Why publishers are betting on video to counter AI search

Sponsored by EX.CO • May 27, 2026 •

Shachar Orren, co-founder and CRO/CMO, EX.CO

For three decades, the click was the currency of digital publishing. Someone wrote the headline, someone clicked it and the monetization engine did the rest. It was simple, reliable and scalable.

Then AI arrived.

Zero-click search rates jumped from 56% to 69% in a single year. AI overviews now answer the question before the reader arrives. The article — the foundational unit of digital publishing since the internet began — has become raw material for a machine that returns the answer without the visit. Publishers are losing an estimated $2 billion in annual ad revenue to AI search summaries alone. That number will go up.

This is not a traffic problem. It’s a format problem, and the format that built digital publishing is changing. And the publishers who recognize that distinction are the ones who will still be standing in five years.

Why text was always going to lose this fight

The article was built to be indexed. That was its superpower for 30 years: searchable, linkable, shareable. But indexable also means summarizable. A document can be scraped, processed and served back without attribution. Publishers built a huge part of their business model on a format and structure that was easy to intercept.

Video is different. While it’s not immune to AI — nothing is — video, as an experience, resists the shortcut in a way text never could. It can be transcribed or generate a summary, but the experience of watching something cannot be replicated in a way that substitutes for actually watching it. A story lands differently when seen rather than read, and this can’t be flattened into a search result. The experience is the content, and the experience requires the watch.

The market has already made its bet. According to Statista, global video ad spend is projected to hit $236 billion in 2026 — the single largest format category in digital advertising. Advertisers follow engagement, and video is driving engagement. Nine in 10 U.S. consumers say they’re open to watching short-form vertical clips on publisher sites. Sub-60-second vertical video drives 2.5x higher engagement than standard formats.

Publishers who have built the right video experience are seeing it in their revenue. Those still treating video as a checkbox are leaving that money on the table. Time magazine is already commanding CPM premiums of 25%–40% on vertical video over standard display — not because its content changed, but because its format did.

The next wave of video will separate the leaders from the rest

The formats performing today are just the ground floor for video. The next generation of video experiences is immersive and adaptive — a player that responds to the content and the device, shifting between vertical and horizontal, filling the screen and meeting the viewer where they are.

Built for how audiences actually move through content, these formats will do something the static article never could: make staying feel better than leaving. A viewer who chooses to watch, remains through the content and engages with what comes next is a fundamentally different audience signal than a reader who bounces after 12 seconds. Advertisers know this, and the CPM gap between passive inventory and genuinely immersive video environments will only widen as the formats mature.

This is not about vertical video or chasing TikTok. It’s about building a premium, publisher-owned video environment that belongs to the media brand, not the platform. Publishers who invest in that experience now are building an asset. Everyone else is renting attention from someone else’s algorithm.

What publishers should be asking themselves today

Publishers have spent the last several years smartly diversifying — subscriptions, newsletters, events and first-party data. All of it matters, but none of it fully addresses what happens when AI continues to intercept the reader before they ever arrive the way video does. It isn’t new, but video is irreplaceable in a way that text never was.

The question worth asking right now: Is your video experience actually built to capture that value? Is it immersive enough to keep a viewer on-site? Is it formatted for how your audience is consuming content — on mobile, in vertical, in short bursts of genuine engagement? Is it generating inventory that advertisers will pay a real premium for?

Those answers will define which publishers lead the next chapter and which ones spend it wondering where the audience went.

Partner insights from EX.CO