campaigns launched by advertisers worldwide.

Since early 2025, PropellerAds has been integrating AI into virtually every internal process: from code review and agentic coding in development to a campaign assistant and landing page generator for advertisers, AI-powered moderation and self-serve analytics in operations, and even a company-wide “second brain” for management.

But what do these changes mean for traffic buyers, and, more importantly, for the way you make money?

Below, we break down the six major AI trends reshaping traffic buying, the data behind them, and what buyers can do about each one.

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Trend 1: The Market Is Flooded

AI has lowered the barrier to building a product: you no longer necessarily need years of experience, a large team of specialists, or a massive budget. What you need is a solid idea, and the right AI tools to bring it to life.

The result is predictable: a market packed with new apps, often competing in the same categories and for the same target audiences. As competition grows, traffic becomes more expensive.

From a business perspective, this situation demands fast decisions. According to Alex, the right response depends on which side of the market you are on.

• If you build products: choose your strategy consciously:
  1. The retention approach: building a small number of polished, LTV-focused products – can produce a viral hit, but the results are highly unpredictable.
  2.  The mass approach: launching more products, moving through fast development cycles, and using AI to scale production is more pragmatic: volume helps offset the role of luck and creates steadier growth. Alex’s own bet is on the second strategy.
• If you run offers: ride the wave. Every new product creates a new offer, and someone needs to promote it. Affiliates should automate routine tasks, add more offers, test them quickly, and scale the winners.
• If you buy media: don’t rely on a single bid. Divide traffic into different price tiers instead. PropellerAds analyzed 1,000 US placements and more than 100 million impressions and found that CPMs for similar traffic can vary by up to 1,000x. More expensive tiers also tend to bring higher-quality conversions. Since one bid reaches only one price tier, run separate campaigns for low-, medium-, and high-cost traffic. The most advanced buyers use as many as 30–40 bid levels.

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Trend 2: Buying Goes Agentic

Here is the next major trend: manual media buying is going extinct. eMarketer calls 2026 “the beginning of the end” for manual programmatic buying.

The market is moving from generative AI, which helps people create content, to agentic AI, which can complete tasks and make decisions on its own.

PropellerAds offers buyers two ways to make this shift, depending on whether they already have their own automation system.

• If you don’t have your own system: use NIKO, the AI agent built into the PropellerAds Self-Serve Platform (SSP). You describe your offer in a chat, and NIKO turns it into a live campaign. It then continues to optimize the campaign by removing weak zones, scaling the winners, and reporting the results.

There is no complicated dashboard to learn. According to internal data, NIKO AI Agent can take a campaign from brief to launch in minutes, make the first launch around five times faster than the manual process, and keep 52% of its users coming back.

• If you already have an automation system: use the PropellerAds MCP connector. It connects your AI agent directly to PropellerAds, allowing it to launch, manage, and analyze campaigns at scale. The connector is open-source and works with Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor.

Alex also shared two real cases from the platform.

In the first, PropellerAds media buyers built a Keitaro-class tracking system in just one week. AI handled the coding, while MCP connectors linked the tracker to the company’s internal systems. The system is already running in production and has been stress-tested at a scale of more than 200 million daily impressions.

The second case involved a media buyer with no development experience.

The takeaway: scaling is no longer about how many campaigns your team can launch manually. Whether you use NIKO or connect your own AI agent, automation lets you launch more campaigns, optimize them continuously, and spend more time on strategy.

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Trend 3: Data Is the New Bid

As campaign buying becomes more automated, results increasingly depend on the data behind that automation.

The network’s algorithm learns from your conversions. Every funnel event you share helps it understand which users are more likely to convert, and bring more of them to your campaigns.

If you share nothing, the algorithm has to work with incomplete data. As a result, you may get less relevant traffic and pay more for each conversion.

Our Q2 2026 data shows a clear pattern: advertiser LTV increases with every type of funnel event sent back to the network:

The practical rule is simple: share the entire funnel through an S2S postback. Send the install as the first goal, the deposit as the second, and rebills, redeposits, and other valuable actions as additional goals.

The more data you share, the better the network can optimize your campaigns for revenue – not just for leads. It also allows you to build conversion audiences, identify users who have already converted, and target them again in separate campaigns. 

For an advertiser who shares nothing, those tools simply do not exist.

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Trend 4: The Network Knows You

But conversion data is only part of the picture. The network also learns from what you tell it.

This is where hyper-personalization begins. Every conversation you have with NIKO AI Agent, your account manager, or the support team provides valuable context. Combined with your campaign history, results, and goals, this information feeds our company-wide “second brain.”

The system learns from these signals and builds a better understanding of your business. This allows it to tailor campaign launches and optimization to your goals and campaign history, rather than relying on general recommendations based on average results.

What you tell NIKO or your account manager becomes part of the system’s input and shapes how it recommends launching and optimizing your campaigns.

The takeaway: the more the network understands your goals, the faster it can adapt its campaigns and recommendations to your business.

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Trend 5: Creatives Make Themselves

Once AI can launch and optimize campaigns, creative production is the next step to automate.

Creatives are not disappearing. But advertisers no longer need to produce every banner, text, or push copy manually. Major platforms are already generating these assets as part of the campaign launch.

At PropellerAds, NIKO follows the same approach. You can launch a campaign without preparing the creatives yourself: the network generates and personalizes them for you.

As platforms take over more creative production, banners and push copy become less of a competitive advantage. The part you can control and improve is what happens after the click.

The post-click experience, especially your pre-landers and PWAs, is where your decisions still have the greatest impact. These assets explain the offer, warm up users, filter the audience, and guide interested users toward conversion. That makes them part of the product itself, not just an extra step between the ad and the offer.

A strong post-click flow can improve your conversion rate. Without it, one of the few ways left to compete is to bid more than the next buyer.

The takeaway: let AI handle the production of ad creatives, but keep investing in your post-click funnel. A strong pre-lander or PWA can turn more of your paid clicks into conversions.

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Trend 6: Moderation Gets Even Smarter

AI not only make campaign launches faster. It speeds up moderation too.

AI moderation and global monitoring tools can now detect many policy violations in minutes instead of days. Networks are also getting better at identifying the people behind those campaigns and blocking related accounts.

Automated checks are getting so much faster across the industry, leaving less time for gray-zone campaigns to run. Building a business around slow manual reviews is no longer a reliable strategy.

In other words, working transparently pays. 

Buyers who share conversion data, complete verification, and run compliant funnels can get more value from the platform: from better campaign optimization to conversion audiences and more relevant recommendations.

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Six Trends, One Mindset

The recap fits in six lines:

All six trends point to the same shift in how we use AI.

The first approach is to treat AI as a tool. It writes code, creates assets, or completes individual tasks, while you design and manage the entire process. This approach works, but the process only improves when you change it.

The second approach is to treat AI as an operating system. You set the goal, while AI runs the routine, makes decisions, and adapts based on the results. You only step in when something needs to be corrected. This is how NIKO AI Agent works, and the direction Alex believes both PropellerAds and traffic buyers should take.

AI is making campaign execution faster, cheaper, and available to everyone. As a result, simply using AI is no longer an advantage. What matters is what you bring to it: a strong funnel, detailed conversion data, fast decisions, and enough context to understand your business. AI can run the process—but these inputs determine how well it performs.