Media Briefing: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit, Sept. ‘26 ‘Google Zero’ edition

By Sara Guaglione • September 17, 2026 •

Ivy Liu

This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series →

This week’s Media Briefing recaps what publishers said about search traffic declines, opaque AI licensing contracts and monetizing AI visibility during closed-door town hall sessions at the Digiday Publishing Summit, held in Miami this week.

Overheard at DPS, “Google Zero” edition

OpenAI partners with a Canadian local news network, Amazon wants in on short-form video news and more.

Overheard at DPS, “Google Zero” edition

Publishers know the old playbook is breaking. Search traffic is shrinking, AI platforms are increasingly intermediating audiences and the mass-traffic, programmatic advertising model that powered much of the digital publishing ecosystem is losing steam. What’s far less clear is what comes next — or how publishers ensure they get paid fairly in the process.

During the closed-door town hall sessions at the Digiday Publishing Summit, publishers seemed to finally accept their new reality: Google search traffic is not coming back.

But there’s not exactly a clear way forward. AI licensing deals may seem like opportunities to make up for some of the revenue lost from monetizing a smaller audience base – but the deals remain opaque and uneven.

Meanwhile, publishers are testing optimizing content for AI (and trying to monetize that AI visibility) and direct audience strategies. They’re leaning harder into subscriptions, sponsorships, events and premium advertising. But none of it has emerged as a silver bullet as they work to rebuild more sustainable — and less traffic-dependent — businesses.

Publishing execs spoke under Chatham House rules in the town hall sessions, so Digiday could share what was said while maintaining executives’ anonymity. Here are the highlights:

Lack of transparency with AI licensing content deals

“Everyone is coming with a different deal, and none of us are allowed to talk about these deals publicly… It’s super freaking frustrating.”

“It’s like, [they’re saying], we’re coming to you with a flat rate. We’re coming to you with a grounding rate. We’re coming to you with, I don’t know, something that Tinkerbell made up… You have no idea what the metrics mean, and so there are so many different models out there. They’re completely opaque. The exact same AI company will put different models in front of different versions of us, and it’s just super, super frustrating.”

“We will decide to participate in a number of them if we can get the economics close to being right because we don’t know which way the ball is going to bounce. But it makes a frank conversation like this right here super, super hard.”

“The money is largely concentrated in the very biggest players. They don’t want to participate through [an AI licensing] marketplace. And we have no ability to see through, nor even talk amongst ourselves, about what ‘good’ might look like. “

“We can’t even talk about the deals that we sign.”

On why AI licensing marketplaces are taking so long to develop: “I think it’s because those who have big checkbooks to go acquire data are avoiding the marketplace because they do not want a value established there. They want to cut a deal that no one other than the publisher that they’re cutting that deal with has visibility into. And it feels like we’re being picked off one by one. It’s frustrating as hell.”

“With the Metas and the Googles, you kind of know what’s the standard contract. We all know what’s the rev share. We might not be able to disclose it, but there’s a standard contract from those partners. I think what we’re facing right now – and maybe it’s because of the newness of the industry – is that there is a distinctive contract probably for everyone, and it depends on your ability to negotiate. And I think that is scary because we can’t put a concentrated effort. We just have to survive on our own.”

“This is a new fresh hell.”

“Programmatic is going to go down consistent with what we see in our page view decrease. The question is: What is the value that our content has, and what opportunities are available to us to achieve a fair value for that content?… It’s really, really hard to form a point of view on that because of the information control that is on this.”

“Some of the contract terms can be really, really ugly.”

“I’m going to cry myself to sleep tonight.”

Debating “Google Zero” and what to do next

“The idea of Google Zero is, we’re not going to hit zero… I think what people mean is search zero. it will decline. It’ll continue to decline. We’ve got to figure out what that means. That probably means we have to monetize better, more efficiently.”

“I predict that Discover will continue to be here, and it probably will start to grow… Not to the degree that we saw search, and it’s not as valuable a user. It definitely isn’t. But if we’re just talking about eyeballs on ads, and we can make sure that we are growing direct or growing any kind of loyal users through subs, then we can also demand more CPMs or whatever it might be from the advertisers.”

“I think the days of making money on mass traffic from Google referrals are generally down and over.”

“[Our approach is] kind of accepting that, trying to squeeze as much as we can out of it, and then trying to prop up and make more healthy the other slices of our pie of revenue.”

“I don’t think we’re accepting a loss quarter over quarter, no matter what. But I do think we have to accept the slice of the pie that is Google or that is traffic or that is even a sick LLM deal where you do get paid and licensed – that pie slice is just not growing.”

“The days of… high yield programmatic revenue is just coming to an end.”

“Like with Facebook, I think it’s time to say goodbye… and try to understand what are other parts of our business that we can prop up and where we can actually diversify and grow in other places.”

“We wrote a lot of listicles. We did a lot of stuff that, frankly, was commoditized. That’s gone away… The stuff that has gone away is gone. And it was great. But now we’ve got to do something else… Focus on the things that actually provide value, the things that AI slop can’t replace… We’re not going to be made whole on those areas of coverage where, frankly, it wasn’t providing as much value to the public in the first place.”

Optimizing for AI, and monetizing AI visibility

“We’ve really focused on optimizing articles for AI, and we’ve seen a 40% increase in customer acquisition and traffic as a result… It’s not like going from 100 million users a month to 140, but it’s substantial.”

“We have a lot of shopping content… We’ve written about specific products within [an onsite AI search] chatbot on a licensing fee. So that’s been creative. Not much money, though.”

“Every publisher here has access to [an AI performance report in Google Search Console]… They have data going back to May on AI Overviews and every single URL on your site that’s getting impressions, not clicks. Because if they show clicks and impressions, you’d see how much traffic you’re losing because of CTR drops. But they show impressions. They show what countries those impressions are coming from. You can then go back a level to look at all the clicks coming from search. AI Overviews are in search, and so you can deduce on a particular URL what percentage people are clicking through to the page. And if you identify URLs that are only in the AI Overview and not in blue links below, then you can kind of get a sense of what the CTR is, which ends to be about 1% from the AI Overviews section.”

“We will take a look at the entities [people, places, things, brands] that we want to do well for and influence the LLMs outside of AI Overviews, mostly in ChatGPT… Then we’ll write a bunch of stories about that, and then see if we increase [impressions]… We’ll take a look at the before. We’ll refresh [the content]. We’ll see what happens over in ChatGPT specifically, and it just goes right up through the same day. There’s no delay.”

What we’ve heard

“I think of Google traffic now as extra. I don’t like to plan or optimize for Google.”

— Esther Cohen, director of audience and subscriptions at The Verge, speaking onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit.

Numbers to know

53%: The number of Americans who say it is more important to prevent inaccurate reporting, even if it limits freedom of the press.

£126 million ($170 million): The Guardian’s revenue from direct reader payments, having risen 17% YoY in March. It now has 1.4 million paying digital supporters.

160: The number of editorial jobs Reach, the publisher of The Mirror and Express newspapers, is culling as it adapts to sharp drop in online traffic thanks to AI-generated summaries.

What we’ve covered

Google rolls out pay-per-value AI licensing program to publishers

Google has been quietly inviting publishers to join its AI Contribution Pilot, a program which pays certain publishers whenever their content as “significantly contributed” to an AI-generated response in Gemini, AI Overviews or AI Mode.
So far publishers in the program can see limited data, but have accrued some money from Google, which is calculating the payments based on what it deems the most “value” to its AI tools.

Read more here.

How Reuters’ dynamic paywall is boosting subscriptions and ads

Speaking onstage at Digiday’s Publishing Summit in Miami, Phil Andraos, gm for digital at Reuters, said the recently launched dynamic paywall is reinforcing its ad revenue.
Its dynamic paywall’s machine-learning system takes certain outputs, like user behavior and content performance, and estimates how much ad revenue Reuters could make from that user.

Read more here.

In Graphic Detail: Inside the scramble to measure a brand’s AI visibility

There is no single playbook for AI visibility. One LLM’s go-to source for information is barely an afterthought for another.
Two LLMs might name the same brands in response to a question about sneakers, but they tend to reach for different sources to prove it.

Read more here.

What we’ve learned from the creator snafus at this year’s U.S. Open

The backlash over creators’ behavior at the U.S .Open was seriously overblown, per six marketing execs and creator agents sho spoke to Digiday.
When it comes to bringing creators to events, brands need to do their homework and ensure their understanding of rules of the sport, etiquette and when and where content should be captured, are water-tight.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

OpenAI partners with Canadian local news network

OpenAI has teamed up with Canadian digital local news network Village Media to launch an AI-powered community services tool.

Amazon wants in on short-form video news

Amazon is bringing short-form news clips offering local and national stories to Prime Video, a move which is seen to be a direct attempt to pull Gen Z attention from TikTok.

McClatchy cuts 30% of unionized staff

Newspaper chain McClatchy let go of more than 90 unionized workers across 17 publications, or about 30% of all unionized McClatchy workers, the AP reported. The layoffs impacted news outlets like The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer and others.

Publishers’ paid search budgets have risen 274%

Publishers’ paid search budgets have risen 274% in the last three years, according to Similarweb data, Adweek reported. In July, the top 100 publishers spent an estimated $113 million on paid search.