Media Briefing: The post-traffic era of the open web is taking shape

The open web isn’t dead — it’s just changing shape. As human traffic becomes harder to attract and AI crawlers absorb more publisher content, the web is splitting into two audiences. That’s forcing publishers to rethink the economics of the open web, and shift their focus from chasing scale to building strong brands with diversified content strategies that resonate with audiences.

That’s the only way to survive, and grow, in this new era, four publishing execs told Digiday.

“If you want to grow, you want to be more than an open web business. The open web is not dead, but it’s getting smaller,” said Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc. “We will always be an open web business… And we will also build on other platforms. It’s not a this or that, it’s a this and that.”

At the same time, publishers are trying to determine how to deal with the surge of bots coming to their sites, while navigating the nascent commercial landscape of AI content licensing. Determining how to monetize this new bot audience is challenging, and not happening fast enough to offset losses in impression-based ad revenue for some publishers.

“How can we subsidize the creation of high quality, authoritative, trustworthy content that is viable and sustainable when traditional models are being disrupted very quickly and new ones aren’t catching up? We’re not there yet. I think publishers look at this gap. We know we’ll get there. It’s all nascent. All the players are figuring out their place in this economic model, but we have a gap,” said Nina Gould, Forbes’ chief innovation officer.

Proliferating claims from analysts and execs across ad tech, media, SEO, AI and beyond about the “death of the open web” may in reality represent the decline of a particular economic model of the open web, one predicated on humans arriving through search or social, generating page views, seeing ads or converting into subscribers. That dynamic will live on, but now publishers have to determine how they fit into the new economics of the open web shaped by AI.

The brand era

In the AI era, brands may matter more than ever, publishing execs told Digiday. As search shifts from lists of links to AI-generated answers, publishers with strong editorial authority have an advantage: LLMs often surface and cite established news brands when generating responses.

“We are leaning into [our brand] more than a content and monetization strategy that relies on scale. We can’t rely on that anymore. The internet doesn’t work like that anymore,” Gould said.

Instead, publishers like Forbes are going back to the basics: focusing on what its audience values, and building experiences around that, Gould said. It’s not dissimilar to how Forbes is thinking about its bot audience, by trying to understand how crawlers are accessing content, what those crawlers value, and what the AI systems are doing with Forbes’ content.

Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Raptive (which oversees a network of 6,000 independent publishers) said brand and content quality are separating the sites most resilient to traffic and ad revenue losses in this new version of the open web from the ones that aren’t. 

The order of priority is different for publishers now, execs said. Publishers used to build their brands on websites and then distribute content on social platforms to reach more people. Now, the order has reversed: publishers are building their brands on other platforms (like Apple News, newsletters, social feeds) while the website serves as an anchor for those audiences.

“A website still has value… because it’s what you own. It’s the only thing that is yours … The algorithm can deprioritize you tomorrow and effectively, you’re dead,” Bannister said. “The playbook now is, ‘Do more and more to build that real connection with your audience’,” he added.

Ad sales consolidation and optimization

One thing is clear: the open web as we know it isn’t in a growth phase, execs said.

People Inc.’s latest company earnings results are a good indicator: session-based revenue as a percentage of the publisher’s total digital revenue decreased year over year, from 61% in Q2 20225 to 57% in Q2 2026. This business remained flat year over year, due to flat ad revenue in the quarter, Tim Quinn, CFO at People Inc., said in a recent company earnings call. 

People Inc. says it’s seen a 22% year-over-year decline in “core sessions” (unique visitors to People Inc.’s core brands), including a 40% year-over-year decline in Google search traffic. That means even though fewer people came to People Inc’s web properties, the company made more money.

Meanwhile, revenue not tied to sessions (ad revenue from social or native campaigns, events, sponsorships, emails, ad targeting tool D/Cipher and licensing) grew 16% year over year in Q2, and grew as a percentage of People Inc.’s total digital revenue, from 39% in Q2 2025 to 43% in Q2 2026.

The key to this stabilization has been to sell more integrated programs that include events, site sponsorships, custom content and social extensions.

Bannister said this is one reason the market is seeing more consolidation of ad sales. Last month, Raptive launched Apex to handle digital ad sales for large media companies. Last week, Taboola announced it will now handle all of NBC News’ programmatic display ad sales, consolidating the publisher’s automated ads business with the one vendor. 

“The search component of discovery has been shifting long before LLMs, with zero-click searches on the rise for years now and LLMs accelerating this trend,” said Jamie Samuel, vp of commercial product & GTM at Future. “A brand mustn’t only reach users via search, legacy or LLM, on the open web. But more importantly, its monetization cannot be tied solely to this and to indirect or passive revenue streams.”

That’s one of the reasons Future’s sales teams have shifted to focus on business outcomes and effectiveness, rather than impressions, Samuel added — a strategy many digital publishers have moved into.

AI advertising economics are not there yet

However, monetizing the open web is getting more difficult for most publishers. And while one answer to this could be the growth in AI content licensing opportunities from tech companies developing marketplaces and revenue share programs, it just hasn’t caught up fast enough.

“Until there’s a unified way for publishers to set pricing around their content, it’s tough to do. There needs to be an ecosystem. It’s all coming at us ad hoc,” Gould said. 

Roberts had a different perspective, arguing that publishers shouldn’t be thinking of revenue from AI content licensing deals as a replacement for revenue driven by the open web. “Anything from AI should be incremental, not a replacement,” Roberts said.

What we’ve heard

“GEO is not a replacement for search in the sense that it will drive traffic. It’s not a scale thing. GEO… [can be used] as a service to partners to help them increase their [AI] visibility. That is the potential. That’s the opportunity for publishers… It’s such a serious moneymaker for publishers.”

—A head of SEO at a publisher.

Numbers to know

50 million: The number of views The Athletic has driven from videos produced by sports creators.

$7.99: The monthly price of MS NOW’s new digital membership program.

3: The number of HuffPost reporters left on its National desk, after BuzzFeed’s latest round of layoffs. 

4: The number of employees laid off at Vox.com in the first restructuring since James Murdoch’s takeover.

What we’ve covered

USA Today Co. is reformatting content to attract more AI licensing deals

• USA Today Co. is testing different ways to reformat its website content for an AI bot audience to attract AI content licensing deals.
• Restructuring content formats and templates can help make it easier for AI systems to access, understand and cite USA Today’s reporting, improving the discoverability of its content in AI answer engines, Kara Chiles, USA Today Co.’s svp of product management, told Digiday.

Read more here.

In Graphic Detail: How AI search has impacted the web traffic of over 50 advertisers

• Google’s AI Overviews are taking a measurable bite out of advertisers’ organic search traffic: Brainlabs found that traffic across 54 clients fell 10.5% after AI Overviews became widespread.
• But less traffic hasn’t necessarily meant worse business results. Referrals from AI platforms rose 163%, while AI-driven “key events” such as purchases and sign-ups jumped 335%. 

Read more here.

X creates a new revenue model for creators — but will it actually win them over?

• X is launching a new revenue model for creators next month, called the Original Content Rewards Program, that will reward creators who produce “original, high-quality content.”
• But X’s program faces a challenge in winning over creators. The platform’s feed can be controversial, which media buyers and creator agents say diminishes its creator and advertising value compared to others.

Read more here.

The IAB is developing a framework to tackle AI advertising measurement

• Ads are starting to get served to bots instead of people. Nobody agrees on what that’s worth, or who gets credit for it.
• The Interactive Advertising Bureau is trying to fix that. A new framework, due out Nov. 12, will tackle how to attribute and credit conversions influenced by AI.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

New York Times tests AI-generated search summaries

The New York Times is testing its first generative AI tool for readers, showing a new search page for some visitors that responds to queries with excerpts, story links and AI-generated summaries, Semafor reported.

The Athletic is in talks with Kalshi for a sponsorship deal

The Athletic and prediction market company Kalshi are in serious talks for a sponsorship deal, Front Office Sports reported. Kalshi has content deals with Fox, CNN and CNBC.

Forbes and Shook Research halt partnership after $6 million payment to editor

Forbes and Shook Research are suspending the rankings and events they produced together, amid fallout from a $6 million payment from Shook Research’s founder to Forbes’ top editor, Randall Lane, The New York Times reported.

The Wall Street Journal defends billionaire’s use of AI to write op-ed

Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller used AI to write an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ’s opinion editor doesn’t seem to have an issue with this, and said AI is a “fact of modern life,” The Washington Post reported.