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digital publishing industries

The New Cost Of Search: Publishers Are Now Buying the Search Traffic They Used To Get For Free 

Publishers searching for an answer to their traffic woes appear to be including deep pockets and purse strings as part of their search.

According to research by Similarweb, “media companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every month to buy the search traffic they used to get for free,” with paid-search spend amongst publishers in its Top 100 index up 41% more YoY  … and up 274% over the last 3 years.

 

Google Paid Search Becoming More Expensive 

According to data from the Tinuiti Digital Ads Benchmark Report, published Thursday, the acceleration of CPC growth from 1% in Q2 to 4% in Q3 2026 was primarily driven by two structural shifts in the advertising market. One of those drivers in the report pointed to Amazon pulling out of almost all U.S. Google Shopping ad auctions in mid-2025, which initially created a vacuum that artificially depressed CPC growth throughout early 2026 and kept click costs relatively flat. By Q3 2026, other giant ecommerce platforms increased or consolidated their presence in Google’s ad auctions. This massive influx of capital forced standard advertisers to bid significantly higher to maintain their impression share, according to the report.

 

AI Search Tools Cited A Made-Up Concept Within A Week, Paper Finds

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Google AI each cited posts about a made-up concept within seven days of the posts going up, according to a paper from researchers at Fudan University. The researchers published the posts from ordinary accounts on nine sites the tested tools already cited often. 

 

ChatGPT Ads Target Your Phone Number, Email

OpenAI’s ads targeting is pretty creepy, and new research confirms spyware companies are delivering potent malware through advertising networks.

AI Everywhere: More Than One-Third Of New Pages Show AI Fingerprints 

Everyone’s favorite parlor game — “That’s Gotta Be AI, Right?” — has finally been adopted by resourceful researchers who can put in the blood, sweat, and tears to get the answer.

In analyzing the text of 10,000 webpages this past summer, the Pew Research Center found that 10% show “significant signs of AI authorship,” though that hardly tells the whole story.

 

Newsletter Tips: Boost Interactivity, But Keep Subject Lines ‘Boring’

Leading publishers shared their newsletter strategy tips at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference. Christopher Sopher, chief executive and co-founder of newsletter management system Letterhead, said: “There’s two big things that we see happening right now that are very opposite from each other, actually, which I like. One is thinking a lot more about interactivity and how we can use polls and reader feedback and responses and people hitting reply and talking to the editorial team, leveraging that voice to create that interaction.” … The second trend cited by Sopher was publishers looking to improve discoverability for newsletter content in AI engines. 

 

AI Overviews Have Spread To Most Big-Brand Searches

Ahrefs checked Google’s U.S. results for the exact names of 100 global brands every week from July through September. …. On July 1, five of 98 usable results had an AI Overview. By Sept. 30, 63 of the 100 brand-name queries did. For brand teams, this is the results page showing their company’s name. Ahrefs’ panel also tracked where these AI Overviews appeared and the external sites they linked to. 

 

Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting

Workers at three major publishing houses tell WIRED that LLMs are being used for publicity, cover art, back cover copy, and emails, as some execs push junior staff to champion the tech.

Label What Misleads, Skip the Rest: IAB’s New Rules for AI Ad Disclosure 

The Interactive Advertising Bureau recently updated its AI Transparency and Disclosure Framework, providing guidance for advertisers and marketers who are witnessing industry transformations firsthand along with “rapid AI integration [that] creates both opportunity and risk; opportunity to reduce costs and expand creative output, and risk of consumer mistrust, operational inconsistency, and regulatory exposure.”

 

Google Urges Fact Checking For Anyone Publishing Content Using Generative AI 

Google updated its Search guidelines on Thursday to explain how to ensure the accuracy, authenticity and trustworthiness prior to publishing generative AI content on websites. All work must meet the standards of Search Essentials and spam policies. Google wants brands, companies and others to manually fact-check and review before publishing online.

 

AI Hallucinations Are Making Entitled Customers Even Worse 

Mass adoption of generative AI tools is rewriting the old adage that has long been a thorn in the side of restaurant and retail workers: “The customer is always right.” But what happens when the customer expects you to play along with something AI made up? 

 

AI Changed Your Buyer Faster Than Your Business Can Adapt

Buyers arrive confident and half-informed, businesses were built for a different customer, and the gap widens with every planning cycle that doesn’t address it.

Why Advertisers Could Soon Demand ‘Verified Clicks’ From Email Marketers 

Last week, I wrote about the impact that bots and AI scraping are having on publishers here in the United States and, more extensively, around Europe.

A recent report on email bots and the associated engagement metrics found what A Media Operator said “might soon force publishers to change course and move toward the ‘verified click.’”

 

Ad Market Resumes Tepid Growth In August, ‘Traditional’ Media’s Share Falls Below 20% 

Following a World Cup surge in spending in June and July, the U.S. ad market flattened out once again, posting a tepid 0.7% growth in August vs. the same month a year ago, according to just-refreshed data from Guideline’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker. 

 

Google Has Deployed A New AI Spam Detector Called SAFE

Google has published a research paper about detecting spam that mimics a human manual review that catches content that violates the “spirit” of policy violations and platform guidelines. The system is called Scaled Abuse Forensics Examiner (SAFE) and it is expressly designed to identify AI-generated content. 

 

Can Errors From an AI Summary Distort Memory? A New Study Says Yes

You watch an event, read an AI summary later, and notice the two accounts disagree. You might expect your memory of the original event to help you identify the mistake, but new research suggests the summary itself can influence what you remember. Researchers at Georgetown University and the University of Washington found that misleading summaries reduced how accurately people remembered details from videos they had watched. The finding raises a concern for human-in-the-loop AI systems because a reviewer’s memory may already reflect the AI’s error.

Knives Out: AI Scraping Hits European Publishers Hardest, New Data Shows 

Corner any publisher in the United States, and they’ll talk endlessly about the impact of AI and its bots on their business.

Now imagine what that conversation might sound like across the pond.

A recent study of AI scrapes over the first half of 2026 found that median AI scraping was four times higher in Europe than in North America, with scrapes 20% higher in June than they were in January.

 

Proposed Revisions To SPJ’s Code Of Ethics: Preserving Principles, Responding To Change

The current Code was adopted in 2014. Since then, the way journalism is produced and consumed has shifted substantially. Independent publishing has grown, traditional newsrooms have contracted, generative artificial intelligence systems have become commonplace, misinformation has accelerated and public trust in news has declined. The revision aims to help the Code meet those realities without chasing every passing technology or trend. 

 

The State Of Search In An AI World: What Marketing Leaders Need To Know Now

Organic traffic is declining, but conversions are proving more resilient. In Search Engine Journal’s survey of search professionals, 39% saw traffic decline or remain flat while leads and conversions held or improved. Only 15% lost both traffic and conversions. That split changes how marketers should evaluate search. Traffic still measures reach, but it no longer measures business value by itself. 

 

Faster AI Can Make Slow Marketing Processes Worse

Marketing leaders expected Claude’s rollout to create a giant productivity leap, but some six months later, little has changed. As a consultant, I have to explain that tools alone don’t create efficiency — people do. That’s because AI isn’t a plug-and-play efficiency layer; instead, it’s a mirror. Adding AI to your workflow will certainly amp up the processes that already work well. However, any broken processes that might have been overlooked are likely to spread like wildfire.

All In On AI: Publishers Say AI Discovery Is a Net Positive

The publishers have spoken.

According to a recent study, an overwhelming 95% say that AI and LLMs are making an impact on their organizations and, despite what can obviously be called a “real disruption,” 4 out of 5 categorize the “net impact of LLM-driven discovery as positive.”

 

IAB Revises Ad Forecast, Shows Growth For Most Media 

Major cyclical events continue to drive strong ad growth during the first half of 2026. Macroeconomic concerns have eased amid a resilient consumer market that shows optimism, playing a major role in the change. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released an updated U.S. ad-spending forecast — up 2.8 points to more than 12.3% for 2026 compared with its estimates in January 2026.

 

How To Connect AI Search Visibility To Local Leads

… There are two main things you can actually measure. One is when someone clicks on a citation within an AI response, which then directs them to your website, acting like a typical referral. The other is self-reported attribution, where a customer says that ChatGPT recommended the business.  

 

Press Gazette Launches Newsroom Tool To Stop AI Fakes Before Publication

Press Gazette today launches a new tool for publishers that aims to protect them from publishing misleading AI-generated content. It follows this publication’s Reality Wars investigations into the rise of fake experts, infecting the news ecosystem with AI-generated commentary.

Global Ad Revenue Set to Hit $1.3 Trillion in 2026’s ‘Gold Rush’ Year 

A summer forecast of global ad revenue sees a nearly 9% growth by year’s end, hitting the $1.3 trillion mark and part of what the analysis is calling “the 21st century’s ‘Gold Rush.’”

… WPP Media’s forecast of generative search in particular sees the channel exceeding $100 billion in just 6 years, faster than retail media, social media, or traditional search ever did. Generative and traditional search together will make up 21.6% of total advertising revenue this year.

 

How Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine Transformed the Publishing Industry

When Gloria Steinem started Ms. magazine in 1971, most women’s magazines concentrated on how to keep a house and how to attract a husband. Her publication took a very different focus: liberation. … The DNA of Ms. magazine inspired a new gen­er­a­tion of out­lets, said Emily Ram­shaw, the CEO of the non­profit news­room The 19th, which focuses on women and polit­ics. Steinem “spent her life and career insist­ing that women were not a niche audi­ence, that our exper­i­ences were not side dishes to the main event, and that gender-based journ­al­ism could be both rig­or­ous and unapo­lo­getic,” Ram­shaw said.

 

6 Months Into ChatGPT Ads, Advertisers Still Don’t Know What ‘Good’ Looks Like

[We] have something we didn’t have at launch: real results from advertisers who have spent money on the platform. Some are reporting costs per click (CPCs) below $3. Others are closer to $10, or even $13. There are examples of campaigns generating qualified leads at competitive costs, along with others that produced little meaningful activity after the click. The problem is knowing what to make of those differences.

 

Traffic To 10 Biggest US News Websites Down A Third In Two Years

Combined traffic to the ten biggest news websites in the U.S. is down by almost a third compared to two years ago, new analysis shows. The difference was even higher across the top 50 news websites in the US, with monthly visits falling 37% since July 2024.

Programmatic Ad Quality Hitting An All-Time High … At A Cost

Like all the best things in life, programmatic advertising is only as good as the quality that drives it forward.

As the latest Q2 research from the Association of National Advertisers finds, programmatic efficiency is “driven by the ability to actively manage quality, price, measurement, and curate supply at scale, not by traditional transaction cost components.”  The research found an increase in TrueAdSpend — the percentage of total ad spend resulting in high-quality impressions — to the highest level it’s measured: 45.1%. That’s a nearly 2pp increase from Q1, with higher-performers at 52.3% and the lower cohort at 31.1%.

 

Google Ads Is Automating More Decisions, Your Measurement Needs To Get Better

Google Ads has steadily automated more of the decisions advertisers once managed directly. Bidding is an obvious example, but the shift has gone much further. Google now has more influence over which searches ads can match to, where ads appear, how budgets get allocated, and even which creative combinations users see. For advertisers, that changes where some of our most important decisions happen.

 

Inside OpenAI’s Reboot

Early advertising results within ChatGPT have been promising enough that executives are increasing the number of ads, potentially subsidizing free access for the 92% of ChatGPT’s consumer users who, [CFO Sarah] Friar says, do not pay for a subscription. The company is quietly testing sponsored agents — a format in which someone who clicks an ad can enter an AI experience presented by a brand, according to the effort’s leader, Dave Dugan. 

 

MSN Removes Publishers From Platform Without Notice

Several independent publishers told Press Gazette they have been removed from syndication platform MSN without being given any notice. Microsoft said it regularly reviews content and partners “based on a range of business, quality and operational considerations.”

The Newsroom AI Shift: 4 In 5 Journalists Now Using AI Tools

Whoever believes journalists are stuck in their way — white-knuckling their pen-and-notepads and just waiting for a magnet powerful enough to wipe out any tech created after the typewriter — might need to touch some grass themselves to get a better sense of both real-world realities and the actual responses professionals are having to those realities.

“Journalists are increasingly experimenting with generative AI tools,” says Cision’s 2026 State of the Media report, which found only 1 in 5 (21%) do not use AI, down from one in three (33%) last year. 

 

How Do I Know If AI Overviews Are Taking Clicks From My Site And What Can I Do About It?

There are a lot of assumptions being made about the impact of AI platforms on SEO traffic and conversions. However, how much Google AI Overviews do affect your website’s performance is going to depend on individual factors, like the type of content on your site, the keywords you are targeting, and your audience. 

 

The News Publishers On Tiktok With Biggest Growth Since 2024

Four major news publishers in the UK and US have increased their core Tiktok followings by more than 11 million people in the last two years. … The analysis features the main Tiktok accounts for 84 news publishers, including those featured in the 2024 round-up and 16 additional newsbrands that were included in the most recent rankings of the biggest newsbrands in the UK and the US.

 

Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing

… The way it will work, the post explained, is that Anthropic will subtly alter the word choices in AI-generated text in a way that is only known to Anthropic and its algorithms. Anthropic will know the watermarking algorithm, which will change “the source of the randomness used to pick among words” and thus can write a tool to detect whether something has been AI-generated. This research and approach is interesting in a data science kind of way, but Anthropic’s layperson explanation for how this will work shows how little the company thinks about the craft of writing or the subtle differences between words a human author might want to use to convey their thoughts. 

Digital Ads in 2026: The Challenges of Transitioning Your Team to Digital

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

You hear that warning a lot when you plan for the future. I know I heard that plenty when I was a publisher helping ad sales teams transition from a print-focus to digital.

As far as business expressions go, there are few that I disagree with more than that one. Its dismissing message bears no reality on what I experienced in helping salespeople and advertising teams make the leap to digital ad sales.

So let’s dispel this oft-repeated phrase, once and for all.

What We Can Learn From Evolving ChatGPT Fan-Out Queries

I think OpenAI is using fan-out queries, and the site: operator in particular, as one method of reducing spammy outputs in their answers derived from internet content. I believe it’s their effort to improve the quality of retrieved sources while taking early steps to combat spam and low-quality information in their results. It reminds me of what Google has tested with E-E-A-T, but ChatGPT style. 

 

Claude Vs. Pangram: The Watermark Wars Are On! 

There has been a growing tug of war between publishers and authors over AI. Until recently, I thought we were slowly beginning to figure out some reasonable ground rules. If you ask an AI to write your book and put your name on it, that’s one thing. If you write the book and use AI to check spelling, grammar, citations, chronology, repeated paragraphs or whether you’ve gotten somebody’s name wrong, that should be something very different. The line between those two things can get blurry, but at least we’re beginning to acknowledge that there is a line. Anthropic may have just made the whole thing worse — maybe on purpose? 

 

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.