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This week’s Media Briefing looks at the rise of AI visibility as publishers’ latest performance metric and are using their prominence in AI answer engines to attract advertisers — even as the tools measuring it remain inconsistent and difficult to compare.
- Publishers are monetizing AI visibility
- Publishers call for legal sanctions against OpenAI, AI startup wants to hire local reporters, and more.
- Zero‑click search choked the flow of traffic to news and other open‑web sites, according to new U.S. and U.K. benchmarking data from Ozone.
- However, spend hasn’t collapsed at the same rate, with rising eCPMs helping to plug the gap left by disappearing volume.
- Publishers are working to re-engineer newsrooms so reporters and editors behave less like byline-only journalists and more like on-camera video correspondents and creators.
- Some are building formal “talent labs” with structured coaching and workflows. Others are taking a looser approach, simply putting more journalists in front of a camera and iterating from there.
- The publisher-led coalition SPUR is building a standard to track how AI systems retrieve, cite and display content, giving publishers visibility into how their journalism is used.
- The goal is to turn AI usage into revenue, creating the data infrastructure needed for transparent reporting and usage-based licensing deals.
- As the 2026 FIFA World Cup nears its conclusion, a parallel broadcast has emerged alongside the official TV feed: creator-led livestreams from inside the stadiums and FIFA fan zones on Twitch and YouTube.
- It’s a new broadcast layer built around community, drawing in younger viewers who show up for the streamer first and the soccer second.
- Reddit execs are “intensely debating” whether feeding ChatGPT is eating its own ad business.
- A top Reddit advertising exec admitted the company doesn’t yet know whether selling its community data to train ChatGPT and Gemini is undercutting the very data advantage its own ad-targeting business is built on.
Publishers are monetizing AI visibility #
When publishers were chasing scale, they touted Comscore rankings as proof of their value to advertisers. Now, there is a new metric on the rise: AI visibility in LLMs.
Publishers like Axios, Forbes, Future, Time and The Washington Post are figuring out how to package that metric into GEO products that promise to improve how often brands are surfaced and cited in AI answer engines. In Germany, media houses like Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt are doing the same.
Publishing execs told Digiday these ideas aren’t coming out of nowhere, but are spurred by brands coming to them for GEO insights. Last week, Time received multiple RFPs seeking solutions to improve how a brand shows up in AI platforms, Time’s chief operating officer Mark Howard said.
Proving that a publisher is a highly-cited source in AI answer engines is the strongest signal they have right now to show authority on a topic in LLMs, said one publishing exec who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity.
“We’ve had brands come directly to us, saying that whenever they ask a chatbot about their products [or] brands, we’re constantly appearing,” they said.
The catch: that metric is anything but concrete. Figuring out which news outlets appear most often in AI chatbot responses relies on inconsistent data, and there’s no single way to measure AI visibility. Added to that, behind the scenes publishers say a noticeable share of GEO vendors are closer to snakeoil salesmen than partners, pitching “top citation” guarantees without credible methods to back them up.
Most analytics firms look at how often a publisher is mentioned or cited in AI answer engines — but they use different datasets and methodologies to rank which publishers show up the most.
Regardless of how AI visibility is being measured — and which vendors are being cited by publishers to prove their relevance in AI answer engines — one thing is clear: publishers are increasingly using this metric to pitch new marketing offerings to brands.
Despite the murky metrics, premium publishers may be in a position of strength here. AI chatbot adoption is growing, but users remain skeptical of the accuracy of AI responses, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. LLMs recognize the value of citing content from large publishers with brand recognition and authoritative coverage (hence the AI content licensing agreement spree) — and so do brands, execs argued.
“The value proposition is evolving beyond audience reach, engagement and SEO to include how authoritative content from trusted media brands shapes how AI systems understand, cite and recommend brands over time. Publishers aren’t just selling impressions anymore – they’re selling visibility within the AI knowledge ecosystem,” said Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould.
After ranking among the most-cited publishers in AI answer engines across four different studies (including ones from Muck Rack and 5W), Axios saw an opportunity to turn its AI visibility into a new commercial offering, said CRO Jacquelyn Cameron.
“Ensuring that Axios has a high citation score within these LLMs is something that we think about a lot… That’s incredibly important for us as a brand and as a news publication, especially as adoption of these tools continues to accelerate,” Cameron said. “There are so many different companies and different analytics that are out there. The thing that we keep coming back to is that regardless of which organization or which analytics company you’re talking about, we are still populating as one of the top sources.”
Axios is having early conversations with advertising clients now about these opportunities, Cameron said.
Without any standardization of how to measure AI visibility, however, no single analytics firm’s rankings have emerged as the go-to for publishers or brands. Some publishers aren’t convinced these vendors are providing reliable reflections of their prominence in AI answer engines.
“They all have different methodologies. Their numbers are all different. I don’t think that there’s any standardization here that you can anchor on, at the moment,” said Mark Howard, chief operating officer at Time. “I don’t think you get any consistency from one to the next… We’re not anywhere close to a Comscore or Similarweb type of model where you can actually use that in any kind of cross-website, cross open web way.”
Because of this, Time is using bot traffic as the main proxy metric in GEO discussions with clients, said Howard. Time’s high bot traffic demonstrates its content is highly sought after by LLMs and influencing AI search responses, and those insights can be a selling point to brands seeking to improve their AI visibility, Howard said.
He noted that Time ranks in the 98th percentile for AI bot activity among the nearly 7,000 publisher sites in TollBit’s network, meaning the publisher is seeing more AI crawler requests for its content than the majority of publishers. Time tracks daily and monthly AI bot traffic to the site, and compares those stats with human website traffic. It also tracks Time’s AI citations compared to pageviews, Howard added.
“It’s inconsistent from one platform to the other. Each of those different platforms all have their own system and their own analytics. It’s kind of like when we were doing ad viewability 10 years ago, when each of the verification vendors had their own measurement system and classification, and nothing was interoperable between one to the other until we standardized everything. Right now, it’s sort of like that,” Howard said.
Forbes uses Profound to measure its AI visibility rankings, which includes citations, share of voice, source attribution and competitive rankings across thousands of prompts, Gould said.
“While there’s no industry standard yet, a growing ecosystem of measurement tools has emerged — and brands are paying attention,” she said. “At Forbes, we’re seeing a clear shift in client priorities. More and more brand partners tell us AI discoverability is a top marketing priority – and increasingly a key driver of their investment in branded content.”
As publishers push GEO and AI visibility products, agencies say brands are beginning to rethink what counts as being seen online. Rather than focusing on appearing in search results, referral traffic or media coverage, brands are now finding it important to consider whether AI answer engines are surfacing, citing and accurately representing them in responses, said Kalina MacKay, svp of owned media at digital marketing agency Go Fish Digital.
“As AI becomes a larger part of the discovery journey, visibility in those responses is becoming an increasingly important measure of influence, even when traditional traffic and attribution do not fully capture its impact,” said Ashish Jacob, director of GEO at Go Fish Digital.
What we’ve heard #
“I left with more optimism this year than I have ever felt coming out of Cannes before… Much more green shoots of opportunity in front of us [around GEO and live events], so long as we move fast and move smart.”
– Jacquelyn Cameron, CRO at Axios.
Numbers to know #
56.4%: The percentage of news publishers that block at least one AI crawler in robots.txt, according to web data firm HasData.
23.3 million: The number of U.K households that paid the BBC license fee last year, declining by 539,000 year over year.
187%: The growth in AI-driven traffic in 2025, about eight times faster than the growth of human traffic, according to web data platform Decodo.
What we’ve covered #
Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2
Read more here.
Inside the newsroom push to turn print reporters into video talent
Read more here.
WTF is SPUR’s publisher-run Content Telemetry Framework?
Read more here.
How streaming creators built a new broadcast blueprint at the World Cup
Read more here.
Reddit questions if AI data deals could hurt its ad business
Read more here.
What we’re reading #
Several publishers call for legal sanctions against OpenAI in copyright dispute
The New York Times, The New York Daily News and 15 other media orgs said in a federal court filing that OpenAI was withholding evidence in a copyright lawsuit, calling for legal sanctions against OpenAI, The New York Times reported.
AI startup State Affairs wants to put local reporters in statehouses
The company has attracted $70 million in investment to acquire local news orgs and hire journalists to feed stories into an LLM, to sell subscriptions to companies, nonprofits and governments, The Washington Post reported.
The New York Times is launching local news newsletters
The New York Times is launching a local news initiative, starting with a pilot newsletter for the Twin Cities, likely an effort to fill the local news void and add advertising and subscriber value, Nieman Lab reported.
Semafor is developing five new shows and has hired Fortune’s Adam Banicki to create video programming for its C-suite audience, Adweek reported.
Voice of America contractors turn to other careers after Trump cuts
After the Trump administration’s dismantling of Voice of America, many displaced journalists have rebuilt their lives in jobs ranging from retail to real estate, The Washington Post reported.
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