Closed, AI-powered ecosystems built by dominant tech platforms—Google, Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI, Amazon—where content is ingested, processed, summarized by AI, and delivered without attribution or links.
The Big Tech Walled Gardens definition
Today's walled gardens are AI-driven environments that shape, generate, and filter content, guiding users through predictions and synthesized answers rather than a set of pages. They replace open search with assistive prediction embedded into daily life.
How Jason Barnard uses Big Tech Walled Gardens definition
We prepare clients to be visible inside these systems by feeding the AI internally with structured data and maintaining brand presence without relying on traffic. We accept that being the default answer is the new homepage and work to ensure that answer is accurate and branded.
Why Big Tech Walled Gardens matters to digital marketers
The open web is shrinking. You now compete to be included in the AI's internal model of the world. If you are not in the Knowledge Graph, present in the Web Index, and reinforced in LLM outputs, you don't exist to the user in the walled garden. Brands must adapt or become algorithmically irrelevant.
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