Naturally, the toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to AI companies training on publishers’ archives, but now the industry is fighting to shape what comes next. Publishers want a fair, structured, regulated AI environment that involves AI companies not just splurging on chips and computing power, but actually coughing up for the information their large language models (LLMs) churn out. 

Digiday asked 10 publishers if they could have one wish granted for Christmas, what would it be? It wasn’t tricky to identify a theme. 

“As Ebenezer Scrooge can testify, Christmas is a time for reflecting on the past, the present and the future,” says Matt Roberson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the Financial Times. “Like Scrooge, many of the biggest AI developers go into the holiday season with no qualms about extracting commercial value from human labor, in the form of human-authored copyright material, without paying for it. That position is unsustainable and has to change.”

There have been flickers of hope throughout 2025. Cloudflare helped publishers give the middle finger to unwanted bot blocking — a much-needed slither of leverage to at least stem the flow of unwanted scraping. Amazon entered the AI licensing fray, showing it was willing to pay The New York Times, Condé Nast and Hearst good money in exchange for access to their content. Microsoft’s move to establish an AI content marketplace with a group of publishers, showed the media business world that it was willing to pay for quality content. And finally, Meta ended months of rumors, confirming that it had multi-year AI licensing deals with seven major publishers, including CNN, People Inc. and USA Today Co. In doing so, it reinforced just how critical it is for the LLMs themselves to have access to strong content to compete.

Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

Unlocking AI-powered audience value in 2026

Publishers have largely moved past the shock of search-referral nose dives — which many still blame, at least in part, on the rise of zero-click search. The next hurdle is agreeing what replaces pageviews as the industry’s core metric. While SEO tactics will still be relevant, the reduction of click-through rates means publishers will need to get extra creative around how to ensure their content gets distributed, and how long they keep people on site when they do (eventually) arrive there. 

Nina Gould, chief innovation officer at Forbes wants to unlock what’s currently still a mystery for publishers: AI-powered audience value. “The current reliance on clicks as a measure of impact is becoming obsolete,” she says. “Publishers need a new value index to quantify how deeply quality journalism influences AI systems and engages audiences.” In 2026, she wants publishers to collaboratively establish new metrics that reflect the value of content. “We need to move beyond just traffic, and find ways to quantify trust, authority, and informational impact, ultimately redefining how AI values and compensates quality journalism,” she says. 

One thing all publishers agree on: AI engines need to get real about how much their own futures depend on sustainable journalism and quality content.

Nada Arnot, evp of marketing at The Economist, says she wants AI search engines to return traffic to publishers as strongly — and as generously — as the heyday of organic search. “This year, organic traffic has declined sharply as generative AI tools increasingly intercept the path to publisher content,” she notes. While consumer adoption of AI search has risen, she stresses that there has been zero value exchange for content creators. “The promised upside — traffic from LLMs and AI-powered search — hasn’t materialized. For publishers who rely on discoverability, that’s a growing concern. If AI is to be part of a sustainable media ecosystem, it must also support the sources that fuel its value,” she adds. 

Publishers have worked on honing their first-party data assets for years, everything from audience log-in strategies, loyalty programs, newsletter portfolios, to identity frameworks and e-commerce data capture. Now there’s real urgency to push it further. As Gould put it: first-party data is now the critical advantage, offering the insight and integrity to personalize user experiences while rigorously protecting privacy.

“With the demise of third-party cookies and the rise of AI-driven distribution, publishers have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild their data foundations on audience trust,” says Gould. Publishers and their partners should embrace a “first-party data renaissance” in 2026. “The future of growth in media will come from deep, data-driven relationships built directly with readers, powered by transparency, consent, and mutual value exchange.”

New era of partnerships and AI slop censors

Noy Freedman, svp of strategic alliances at Minute Media, which owns Sports Illustrated and The Players’ Tribune, wishes for an AI-led discovery experience that helps people find and support trusted media brands and steers them away from low-quality imitators. “My Christmas wish is that in a world increasingly overwhelmed by AI-generated slop, audiences rediscover the value of premium, human-created content and recognize the influence their loyalty has on the success of the brands they care about,” she says. Beyond that, she wants AI to be a visibility tool that helps audiences find and appreciate real quality instead of treating all content as interchangeable and differentiating credible sources, not “flatten everything into generic summaries.”

Publisher consensus is that they need to stop lamenting and lean in, if they’re to survive, but that AI companies must shoulder more accountability. Freedman believes audiences also need to do their part. “The future of quality content now depends on a true partnership between publishers and audiences,” she says. “We commit to the rigor, expertise, and human insight required to create work that cuts through the clutter. Users, in turn, play a powerful role in ensuring that this work is recognized, surfaced, and valued across emerging AI discovery pathways.” Their choices determine which voices get seen and which brands still carry cultural relevance, she stresses.

The push to galvanize around standards

In 2025, efforts to standardize how AI companies pay publishers for using their content began — from the IAB Tech Lab’s CoMP framework to RSL’s licensing standards. In 2026, they’ll take more meaningful shape. What’s notable is the level of publisher collective action behind them — a stark contrast to the Facebook-Google duopoly years (roughly the mid-2010s through to early 2020s) when those two platforms ate the majority of digital advertising dollars and publishers largely failed to mount a united front.  

While there will always be outliers — the likes of News Corps and the New York Timeses of the world, big enough to negotiate on their own — many publishers are hopeful the current push to standardize AI payments will make a difference to the AI-scraping rampage seen throughout 2024 and 2025. “In 2026, AI should move from Wild West scraping to standards-based collaboration,” says Stefan Betzold, chief product marketing officer and managing director of Bauer Media Group. “No more black-box LLM scraping — but a fair, structured agentic web where every bot plays by the rules, every request is transparent, and every publisher is part of the value chain, not just the training set,” he adds. 

It may seem a tall order, but publishers are noticing a change in the winds: largely that AI companies need to differentiate their LLMs in an increasingly crowded market. And for that, they need the best, most up-to-date content. Some savvy publishers are already monetizing the opportunity in enterprise businesses’ private LLM requirements, and several believe next year will see an explosion in small language models wanting licensing deals with specialized, niche content providers.

There are also signs that the Google narrative that dominated this year — with AI Overviews taking most of the blame for traffic drops — may start to shift, as more publishers experiment with Gemini projects. As Christian Broughton, CEO of The Independent put it: “Tech giants and the creator economy are often cast by news publishers as the villains of 2025, but our partnership with Google’s Gemini, and the launch of Independent Studio, set us on a transformation greater even than our switch from print to fully digital very nearly a decade ago.” He stresses that this use of AI products helps its journalists drop the boring tasks they’ve always hated and free them up for more exciting journalism that “only humans can do.”

That’s certainly something the FT has gotten very adept at — using computational techniques to identify critical stories that might otherwise go untold. More than a few publishers Digiday has spoken with in recent months now talk about AI engines in binary terms: the “good ones” (who pay for content and respect do-not-block requests from publishers) and “bad ones”. And while AI offers real upside across newsrooms, product workflows and even programmatic trading, there’s no denying that publishers will still need to hold their ground as the internet ecosystem is reshaped.

“In 2026 and beyond, I hope to see news organizations focus on building better relationships with AI developers who want to do the right thing, and taking bold steps to wean ourselves off increasingly one-sided relationships,” says the FT’s Rogerson. “A complete transformation of the culture that underpins the AI industry might be too big an ask for the Christmas list. But as we look to the New Year, seeing publishers take the initiative through stronger steps to punish the worst actors, and to celebrate those doing the right thing, would be a great start.”

Got all that? Great – thanks, Santa.