Media Briefing: AI is the new middleman, and it’s coming for the browser

Some days, it feels like publishers are stuck inside a disintermediation hamster wheel.

Today, it’s not ad tech or social platforms causing it; it’s the AI platforms. And it appears that the true extent of their ambition is only just starting to emerge. 

The revolving door of gut punches keeps spinning for publishers, with Google now rolling out AI summaries to Discover — a move which could cut publishers even further out of the referral traffic loop. Meanwhile, AI company Perplexity’s release of its AI-powered Comet browser and the expected forthcoming release of OpenAI’s browser have sent ripples of nervous anticipation through the media world. 

In its press announcement, Perplexity claims that Comet is an AI-powered browser that turns traditional browsing into a seamless, conversational experience. Instead of juggling tabs and apps, users can think out loud while Comet handles all tasks, whether it’s completing research, comparing products, sending emails, or booking meetings. It claims it can do all this by understanding context and collapsing complex workflows into a single intelligent interface. 

In Digiday’s tests with Comet, the browser opens up to a homepage with Perplexity’s search bar (a similar user interface to a Google search bar in Chrome), but users can also request tasks — such as “close all tabs” or “summarize my recent email.” Comet also has a built-in AI-powered “assistant” in a sidebar that users can open as they explore the web.

While some publishers are excited about the potential of AI-driven browsers and how the agentic features may define the future user experience, there’s a healthy dose of skepticism about how disruptive this shift may be as browsers gain more control over content access.

Naturally, for it to upset the apple cart completely, they need scale. And there are skeptics about that too. Currently, Comet is available to subscribers of Perplexity Max at $200 a month, and that’s likely to be prohibitive to mainstream uptake, according to Mattia Fosci, legal and tech expert and co-founder and CEO of privacy-enhancing tech company Anonymised. For now, Comet will be the plaything of early adopters, tech-savvy and wealthy people, he stressed. Yet, he does believe that it could incur further disruption for publishers.

AI browsers could “radically change” people’s behavior

Mark Howard, chief operating officer at TIME, was still on the waitlist to test Comet on Monday, when he spoke to Digiday. But he’d made the AI-powered web browser Dia (built by startup company Browser Company of New York) his default browser a few days prior, to get a sense of how these new browsers work. 

His conclusion was two-fold: AI browsers will accelerate the decline of link-based search traffic for publishers, putting even more pressure on their reach and revenue, but they can also help people work faster by getting them right to the information they need.

“All media companies are thinking a lot about their pageview-dependent businesses, whether that’s ad-supported, subscription or commerce. Everybody’s running those analyses right now,” Howard said. “You’ve gotta assume that people’s behaviors are going to radically change to that experience, but that behavior is only going to be accelerated when you actually have it built into every single page of your web browser, as opposed to currently you still go to either a desktop app or a mobile app for Perplexity, or OpenAI or Gemini. When it’s right there baked into the page experience, it’ll only accelerate that.”

It’s not just about AI summarizing informational content — it’s also about agents helping users take action. That’s where the bigger disruption comes in, stressed Fosci. Price comparison sites or travel search engines could see a drop in traffic. Some rely on ad revenue, others on commissions — both models depend on users spending time on the site. If AI agents handle those tasks directly, that traffic (and the associated revenue) could disappear, he said. 

“If you have a question or curiosity about anything, you’ll skip browsing through four or five different websites, because the AI is doing that for you and gives you the answer right away,” said Fosci. “Generationally, we’re already losing the habit of going deep and spending time consuming content.” 

Nicholas Diakopoulos, computational journalism professor at Northwestern University, said the timing of the AI browsers rolling out just as the media industry steps up efforts to clamp down and block unwanted AI bot traffic may be more than coincidence. He speculated that if the internet becomes more anti-bot, AI companies may develop tools that mimic human behavior to bypass security measures and continue collecting data, giving them an edge in data acquisition.

Meanwhile, Howard believes publishers can curb free scraping while earning revenue from AI agents that pay to access content in response to user queries. 

“How quickly that can scale? We don’t know. It’s hard to project,” Howard said. “But there’s no doubt that with the introduction of things [like AI browsers and AI agents]… more and more of these things are going to be out there every day… retrieving real-time information, and that is an opportunity for the media industry.”

What we’ve heard

“The industry and market will adapt, along with that. At the end of the day, there is a need for trusted journalism. Before, we were based on scale, and everyone was going after scale – now we’re coming back to, people do want that trusted journalism and authoritative opinion… I think readers will come back to us… It’s also why we’re building on these different platforms.”

– Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips on Google Discover adding AI summaries.

Numbers to know

$1 billion: The amount of public broadcasting funding Congress will vote on cutting this week.

$1 billion: The amount of News Corp’s stock repurchase program, authorized by its board.

$4.99: A temporary “surcharge” Lee Enterprises has added to its local news subscriptions, blaming inflation and tariffs.

3: The number of titles sold by World of Good Brands (which is shutting down), two of which to Ziff Davis.

What we’ve covered

IAB Tech Lab’s pitch to help publishers gain control of LLM scraping

• The IAB Tech Lab is working to assemble a task force of publishers and edge compute companies to kick off its plan to create a technical framework that helps publishers gain better control of, and be paid for, LLM crawling. 
• So far, it has roughly a dozen publishers on board for the task force, who will meet for the first workshop in New York City on July 23 (next Wednesday), to discuss next steps for what it has called its LLM Content Ingest API framework.

Look at the IAB pitch deck to publishers (and what it means) here.

Publishers’ recent workforce diversity reports show DEI efforts remain sluggish

• Despite years of pledges to diversify their ranks, major publishers are making barely perceptible progress, and in some cases — none at all. 
• Overall, staff diversity at The New York Times, Hearst and Condé Nast has either marginally improved or stalled in 2024, according to their annual workforce diversity data this year. 

See more of the data – and other DEI program changes – here.

A number of publishers tap clean room tech for smarter data targeting

• News UK, The Independent, and magazine publishers Immediate Media and Future are teaming up with retail media network Ocado to test clean room-powered data matching. 
• The goal is to match Ocado’s shopper data with the publishers’ audience behavioral and contextual data, to unlock more granular ad targeting for advertisers without giving up user control.

Read more about the deal here.

Esports events are putting creators center stage

• In 2025, esports events are increasingly putting individual content creators front and center to keep both fans and brands interested. 
• The growing presence of creators at events such as the Esports World Cup shows how the esports industry is acknowledging creators’ role as key drivers of both audience and advertiser interest — and is increasingly putting them front and center as a result. 

Read more about the strategy here.

Condé Nast and Hearst strike Amazon AI licensing deals

• Condé Nast and Hearst have signed multi-year agreements with Amazon to license their content for use in its AI shopping assistant Rufus. 
• Rufus is Amazon’s LLM-powered shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s product catalog and information from across the web, to answer customer questions on shopping needs, products, and comparisons and make related recommendations. It launched last year.

Read more about the deals here.

What we’re reading

Google Discover adds AI summaries

Google has begun rolling out AI-generated summaries in its main news feed Discover, further threatening publishers’ referral traffic, TechCrunch reported. 

Skydance looking to acquire The Free Press

Skydance CEO David Ellison has held early discussions about acquiring The Free Press, the online publication co-founded by Bari Weiss, The New York Times reported.

Hearst buys The Dallas Morning News

Hearst Newspapers has bought DallasNews Corporation, the parent company of The Dallas Morning News and Medium Giant, the publication reported.

The Washington Post restructures newsroom with a new “Futures” desk

The Washington Post is creating a new “Futures” team to cover the “forces shaping life in the 21st century,” Talking Biz News reported.

Reuters launches AI-voiced video content in Spanish and Portuguese

Reuters is packaging up video content translated and voiced by AI technology, in Spanish and Portuguese, for people who pay for its news wire service.