> or the sponsored advertiser will somehow be on recommendation list of AI answer?

LLMs aren't new. PPC ads are as as old as the mountains. People have been trying[1] to glue them together (with RAG), for quite some time now.

IIUC, this also happens to be the core strategy of a well known "AI" startup that made a big show about trying to buy TikTok and more recently, Chrome.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07601