Prime Real Estate: Why Advertisers (And Consumers) Love News Content And Environments

Ads do better next to news.

And while that might not feel like news at all to many publishers, it’s reassuring when the marketers responsible for buying those campaigns acknowledge the benefits from their side.

In a DoubleVerify survey of nearly 2,000 marketers, 60% said advertising in news environments “outperforms campaign baselines,” with a further 27% seeing an average performance from that inventory.

 

Rolling Slowdowns: Publishers Suffered Traffic Declines In Late 2025

The traffic declines suffered by publishers from mid-2024 into 2025 are continuing, but not all because of Google’s AI Overviews that were blamed for the earlier problems. One cause is the crawling of news sites by bots to feed large language models (LLMs), according to a study from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. 

 

Eight In Ten Of World’s Biggest News Websites Now Block AI Training Bots

Some 79% of almost 100 top news websites in the UK and US are blocking at least one crawler used for AI training out of OpenAI’s GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Anthropic-ai, CCBot, Applebot-Extended and Google-Extended. Meanwhile 71% are blocking AI bots from crawling their sites for retrieval or live searches. 

 

How Different AI Search Engines Choose Which Brands to Recommend

Each AI engine has a distinct “personality” that determines brand visibility. ChatGPT mentions brands in 99.3% of eCommerce responses while Google AI Overview includes them in just 6.2%. These aren’t random variations — they’re fundamental design differences that shape how customers discover products.