Bold Call: AI will rewrite publishers’ websites in 2026

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Newsweek is building an AI Mode-like experience to customize homepages for readers Read More

“I think what shifts when it comes to personalization is that it becomes a filter or an input,” said Mike Dyer, The Washington Post’s new chief product officer. News publishers have to balance giving readers what editors believe readers need to know, and what readers themselves want to consume, he said. “What a site might look like in the not-too-distant future is the constant balance of those things… Editorial point of view will go from being the organizing principle to a critical filter of personalization,” Dyer said.

AI chatbots will be a key part of this, but so will AI-generated summaries and vertical video, tailored to readers, based on data like geolocation, referral sources and past reading behavior.

It’s all an effort to improve engagement and keep readers onsite longer — a critical move as AI-driven search reshapes traffic and search volatility hits record highs. This has put a renewed focus on optimizing for engagement, repeat visits and dwell time — over page views and flyby readers. These moves will also help publishers meet readers’ expectations for how they use the web in the era of AI chatbots, execs said.

Newsweek is trying to see how far homepage experimentation can go: the publisher is building a homepage modeled after Google’s AI Mode, customized to each user with local weather, a news briefing summary and stocks.

The Washington Post is also thinking about tailoring its homepage and other digital experiences based on what a user wants, and when they want it. AI can help publishers understand those desires and help them build experiences that match them.

Publishing execs are considering now “who has control over what is most important” when it comes to AI — so that they can give readers “more and more and more of that,” Dyer said.

“You could imagine a scenario where a news company doesn’t just use AI to repackage content as voice, as visuals — but to reorganize the entire experience. Most AI today, you have to prompt it, you have to tell it what you want. Imagine a scenario in the not-too-distant future where we can take those signals in terms of your behavior and the time and things like that, and convert that into a point of view on how the experience should be rendered to you,” Dyer said. 

A user may want a brief summary listing the five most important things to know in the morning, but then later in the day they might want deeper information about a breaking news story. The website experience could be flexible enough to reflect what the user wants in that moment, evolving from a static homepage or article page that every reader sees, Dyer said.

Traditional homepages will soon feel ‘archaic’

Nina Gould, chief innovation officer at Forbes, agrees that the days of fully curated homepages — where editors decide what readers should see that day in a stacked headline format — are “over.” Forbes introduced a new homepage last year, with improved article recommendations at the top of the page and content notifications in the header. This year, the goal is to add more AI-driven personalization to improve these features.

More traditional homepages are “going to feel archaic to people. So I do think that [readers] expect us to go the extra mile to learn more about them and give them results that are tailored to things they’re interested in,” Gould said. “Publishers ignore that at their peril.”

Forbes has already introduced AI-powered sections that users can engage with that provides them with a summary of the day’s news, tailored to their interests — and a Q&A tool on some article pages.

Time’s AI agent debuted last year and lives on its homepage, letting people ask questions, generate text summaries and audio briefs from its content archive. As Time expands its vertical video output, a more video-centric homepage could be the “primary experience” for some readers, based on signals like their past onsite behavior and referral source, according to Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer.

The role of agents 

Time wants to make NLWeb — Microsoft’s natural language web protocol designed to let websites be queried and interacted with by both people and AI agents — a more central part of its digital experience in the first half of this year, Howard said. It would be modeled after an AI chatbot tool Time launched for its Person of the Year announcement at the end of 2024, which let users ask questions about the story, as well as summarize and translate it into different languages, with an audio option too.

“As people’s preferences for how they get their information continue to evolve, our ability to allow people to customize that depending on their preference is going to be important,” Howard said.

Time is working with its product, engineering and business development teams to brainstorm a 2027 site. What’s even less clear is how ads fit into these onsite experiences, Howard said. It’s also something OpenAI is trying to figure out now. “If it was easy to understand, they would have been live already,” Howard said.

Ultimately, publishing execs interviewed for this story said these changes won’t alter the homepage’s core function: showcasing the publisher’s best journalism — and curating the day’s most important news.

The next step beyond personalization is agentic AI, where the homepage can proactively serve content and interact with readers. Forbes is testing a personal shopping AI feature on a handful of stories on its product recommendation site Vetted, which walks users through a series of questions around a product to help them find the right product fit.

“How long before users expect to purchase the product right there?” Gould said. “I don’t think [publishers are] far off.”