Here are some of the moments that defined how publishers adapted to the AI era this year.

Google AI Overviews undercut search traffic

Google’s AI-generated summaries in search, called AI Overviews, turned a year old in May. Around that time, publishers began to quantify the impact AI Overviews was having on their clickthroughs from search, with some reporting 50-90% lower CTRs when an AI summary appeared. In August, Digital Content Next found AI Overviews were linked to a 25% drop in referral traffic. The future of “zero-click search” started to materialize, and it wasn’t pretty. 

In third quarter earnings calls this year, publishing execs allayed investors’ worries about the traffic impact on their businesses, and shared their strategies for future-proofing against traffic erosion by investing in video, direct-to-audience approaches and AI licensing plays.

Publishers draw lines on AI crawlers

In the first half of this year, publishers were playing an endless game of Whack-a-Mole with AI crawlers as they tried to stop the ones scraping their sites for content used to train their models — without compensation.

But on July 1, Cloudflare launched an AI bot blocking tool that allowed publishers and other website creators to block all AI crawlers, as well as have the option to implement a pay-per-crawler feature to help publishers monetize AI bot traffic.

Cloudflare’s tool didn’t bring an end to the AI bot wars. But many publishing execs saw it as a way to draw a line in the sand and push tech companies to stop scraping their sites with reckless abandon.

In September, Cloudflare launched a Content Signals Policy to its robots.txt file, which gives publishers a way to communicate how they do and don’t want AI crawlers like Google’s to use their content once it’s scraped. While Google technically separates its search crawler (Googlebot) and its AI crawler (Google-Extended), even if a publisher blocks Google-Extended, their content can still show up in AI Overviews, as they appear in Google Search. 

While it doesn’t guarantee Google’s compliance (or any enforcement), it does give publishers a way to communicate that AI crawlers can scrape their sites to index pages for search, but can’t use their content for training AI systems. Publishers like The Atlantic are working on adding this update to their robots.txt. 

More tech companies get in on AI content licensing deals 

AI content licensing agreements continued to expand this year, as large tech companies like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon became bigger players in the market, giving publishers more opportunities to get paid for their content.

Companies like OpenAI and Perplexity continued to sign deals with more publishers this year, including USA Today Co. and The Washington Post and the Guardian.

On Dec. 5, Meta signed seven, multi-year AI content licensing deals with publishers including CNN, Fox News, People Inc. and USA Today Co. to incorporate their content into its large language model (LLM), Llama.

Two months prior, Microsoft got into the game with the launch of its pay-per-usage AI content marketplace, signing People Inc. and USA Today Co.

Amazon signed deals this summer with Condé Nast and Hearst for its AI shopping assistant Rufus, and an AI training deal with The New York Times.

Google has been quieter. In January, Google did its first AI content licensing deal with a news publisher for its Gemini chatbot with The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Collective — an AI licensing framework designed to standardize how publishers tell AI systems what content they can use, and how they must pay — launched in September and now has over 50 publishers joining its efforts, including People Inc., Ziff Davis, Yahoo, Arena Group, BuzzFeed, USA Today Co and Vox Media.

Lawsuits escalate

Still yet, more and more lawsuits were filed against large tech companies for their use of publishers’ content to train their AI systems.

In December, The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity for copyright infringement. 

Penske Media Corporation sued Google in September for its AI summaries, the first time Google has been challenged by a major U.S. publisher in court over AI search.

And in November, 14 news and magazine publishers won a first-round legal ruling against Canadian AI start-up Cohere for copyright infringement. A judge denied Cohere’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, and said summaries of news articles may infringe copyright, letting the claims move forward.

AI referrals grow — but are still insignificant

Traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI tools to publishers’ sites grew this year, though at miniscule proportions that did little to offset search traffic declines. 

This summer, more data came out showing growth in AI referral traffic from platforms like ChatGPT. Yet for many publishers, it still only made up a single digit percentage of overall traffic — if even that. It became clear this year that publishers couldn’t depend on AI platforms to send the same scale of traffic to their sites as search platforms historically have up until this point.

Publishers launch their own big AI projects

While the media industry reeled from what seemed like the sudden onset of a barrage of challenges and opportunities brought by AI, publishers debuted their own big AI projects. Large undertakings spanned across product, tech, editorial and other teams.

For example, in December, The Washington Post launched an AI-powered audio product that can be personalized to a listener’s preferences, and Yahoo introduced personalized AI-powered audio news summaries in its app. 

Time debuted an AI agent in November, letting readers ask questions and interact with Time’s content, in a number of different languages.

The Financial Times made its “Ask FT” chatbot available for all subscribers in April, letting them search the publication’s archive using natural language.

A disappointing Google search trial outcome for publishers

Unfortunately for publishers, Google’s search engine remains deeply intertwined with its AI products. 

After months of waiting, the Department of Justice’s remedies for Google, revealed on Sept. 2, landed with a verdict that felt anti-climactic for publishing execs who hoped the remedies would separate Google’s search engine crawler from its AI experiments, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Or, at least force them to provide more data on how those products are impacting publisher clickthroughs from search. 

That would’ve given publishers more control over where their content is showing up, and what it’s used for.