Digiday’s comprehensive guide to what’s in and out for publishers in 2026

The stomach-dropping moments are easy to pinpoint: copyright hell thanks to AI engines’ unscrupulous scraping, and the erosion of referral traffic — largely caused by the emerging competitive AI search landscape. 

Adaptability stopped being a nice-to-have for publishers years ago; it became a survival skill. The difference now is that the muscle they built just to stay alive may finally work in their favor in 2026.

Here’s a look at Digiday’s guide to what’s in and out for 2026:

In
AI-search economy 
Out
Blue-link economy

In
Zero-click analytics 
Out
Click-through analytics 

In 
Building audience cohorts from AI search behavior 
Out
Referral traffic panic

In
Pay-per-use/AI royalties 
Out
Lump-sum AI licensing deals

In
AI bot-blocking strategies 
Out
Panicking over AI bot scraping

In
Worrying about Google’s agentic browser
Out 
Worrying about Google AI Overviews 

In
Black hat AI crawlers 
Out
Black hat SEO

In
Google not paying publishers for AI training & grounding
Out 
Google not paying publishers enough for ads

In 
Citation tracking for AI answers 
Out
Keyword rankings as visibility metric

In
Agentic-driven media trading 
Out 
Agents for campaign optimization 

In
Publishers buying traffic 
Out 
Publishers selling traffic 

In
Enterprise LLM licensing revenue
Out
Ad-only dependence 

In
Curation revenue spikes 
Out
Curation hatred 

In
Bitterness over Google’s AI monopoly
Out 
Bitterness over Google’s ad tech monopoly

In 
Brand safety crisis over generative AI
Out 
Brand safety crisis over news

In
Publishers with Substack newsletters and creator-like side brands 
Out
Publishers relying on Facebook link-posting 

In
Video ad revenue as beacon of hope (again)
Out 
Open-web display ad revenue horror

In
Throwing cash at video podcasts
Out
Throwing cash at audio podcasts

In
Publisher-run creator networks and franchises
Out
Treating creators as bolt-ons to the main business

In
Single standard for AI payments 
Out 
Web of overlapping AI-standard frameworks 

In
AI content marketplaces 
Out
One-to-one licensing deals

In
AI orchestration 
Out 
Single-use agents 

In
Personalized, chat-style homepages 
Out
Feed-style homepages 

In
Collective publisher AI lawsuits
Out
Individual publisher AI lawsuits

In
The Trade Desk and Amazon influencing publisher monetization strategies
Out 
Meta and Google defining the terms unilaterally