Forbes looks to Google AI pilot for insights as publishers seek value beyond the click

The program pays participating publishers for Google’s use of “enhanced” content as it develops AI features. These include in-depth article overviews on Google News publisher pages, which give readers context before they open a story, and offers customizable audio briefings. The features include attribution and direct links to publishers’ original content. Forbes will receive citation data and other insights into how its content performs across different experiences on Google’s platform, which will help it understand how different categories of content work in different contexts and inform its own products.

“It really is designed to experiment with experiences within their kind of consumer-facing discovery services to look at ways that publishers’ content can engage audiences ahead of a click,” said Gould.

The partnership comes as publishers look for ways to understand their content’s performance across AI-driven discovery, even as referral traffic declines. Gould said Forbes’ referrals were down about 45% year over year, sharpening the company’s focus on building a more direct, loyal audience rather than relying on page views alone.

Google first launched the program last December with publishers including the Guardian and the Washington Post. It has recently expanded its range of publishers to include titles like Forbes and Reach, taking the total participating publications to more than 400, it stated in a blog post last week.

“It’s a chance for us to learn without having to expend the resources to do the experimentation ourselves,” said Gould. “Testing comes with costs, especially with AI. There’s a human cost in the resources that you’re putting towards it, and there’s also compute costs and token costs that you’re paying to create those AI experiences,” she added. “So, for us to be able to partner with Google, who has a whole team that’s working on designing these experiences and then giving us feedback on how our content is performing and how different categories of content are performing with different types of experiences, is important data for us because we can bring that back to our own site.”

The AI news pilot is one of several variations of licensing agreements Google has going with publishers, which includes its most recent pay-per-value AI contribution pilot, and its ongoing News Showcase deals.

As publishers try to understand how their work is surfaced in AI search, the available measurement tools still provide only a partial view. Forbes uses Profound to track reach and citations, but Gould said publishers lack granular insight into how their content performs across AI platforms. “Those [LLM] platforms are a black box. We really don’t have a ton of insight into how our content is performing there in a granular way,” she said.

Separately, publishers have raised concerns about the difficulty of measuring how Google’s AI Overviews affect referral traffic. Search Console provides broader search-performance reporting, but publishers have sought a clearer way to assess AI Overviews’ impact specifically.

The AI News pilot update comes as Google says it is updating AI Mode and AI Overviews with clearer links, more context about sources and timely articles. Meanwhile, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has been pursuing measures to give publishers greater control and transparency over how Google uses their content in AI search features.

U.K. publisher Reach, owner of titles including Daily Mirror and OK! Magazine, has also recently joined the paid program. Reach CEO Piers North stressed to Digiday that the fact the agreement is time-limited means that both parties can assess whether it has been mutually beneficial ahead of any potential renewal or renegotiation. 

For some publishers, particularly smaller and mid-sized ones, the appeal of licensing deals with AI companies like Google depends on more than the payment: the agreements can differ in what they offer for access to content, collaboration and insight into how that content is being used. 

Gould said Forbes values the insights it can gain from AI partnerships as well as the revenue. That emphasis on learning alongside payment was echoed by several other publishers involved in the pay-per-value Google AI pilot, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity.

“The AI licensing landscape is weird, and it comes in a lot of shapes and sizes,” said Gould. “I think any publisher who’s doing those deals at any scale knows that they vary a lot…Having an avenue for publishers to be paid for how their content is used within big tech platforms, and having a big player like Google kind of lead that is very appealing to us,” she added. 

Metrics for beyond the page-view scale era

Forbes’ paid agreement fits into a broader strategy Gould described on stage: preparing for a publishing business less dependent on page views and search referrals. She called the page view a metric of the scale era, one that says little about whether a reader is known, engaged, or likely to return. Forbes is shifting its focus toward loyalty, depth, repeat visits, and building a direct audience.

“We’re seeing discovery being outsourced to AI search, and as we’re seeing our referral traffic go down, we have to really focus on metrics and measurements that represent the future strength for our brand, which for us, and I’m pretty sure everyone in this room, is around kind of loyalty, depth, engagement,” she said. 

Although Forbes wasn’t planning for a literal “Google Zero” moment, the sharp fall in referral traffic made the threat more tangible and sharpened the internal focus on building a more sustainable audience business. Gould said Forbes’ 45% referral traffic drop drove an internal urgency around preparing a post-referral-traffic strategy. She said the real pressure came from recognizing the risk of not having enough supply to meet advertiser demand. 

“It requires work to shift your thinking around how you’re acquiring an audience; who you’re acquiring,” she said. “You have to shift a bit towards not all page views are created equal. Like not all visitors have the same value to you, whereas in a scale time, they did. Honestly, it was like it blinded you to every other option. If you knew you were optimizing your revenue for that single page view, primarily through ad impressions and ad yield, sacrificing any of that revenue towards trying to build real engagement was difficult.”

Forbes is testing ways to build more sustained relationships with readers, including personalized homepage experiences and newsletter sections. It is also working with brand partners seeking visibility in AI search, using citation data to support affiliate, sponsorship, and native-advertising opportunities.

For Gould, the Google pilot is one piece of that transition: a chance to learn from a platform where audiences are discovering content, while Forbes works to build reader loyalty and revenue streams that don’t rely on page views alone.