Publishers Moving Forward With AI Licensing Deals

Of the AI companies proactively making deals with publishers to license their content, OpenAI has been the busiest and biggest spender, with some estimates saying it deals out as much as $500 million on annual content licensing, more than half of the industry-wide spend. The other big AI players have also developed patterns and earned reputations with their deals, as these lists of publisher / AI licensing deals help spell out. 

 

Cultural Resistance Hampers Use Of Ai In Newsrooms, New Global Survey Finds

Journalists are resisting the adoption of artificial intelligence and lack the skills or expertise to use it, creating barriers to AI’s wider adoption in the newsroom, according to a major new survey of newsrooms worldwide. More than half (52%) of those surveyed for the Future Newsrooms Study 2026 said “cultural resistance or skepticism” was the biggest barrier to wider AI adoption in the newsroom, with six in ten (61%) claiming a lack of internal technical skills or AI expertise was to blame.

 

What AI Engines Want From A Brand 

Artificial intelligence (AI) engines want different things from one brand compared with another. Google AI Overviews uses social platforms for local and availability signals. Between 11% and 14% of its transactional citations are near-me and store-hours prompts, according to data released by BrightEdge.

 

AI SEO: Writing That’s Specific May Get Cited More

User behavior and what other sites and people are saying about a site or product are increasingly important. The best way to influence that is with content that’s insightful and gives users what they’re looking for and a lot of it, as often as possible.

Conquering All Media: The Best Ad Sales Software In Every Industry

As much as consumers love valuable content, advertisers love it even more. And whether you’re sharing your content on page or on a screen, through airwaves or cables, there are invaluable software systems out there devoted to helping you manage ad sales and ensure your content hits all targets.

 

How Americans Are Engaged With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life

How many Americans show up in public life – and in what ways? These questions have been on people’s minds since even before a global pandemic disrupted social activities for years and technologies like smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence began to change the way humans interact. Americans’ engagement with others is not one-dimensional, according to a new Pew Research Center study from the Pew-Knight Initiative. 

 

Advertisers Cannot Ignore The Disappearing AI Browser 

Claude, Anthropic’s artificial intelligence (AI) engine, now has a built-in “sandbox” browser for Claude Code, an agentic coding tool. … For advertising, agentic AI in-app coding will become a foundational shift from human-viewed advertising to machine-processed data, because it allows AI agents to pull documents, interact with elements, and test local servers by bypassing traditional visual cues where digital advertisements live.  

 

Most Digital Shoppers Still Aren’t Sold On Ai Shopping

Nearly half of US digital shoppers (47.1%) have not used AI to shop and aren’t interested, according to an April 2026 survey from Bizrate Insights and EMARKETER.

Let Them Talk: The Best AI Tools For All Publishing Departments

The power of AI didn’t magically appear with ChatGPT.

But it sure feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it?

Media professionals have been nursing the same AI-induced carpal tunnel symptoms as every other human, but with an added case of whiplash ever since a particularly powerful version of OpenAI’s interactive language model debuted in November 2022.

 

Claude’s Ability To Remix ‘Liquid Content’ Is ‘Serious Challenge For News Media’

Media research expert Nic Newman has warned the ability of AI models to provide “liquid content” in different formats is a “really serious challenge” to news media. Speaking at the Media Voices Publisher Summit in London … Newman had a slide that said “AI can do what journalists do quicker and better.” But the Reuters Institute senior research associate (and former lead author of the annual Digital News Report) explained publishers see their future in content that is original and distinctive.

 

The ChatGPT Browser Is Already Dead 

OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October, but as part of its wave of news about ChatGPT Work … the company confirmed that it will be “sunsetting” Atlas and is targeting an August 9th date for deprecation. 

 

LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests

A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41 percent of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data. 

The Great Recruitment: How To Hire Great Ad Sales Reps in 2026

Over the course of a 25-year publishing career, I’ve hired countless advertising sales representatives. And with a quarter-century of bottom lines to cross-compare these reps with, I’ve honed what I like to think is a sixth sense about what separates even the good reps from the great ones.

Advertising sales is one of the hardest kinds of sales because you’re selling an idea. That prospect of a return. Most sales are around a tangible item, but advertising is a different animal that requires a rep who’s good at selling an idea and a hope that it works. And if the forecasters are correct, there’s quite a bit of hope to be found this year and beyond.

 

The World Cup Is Essentially A Media Budget Vacuum 

I spent the last two weeks doing some informal polling, calling and texting people I trust across the industry, asking them what they’re seeing in the market regarding spend and budget allocations. June is surprisingly soft for programmatic. You would have expected to hear things were up, given that the World Cup is in full swing, but unless you are a certified World Cup partner, it appears you’re sitting this month out, or at least taking it slow.  

 

AI Content Didn’t Stop Working, Your Metrics Did

For 20 years, traffic was a good indicator of successful content. When a page was valuable, Google directed people there, and your analytics recorded that visit. Since value and traffic often correlated, you could infer one from the other. Now, traffic and value are disconnected. Search Console shows clicks, impressions, and average position, but it doesn’t differentiate between clicks from a traditional search result, an AI Overview, or AI Mode.

 

AI Visibility Depends On Who Writes About Your Brand

If rankings alone no longer determine visibility, what does? Increasingly, the answer is earned media. AI systems consistently favor independent editorial coverage over brand-owned content, making media coverage one of the strongest signals influencing whether a brand appears in AI-generated recommendations.

Cover to Cover: How to Start a Magazine in 2026

We’ve come quite a long way since the very first American publication in 1741. Who knows if Ben Franklin and his chronicling competitors had any idea that their budding industry would blossom into something that has a global market size of more than $100 billion? 

 

Tech Platforms Overtake Publishers As Global News Source

Social and video platforms are now a bigger source of news consumption globally than TV or news websites/apps, according [to] the 2026 Reuters Digital News Report on publishing trends. The report also found that the use of AI chatbots for news has not changed in the UK and US over the past year, although usage has grown from 7% globally to 10%.

 

How ChatGPT Actually Picks Sources (I Read The Network Traffic, Not The Outputs)

I read the network traffic, the JSON the engine sends to my own browser, and lift out the engine’s own internal labels. … I’m not measuring how often something happens across a population. I’m documenting that the machine has a thing, and what the machine calls it. That difference decides what you can trust here, so I am going to be blunt about it.

 

It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests

A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of AI tools.

Checking The News: What Natural News-Skepticism Means for AI

As AI weaves its way into our normal Search habits, its inclusion in our news-habits is only more and more likely to be intertwined if not front-and-center.

Fortunately, Americans consider some arms-crossed skepticism as much a part of being a responsible news consumer as just staying informed.

 

Publishers Versus Bots: How Trusted Reviews Is Fighting Back Against LLMs

Whilst interviewing Candr CEO Chris Dicker he reels off the names of the bots scraping its flagship site – Trusted Reviews – and stealing its content. … He works with Cloudflare and Tollbit to control and catalogue the bot attacks, but still they come. [They] appear to be third-party scrapers – effectively content traffickers – who then sell content on to LLMs.

 

For The Record: The Case For The Wayback Machine Archive 

Three major news organizations – The New York Times, The Guardian and Reddit – are blocking access to their content because they fear their content will be scraped by AI crawlers and used without permission. It’s easy to understand their feeling. AI-scraping is one of the biggest problems facing publishers today. They are losing money and traffic to this nefarious practice. But let’s look at the Wayback side of it. …

 

Rank And AI Citation Aren’t The Same Number

The length gap is real and well-documented, with some measurements describing ChatGPT prompts running an order of magnitude longer than a typical Google query by character count. None of that tells you what to do on Monday. The part that should change how you read your own reporting is not the length of the input; it is what two different systems do with the same string when you start measuring across both of them at the same time.

Beyond Mere Efficiency: Where AI Users Stand On Advertising, Agentic Commerce

The increased use of genAI tools is undeniable, even if the acceptance of advertising within those tools isn’t as universal.

“Ad-supported models have become the standard in social media and video streaming, but the personal assistant nature of generative AI creates a higher bar for intrusion,” says Mod7’s Beyond AI Adoption report. “Mod7 data supports this assumption, with 61% of current genAI assistant users who find advertising an intrusive or unacceptable model for these tools.”

 

New York Times Chief: How and Why Publishers Should Fight AI ‘Tsunami’
New York Times chairman and publisher AG Sulzberger has urged publishers to do more to fight the oncoming “tsunami” from AI giants jeopardizing the information ecosystem. Sulzberger set out ways for news companies “both to stand up to abuses by AI companies and to prepare our own organizations to succeed in this new era” in a keynote speech …

 

Brand-Safe — And Not-So-Safe — News 

New and revealing analysis of ad-supported news content on FAST channels shows that nearly 36% of “news scenes” are fully brand-safe, according to research from Wurl, the streaming subsidiary of AppLovin. The bottom-line analysis reveals there are significant reasons to buy news content, “meaning advertisers who avoid news scenes altogether are leaving money on the table.”

 

CFOs Lead With AI In Their Growth Playbook

58% of CFOs worldwide cite increasing AI technology investments as a top growth strategy, putting AI ahead of expanding product offerings (53%), hiring (47%), and new-market expansion (46%), according to a survey from Coupa.

Local Ad Landscape: Search’s Slide And The Rise Of Digital Display

Local advertising reached more than $150 billion last year, according to Borrell Associates’ recent annual report, with digital display and social media advertising further separating itself from the long-reigning Search as “the largest single slice of the local advertising pie.” 

 

US Publishers Tell Common Crawl To Stop Scraping And Delete Archive

Digital news publishers in the US have raised “significant legal concerns” over the scraping of their content by Common Crawl Foundation. Trade body Digital Content Next (DCN), which represents many major US publishers, has sent a cease and desist letter via its lawyer to the web archive creator. They called on Common Crawl to immediately stop “scraping, retaining, or sharing copyrighted, paywalled, subscriber-only, or otherwise protected content from DCN member companies in its datasets.”

 

Data Detours: Personalization Is Hurt By Quality Issues, Tech Limitations 

Marketers are hampered by data quality issues and lack of automation, problems that drill right down into email. AI might provide some relief, judging by a new study titled “The 2026 AI and Marketing Performance Index,” from GrowthLoop, working with Ascend2.  

 

The Hidden B2B Journey 

Search engines are still the most common starting point for early B2B research. They’re fast, familiar, and make it easy for buyers to quickly scan pricing, features, and technical details across vendors. But search is rarely the destination — it is a navigation layer.

Zero-Click Searches Are Falling … and Publishers Have Reason to Celebrate

AI may continue tightening its grip on search — with AI tools a part of a growing share of desktop events, according to recent Datos and SparkToro research — but even as AI-generated results are seemingly harder for searchers to avoid, how they ultimately interact with those results seems to be trending in ways publishers shouldn’t ignore.

… Looking at Google clicks since the beginning of 2025, zero-click searches fell from a high of 28.1% in April 2025 to a low of 22.4% in March 2026. Along with organic click-through numbers bouncing back, it’s clear engagement in general is improving as those who are searching are demanding more meaningful results.

 

What Is AI Reading?

When consumers ask what is happening in an industry, AI reaches for news coverage. … When they ask how to do something, AI leans on reference content and brand-owned material instead.

 

Ad Workflow Woes Stalling AI Adoption 

Despite everything advertisers hear about the benefits of performance using agentic and generative AI in ad campaigns, marketers face challenges finding the budgets, implementing the technology, and understanding exactly how it works. … Fifty-four percent of marketers surveyed say the major barrier to broader adoption of agentic AI in campaign management is in the difficulty of integrating these solutions into existing technology and workflows.  

 

Google’s New AI Search Guide Calls AEO And GEO ‘Still SEO’

Google published a new documentation page to help websites optimize for generative AI features in Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. … Two sections are specifically worth highlighting. Google directly names popular optimization tactics it says aren’t necessary, and it redefines the AEO/GEO conversation as part of standard SEO.

AI Crawls So SMBs Can Run: The Performance Benefits of AI Search Traffic

After analyzing a year of traffic to sites built on its platform, Duda has found AI is no longer just a “future consideration” for growth, but an “active, measurable source of traffic.”

“Between March 2025 and February 2026, human website traffic to analyzed websites from Al sources has increased 73%,” says the 2026 Al Visibility for SMB Websites report, “with ChatGPT driving the majority (57%) of that traffic.”

AI crawlers were also responsible for performance gains, proving to be a “reliable way to measure how ‘visible’ a website is to an LLM.” Of the sites analyzed by Duda, AI crawlers helped with 3.2 times more human traffic and 2.7 times more form submissions.

 

Trust Issues: How AI Is Shaping Decisions In The Path To Purchase

AI tools won’t just help shoppers find products faster, they could sway shoppers to make different buying decisions, new research from Publicis Commerce and EMARKETER has found. … For a growing share, AI doesn’t just inform the journey; it accelerates it and possibly redirects it.

 

Handing Shopping Over To AI: How Far Will Shoppers Actually Go?

In the past six months, 63% of Americans say they’ve used generative AI for shopping-related tasks. … Most shoppers use AI for practical tasks: researching and comparing products (47%), finding deals (41%), or summarizing reviews (39%). Others use it to brainstorm gift ideas (31%) or build shopping lists (29%). 

 

State of Marketing

High performers use AI agents to reclaim eight hours a week and boost ROI by 20%. … High-performing marketers are nearly twice as likely as underperformers to use AI agents. In fact, 82% of marketers who use or plan to use agents expect major or moderate improvements to marketing ROI.