A battle plan for publishers in the war against AI search
Opinion
How publishers can insulate themselves against AI search by leveraging content in new, more powerful ways.
Traditional publishers have long stood at the forefront of the digital media ecosystem, driving revenue through standout editorial content. However, that positioning is now under threat from the unstoppable growth of AI search, including Perplexity, ChatGPT, and – above all – Google AI Overviews.
With Google’s AI Mode adding to the pressure, media owners are warning of a “devastating” fallout from a “Google zero” future where traffic referrals drain away.
This alarm is understandable: Google drives 90% of the search market, with AI Overviews already linked to a 25% dip in publisher referral numbers. Yet, global media owners – with their cache of original journalism and content-level data – still have plenty of cards to play.
The challenge now is for editors to collaborate with other stakeholders to safeguard their journalistic integrity.
Seen this way, the AI onslaught could even be an opportunity for proactive change. Alongside licensing deals or regulatory lobbying, publishers can insulate themselves by leveraging content in new, more powerful ways. Here’s how.
Protect your content
At a minimum, publishers should stay informed about the most effective techniques for protecting their content from data scrapers. Some simple examples include ensuring content is marked with copyright notices and making it clear in your terms of service that scraping of content for training AI is prohibited. Meta tags and robots.txt are other valuable ways to make it clear to bots which content must be avoided.
Publishers should also explore licensing and revenue-sharing deals, which allow them to profit from how the GenAI models use their content. Several platforms and tools have emerged that cater for this, including digital tollbooths like Cloudflare, which lets publishers charge AI crawlers for access to their content, or platforms like Human Native AI, which is a marketplace for brokering licensing deals between publishers and LLM companies.
Put the user experience first
Publishers must prioritise protecting the user experience while also making their media offering to advertisers as appealing as possible. Faced with falling traffic, many will be tempted to resort to short–term saturation tactics. However, flooding sites with ads will only exacerbate the problem, sparking a knock-on effect of poor results and a compromised user experience.
Instead, media titles should pause to audit their processes and partnerships. In a climate where every click matters, each partner – from ad tech and SSPs to advertisers – needs to add value.
The aim is to be as clean and nimble as possible. And to do that, publishers don’t need more ads; they need campaigns that perform well and resonate deeply with users. Page load time, attention insights, and immersive layouts: everything counts and must be optimised accordingly.
Focusing on rich media formats is an obvious starting point. For example, publishers could trade multiple small ads for an interscroller creative that integrates dynamically with content. This step alone would set the stage for the kind of positive, high–performance experience that audiences are drawn to and advertisers are willing to pay more for.
Unlock hidden revenue through data
Most publishers are sitting on a goldmine of first-party and content data. By taking time to research cutting-edge tools that process these insights, they can make their content inventory work harder than ever. It’s about helping advertisers to make informed decisions and drive innovative, responsive campaigns (including the ability to optimise in-flight results).
For instance, by drilling down into attention metrics, publishers can begin to see which of their content pages over-index for consumer attention compared to market standards. Understanding why, or the details of the contextual environment, will help a publisher to continually optimise the content experience for its users, as well as drive better performance for advertisers.
This approach could extend to targeting audiences who are in the exact mindset for particular brand messaging, using advanced creative, contextual and attention signals.
Leverage brand safety as a powerful USP
Brand safety and content accuracy are other areas where publishers have a natural advantage over AI search.
A study by the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism revealed that AI Search engines are providing inaccurate answers to more than 60% of queries. This includes issues such as “fabricating reference links, failing to provide sources when requested, and delivering incorrect information, particularly when citing news articles”. A notable example is Apple’s AI news tool, which wrongly claimed Rafael Nadal is gay.
With many AI search companies monetising their search results with ads, there is a real danger that these inaccuracies could lead to costly safety issues for brands. It remains unclear what, if any, brand safety technologies these AI search companies are using to protect advertisers.
In contrast, traditional publishers, backed by robust editorial processes and quality journalism, significantly reduce the risks associated with inaccurate information. Publishers can enhance this advantage by utilising the latest contextual brand safety technologies.
These tools are supported by advanced contextual intelligence that analyses all content signals—such as text, images, video, and audio—providing a human-like understanding of premium editorial content and determining which ad placements are safe and suitable.
The digital publishing world should certainly not underestimate the challenge posed by AI search. The technology will continue to grow and evolve, providing users with quick and easy access to the information they need.
But it does not have to mean the end of the industry. Instead, it’s a reason for publishers to shift their focus and work more closely with the wider ad world to make bold moves that protect their content for the long term.
Kamran Vahabi is publisher development director at GumGum