When the Click Disappears: What Becomes of Industrial and Office Marketing?

Original on Substack: https://purenicholas.substack.com/p/when-the-click-disappears-what-becomes

Industrial and office marketing still feels like it’s running on Windows XP. A few PDFs, a Costar listing, maybe a LoopNet eBlast and post to LinkedIn if someone remembered the password. The rest gets handed off to the broker network… which usually means someone forwarding a flyer from 2017 that lands in someone’s email spam box

That used to work. But discovery is changing, and the people doing the discovering have changed too.

There’s a quiet generational handoff happening in commercial real estate. The next wave of decision-makers — asset managers, analysts, tenants, and site selectors — grew up in data ecosystems, not directories. They expect clarity, speed, and transparency. They don’t want to “call for details.” They want to query for quick details.

Yet our industry is still pandering to ghosts without looking ahead. It’s acting like the buyer is an old man with a newspaper and a Rolodex full of brokers, instead of a team of thirty-somethings armed with ChatGPT, Power BI, and two monitors full of dashboards.

If clicks are disappearing and AI assistants are becoming the new gatekeepers of discovery, what happens to properties that only exist behind paywalls and PDFs?

When someone asks an AI, “Find 100,000 square feet of flexible manufacturing space within 40 miles of Milwaukee with high power and nearby logistics routes,” will your property even be part of the conversation?

That’s the disruption staring industrial and office marketing in the face right now.

The systems were built for human browsing, not machine understanding. They were designed to look good (if you could honestly even call it that) not to be found. And as the next generation of site selectors increasingly leans on AI-driven sourcing and verification, the entire premise of “marketing” will shift from making noise to making trust discoverable.

In this world, brand becomes the constant. Not the logo or the tagline kind of brand, but the brand that signals authority, consistency, and credibility. The kind that both humans and machines recognize as reliable.

Because when the clicks go away, what’s left standing is the brand.

And most of the industry is still pretending that the old playbook will get them there.