While live blogs have been around for years, The Athletic sees live formats as a way to keep audiences on its platform, while insulating its reporting from getting scraped and repurposed by AI tools.

“The one thing that AI isn’t as good at is the live experience. And so we can be that expert for you in the moment. Humans will always be faster,” said Sarah Goldstein, editorial director at The Athletic.

At a time when written content is increasingly fueling AI answer engines, The Athletic is betting that injecting video into its live blogging is both stickier for fans — and better protected. The publisher began adding videos to its live blog feeds (which have been around since 2021) just last month, said Laura Williamson, editor in chief of The Athletic U.K. The Athletic hired Shaneika Dabney-Henderson as its first global head of video last month.

“I’m mindful that in today’s AI world, the one thing [AI] can’t generate is [real-time] information. So that push to break news and nuggets of information — [such as] what you’re hearing, what you’re seeing — make it really vibrant. It comes alive,” Williamson said. “We don’t want play-by-play updates, because fans are watching. They can see that. It’s what we can give them extra, effectively, that we’re really interested in. Or a bit of personality, a bit of fun.”

The Athletic had a good 2025, in terms of traffic growth. The site had 16.9 million unique visitors in January 2026, up 59% year over year, according to Similarweb data.

But improvements in systems like retrieval augmented generation (RAG) mean that AI search chatbots are getting better at fetching real-time information published online. RAG pipelines can be wired to live feeds and news APIs for up-to-the-minute information retrieval.

It’s unclear if live coverage and video truly is harder for AI bots to scrape. A recent report by TollBit found that some AI bot scrapers were even able to retrieve full versions of paywalled articles.

Burhan Hamid, co-founder of AI video ad platform streamr.ai and former CTO at Time, was unconvinced that live blogs and video are less susceptible to AI scraping.

“It depends on the robots.txt files that [publishers] have. If they allow AI scraping, then the crawlers will scrape — regardless of content type,” he said. “Anything searchable is discoverable by the agents.” Then of course there are those that flout robots.txt entirely — 30% of total AI bot scrapes in Q4 2025 were scrapes that did not abide by explicit robots.txt permissions, according to TollBit’s report.

However, David Caswell, founder of StoryFlow, a consultancy focused on AI workflows in news production, had a different perspective.

“Video is indeed harder and more expensive to scrape, and to extract useful semantic information from. This is why major web-scraping projects like Common Crawl don’t include much video,” Caswell said.

Nevertheless, The Athletic is betting that video and live blogs can outrun the worst of the AI scraping rife in the industry, with referral traffic continuing to decline on text articles — at least for now.

About 20 reporters will be contributing videos to the live blogs at the Winter Olympics, and about two dozen will do so for Super Bowl coverage. Overall, there will be about 30 people at The Athletic covering the Winter Olympics, and 55 people covering the Super Bowl — with some on the ground and others covering from home, according to Goldstein and Williamson. Each live blog has its own editor.

The Athletic has provided training to reporters who expressed interest in covering these sports events with video, according to Williamson. Reporters practiced by doing a few stand-ups (such as speaking to the camera to explain what was happening during the NFL training camps last summer), which then expanded to shooting video at NFL press conferences — to get them comfortable with talking in front of a camera and recording on the ground, Goldstein said.

These videos will also be distributed on social media platforms, including Instagram, X, Bluesky and Facebook, Williamson said — to drive audiences to The Athletic’s live blogs and other onsite coverage. 

For the Super Bowl, reporters are being divvied up to target different topics to shoot video for the live blog feeds, Goldstein said. (The Athletic can’t use game highlights or shoot video in the stadium during the Super Bowl game, as media companies are restricted from doing so unless they are part of the official broadcast rights holders or have explicit licensing deals with the NFL or its partners.)

Other publishers are leaning into live feeds to engage readers during big sports events this year. Last summer, Vox Media’s sports media network SB Nation redesigned its site in an effort to deepen audience engagement — a big part of that was driving readers to its “game threads,” SB Nation’s version of live blogs. This forthcoming weekend SB Nation will feed Super Bowl coverage into its Patriots and Seahawks feeds.

Other sports-focused publishers like NBC Sports and Yahoo Sports have been live blogging on major sports events for years now, and will host these feeds for the Super Bowl too.

Meanwhile, The Athletic will produce a daily newsletter dedicated to the Winter Olympics, which kicked off on Feb. 6., as well as other channels to directly engage with readers that are not reliant on search for content discovery, like live push notifications.

The Athletic has over 10 million subscribers across its slate of 11 newsletters, up from 5 million in May 2025, according to a spokesperson at The Athletic. Its flagship newsletter “The Pulse” has 4.4 million subscribers. The Athletic’s Olympics coverage is sponsored by brands like Amazon, Deloitte and Jeep, they added.

“The biggest thing is just trying to show everyone what it’s like to be here and be part of that moment,” Goldstein said. “Not everyone wants to sit and read a full story. Not everyone has time. But you do have time to become smarter in a 90-second video. Or as you’re watching the game, if you have a question about something, a live blog is going to help answer that.”