ChatGPT users on the mobile app saw roughly twice as many ads per hour this July as they did in April, according to Business Insider. The jump coincides with a sharp expansion in the pool of advertisers buying those slots.

US data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates OpenAI has nearly tripled its advertiser count on ChatGPT, from about 300 in April to more than 820 in July. At least 160 advertisers joined in July alone.

The advertiser mix has shifted too. Tech companies including Speechify, Jotform and Natural Intelligence dominated the top ranks in April. By July they had fallen out of Sensor Tower’s top 10, replaced by Booking Holdings, Intuit, Home Depot and L.L.Bean.

Scheels, a sports clothing retailer, was the only company to sit in the top 10 in both months.

The shift extends beyond advertiser count. Retail still accounts for the largest share of ChatGPT ad spending, but its dominance is slipping as financial services, travel and tourism, and jobs and education gain ground.

Financial services has grown the fastest, rising from 2% of ad spend in April to 12% in July.

Sensor Tower identified BestMoney.com as one of ChatGPT’s top advertisers in July, saying the broader mix suggests OpenAI is diversifying its advertiser base — a potentially positive sign for monetization.

The numbers remain a fraction of OpenAI’s ambitions. The company reported $100 million in annual recurring ad revenue in May — a rounding error next to Google’s $81.6 billion and Meta’s $59.3 billion in ad revenue in their most recent quarters.

OpenAI serves ads to users on its free tier and its $8-a-month Go plan, which together account for the vast majority of a user base Sensor Tower estimated at 1 billion monthly app users in May.

OpenAI ads chief Dave Dugan told Business Insider in June that the company initially kept ad placements deliberately limited to protect the user experience. Four months in, he said, the team has grown more confident about scaling up. For now, ads appear beneath ChatGPT’s answers, while OpenAI avoids placing them alongside queries about personal health or politics.

For publishers and media buyers, the bigger story is not today’s ad revenue but where the next wave of attention is forming. A chatbot with a billion users putting ads beneath its answers creates a new pool of inventory competing with search and social for the same budgets.

OpenAI’s self-serve ad platform, launched in May, remains rudimentary compared with the mature systems run by Google and Meta. That makes the early surge in big-brand spending look more like testing than a long-term commitment.

For newsrooms already watching referral traffic decline as readers turn to chatbots instead of clicking links, the stakes are higher. The way OpenAI builds out its ad business could shape where publishers reach audiences — and how they get paid — as search behavior shifts.

OpenAI’s next steps include expanding into new markets and adding targeting tools, both designed to pull more advertising dollars into an app most people still use for free. The bigger question is whether advertisers stick around once the novelty wears off. July’s numbers suggest growing interest, but not yet lasting commitment.

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A Google search for “Burnham social care” on July 30 surfaced something new at the top of the page: BBC, Guardian and Caring Times articles stacked in a Top Stories carousel directly inside an AI Overview, according to Press Gazette.

The placement is part of a broader shift in how Google handles breaking news in AI-generated search results—and it creates a new dilemma for publishers weighing whether to opt out of Google’s AI features.

Google began rolling out the embedded Top Stories carousel in June. When it appears, it replaces the standalone Top Stories box that traditionally sits below an AI Overview, putting publisher links closer to the top of the page instead of forcing users to scroll through AI-generated text to find them.

The format is already showing up at meaningful scale.

Data from news SEO firm Newzdash shows that 15.5% of trending-news searches in the US that triggered Top Stories displayed the module within an AI Overview rather than in its traditional position.

The analysis covered more than 17 million Top Stories appearances across 40-plus countries during the 30 days ending July 28. So far, Newzdash has observed the embedded format only in the US and UK.

Entertainment was the category most likely to trigger the placement, accounting for 35.1% of cases in the US and 31.5% in the UK World news and sports followed, with sports appearing more often in the UK than in the US.

Newzdash founder John Shehata described the change as a “double-edged sword.” Google has said it wants to make links more prominent in its AI search experiences, and embedding the full Top Stories carousel does exactly that.

“We do not yet have comparative clickthrough data, but it should create a stronger opportunity for clicks than pushing Top Stories further down the page,” Shehata said.

But the new placement comes with a catch: Publishers may have to accept AI-generated summaries of their content to qualify for it.

Breaking news was once relatively insulated from Google’s AI answers. That protection is fading. Nearly half of Google search results pages now carry an AI Overview, according to Semrush’s tracker, putting news publishers increasingly inside the AI-generated search experience.

Google recently added Search Console controls allowing publishers to exclude their content from AI Overviews and AI Mode. The UK rollout followed a ruling by the Competition and Markets Authority.

Newzdash found that Top Stories appeared either inside an AI Overview or as a standalone module — never both. That means publishers that opt out of Google’s generative AI features could lose access to the embedded placement, with no guarantee that Google will show the standalone Top Stories module elsewhere on the page.

Shehata said publishers should distinguish between two different Google controls.

Blocking Google-Extended in robots.txt restricts the use of content for model training and grounding and should not affect a publisher’s eligibility for Top Stories. The Search Console exclusion is different: It determines whether a publisher’s links can appear in Google’s AI features at all.

The trade-off lands amid a growing debate over whether publishers should block their content from AI search. Opting out can keep a publisher’s content from being summarized by Google, but it may also remove the publisher from one of the most prominent referral opportunities Google has introduced in years.

And in an AI search environment where being cited by name increasingly matters, the embedded Top Stories carousel is more than a technical change. It is a new strategic choice for news publishers: accept a place inside Google’s AI experience, or risk disappearing from one of its most visible news placements.

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UK publisher digital revenue fell 4.55% in the first quarter of 2026, ending four straight quarters of growth, according to the Digital Publishers’ Revenue Index run by the Association of Online Publishers and Deloitte.

The survey, reported by Press Gazette, covered 13 publishers, nine business-to-consumer and four business-to-business. Richard Reeves, managing director at the AOP, called the drop the “first tremors in an earthquake being felt across the industry” as AI-generated answers and shifting audience habits keep readers from clicking through to source sites.

The decline was uneven. Some 62% of respondents still reported revenue growth, the highest share in a year, which the AOP said points to the heaviest losses being concentrated among a minority of publishers most exposed to changes in the information ecosystem.

The numbers that fell fell hard. Recruitment classified revenue dropped 44.84%, other classified was down 38.17% and off-platform revenue fell 20.27%. The AOP attributed much of that to people getting what they need from AI answers without visiting a publisher. Digital audio revenue sank 46.98% year on year for the second quarter running.

The click-through data backs up the concern. Separate AOP research found only 26% of ChatGPT users say they would click at least one media link in a response, rising to 34% for a Google Search carrying an AI Overview. Users are 18% less likely to click through to a source when an AI Overview sits at the top.

The “miscellaneous” category, covering revenue that doesn’t fit the main buckets, posted the single biggest decline. The AOP suggested AI substitution of publisher content across referral channels was a factor. It also flagged agencies Dentsu and WPP pulling out of The Trade Desk’s OpenPath initiative over concerns about ad placement and hidden fees.

Not everything went down. Digital display advertising rose 5.06%, likely on the back of more direct-sold premium deals. Every respondent now ranks advertising a high business priority, up from 75% a year earlier. Online video grew 1.29%, sponsorship 0.91% and subscriptions a thin 0.63%.

Reeves said the display turnaround “must be commended and demonstrates the quality of the advertising product that premium publishers provide.” Andy Cowen, lead partner for telecoms, media and entertainment at Deloitte, said the display growth shows the value premium content still holds but warned the drops elsewhere point to an “urgent need for publishers to adapt.”

For newsrooms, the report reads as a warning about cost. Every publisher in the index now says it will prioritise cost reductions, up from 50% a year ago, and every one says acquisitions are a priority, up from 25%. That mirrors wider pressure across the sector, where journalism’s workforce is shrinking as AI and new consumer habits reshape the industry.

There is one thread publishers can pull on. AOP research found a reader’s trust in an AI answer depends on their perception of the news brand cited in it, which underlines how much AI companies still rely on verified publisher content even as they starve those publishers of clicks. Whether that dependency translates into deals or dollars is the next thing the revenue index will measure.

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Newsmax’s current and archived reporting will feed Meta’s AI-powered search and discovery tools under a licensing agreement announced Tuesday, giving the social media company another publisher partner as it builds news answers into its products.

The agreement reported by The Desk covers Meta services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and extends to current and future consumer devices sold by the company. Meta will use the material to train its AI-supported search and discovery tools, while those tools will also link users to Newsmax stories and videos and generate short summaries from written work.

Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax’s chief executive, welcomed the deal in a statement to The Desk: “Newsmax applauds the significant resources Meta is putting into AI to keep America at the forefront of this emerging technology.” He added that the publisher wanted to help users reach timely, high-quality journalism through AI technologies.

The reported terms do not include a price or other financial details. That leaves a central question unanswered for publishers weighing similar deals: what compensation reflects the value of an archive, a daily reporting operation and traffic that may be intercepted by an AI-written answer before a reader reaches the original article.

Newsmax joins a growing group of right-of-center outlets that have signed Meta agreements, including Fox News Media, the Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner. The Desk also reports that Meta has reached content arrangements with News Corp, Warner Bros. Discovery, USA Today Company and People Inc.

Meta’s stated aim is broader than adding another political perspective. In comments cited by The Desk from December, the company said it wants Meta AI to become more responsive, accurate and balanced, particularly during breaking news events when its AI systems struggle to keep pace. Meta is integrating the assistant across its consumer products, placing search, recommendations and conversational answers inside the same ecosystem.

That goal remains untested. Licensing news publishers gives Meta a clearer legal basis to use their reporting than scraping the web or relying on unresolved fair-use claims. But it does not answer how Meta AI will choose sources, attribute reporting, summarize competing accounts or weigh conflicting information. Adding more publishers expands the pool of reporting. It does not, on its own, ensure balanced results.

For newsrooms and publishers, the Meta-Newsmax agreement underscores how AI licensing has become as much a distribution strategy as a rights negotiation. As more publishers strike AI licensing agreements, attention is likely to shift from financial terms to attribution, referral traffic, transparency and the distinction between training rights and real-time content use.

Meta’s next test is execution. The company will need to show that licensed journalism makes Meta AI faster, more reliable and better sourced without reducing publisher reporting to an invisible input. Newsmax has secured a place in that effort. The success of the agreement will ultimately be measured less by how much Newsmax content appears in Meta AI than by whether AI-generated answers still create an economic incentive to produce the original reporting.

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Trust in AI answers rises and falls with the credibility of their sources. More than 90% of people trusted an AI response when they completely trusted its cited source, but that figure plunged to about 10% when they completely distrusted the source, according to new findings reported by Press Gazette.

The figures come from an Ipsos survey of 1,000 UK adults for the Association of Online Publishers’ Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study. The findings show that AI can distill reporting into a polished answer, but users ultimately judge that answer by the credibility of the news organization it cites.

The effect extended even to publishers respondents felt neutral about. Trust in the AI answer was only about 25% when the cited source was rated neither trusted nor distrusted. The survey measures correlation, not causation, and reflects stated attitudes rather than observed behavior. Even so, the pattern is unmistakable.

Trust also affected reported willingness to visit the underlying publisher. Nearly half of people who somewhat or completely trusted a cited source said they would click at least one link in an AI response. That finding fits a wider pattern covered in The Media Copilot’s reporting on news brands and AI clicks: the publisher’s name may still be what persuades users to leave the chatbot, even as AI interfaces give them fewer reasons to click elsewhere.

There is an uncomfortable counterpoint. Even when users completely trusted the cited source, nearly a third said they would stop at the AI answer rather than click through. That figure was similar among those who completely distrusted the source. A citation alone can make an AI answer more credible without delivering the visit, subscription opportunity, or advertising impression that paid for the original reporting.

The study also found that 37% of respondents did not know AI tools can fabricate information or sources. That rose to about 45% among 45- to 54-year-olds. The result matters because a polished answer can borrow authority from reputable citations while still getting a claim wrong, omitting context or inventing a detail.

AI companies have good reason to seek current, attributable reporting. OpenAI’s partnership with News Corp is one public example of the licensing deals that give chatbots access to professional journalism. Yet the confidentiality of many licensing deals makes it difficult for publishers to know whether they are being fairly compensated for the credibility their reporting brings to AI answers.

For newsrooms, the immediate task is less about winning back every lost referral than preserving the conditions that make their reporting worth citing. Clear attribution, strong archive pages, distinctive analysis and direct audience relationships matter when an AI answer becomes the first read. Publishers also need to decide which crawlers and products earn access.

The survey’s implication is clear. AI platforms are borrowing trust that publishers spent decades building, while publishers risk capturing only a fraction of the value it creates. As AI answers become the default gateway to information, the rules governing licensing, attribution and publisher control will determine whether publishers can still turn trust into revenue.

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Media OutReach Newswire says it will guarantee that client press releases appear in USA Today’s public-facing release section, part of a broader push by PR firms to optimize content for AI-powered search, according to the company’s own announcement.

The Hong Kong-based wire, which describes itself as the first global newswire founded in Asia Pacific, is framing the deal as an AI visibility play rather than a traditional PR win. Alongside USA Today, it has struck deals covering Yahoo Finance, the Associated Press and more than 770 other US news sites, as well as regional titles including The Arizona Republic, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Tennessean and The Oklahoman.

The company says the strategy relies in part on JSON-LD schema markup, a structured-data format that labels key information in online content so search engines and AI systems can more easily interpret details such as a release’s author, date and subject. Media OutReach said it began adding the markup to its postings in March 2026, arguing that combining machine-readable data with broad distribution can increase the chances that client content appears in AI-generated answers.

“By improving the quality of our guaranteed news postings on trusted, Google-indexed news sites with domain authority, coupled with the direct delivery of press releases to journalists’ inboxes, Media OutReach Newswire has successfully helped many Asian corporations to build their brand reputation in the US market,” said Jennifer Kok, the company’s founder and CEO, in the announcement. She said the company’s journalist database covers more than 500 trade categories and 68,000 media titles.

The company also highlights the domain authority scores of partner sites, a third-party metric from Moz that is not a confirmed ranking factor for Google or AI systems. Media OutReach’s claims about improving AI visibility have not been independently verified, and there is no public evidence showing that JSON-LD tagging or guaranteed release placement directly affects citations in tools such as ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews.

For newsrooms and publishers, the takeaway is blunt: the AI-visibility market is now shaping how PR firms buy placement, too. When a wire service can guarantee a slot in a paper’s press-release section, that section stops functioning as editorial real estate and starts operating as paid inventory built for machine readers, a shift The Media Copilot has been tracking as GEO tactics move out of marketing departments and into wire distribution itself.

That raises a harder question for local papers. As guaranteed press-release sections spread across high-domain-authority sites, publishers will have to be clear with readers and with AI crawlers alike about where sponsored or wire content ends and staff journalism begins.

Whether JSON-LD tagging and wire placement actually affect AI citations is still unproven outside vendor claims. The real test comes when independent researchers, not the newswires selling the service, start measuring the results.

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Sitecore is acquiring generative engine optimization (GEO) startup Scrunch for around $225 million, according to a Bloomberg report, adding AI answer-engine visibility to an enterprise content platform that has been quietly building toward a machine-readable web strategy.

Neither Sitecore nor Scrunch have confirmed the price. The deal marks one of the larger investments in the emerging GEO market: the practice of optimizing brand content so it surfaces in AI-generated answers rather than traditional search results.

Scrunch’s platform shows brands real-time signals about how they appear across various AI platforms, along with competitive analysis and technical audits. Its Agent Experience Platform, or AXP, is designed to deliver content in formats AI agents can read and use without disrupting the human experience. Notable clients include Lenovo, Skims, Headspace, and Penn State University.

“We’re at a pivotal moment where companies must rethink traditional digital strategies and accept that the internet must be written for machines to understand if we want humans to experience it,” Eric Stine, Sitecore’s CEO, said in a statement.

Scrunch CEO and cofounder Chris Andrew echoed the same urgency in his own statement. “By joining forces, we’re helping companies meet buyers where they are, moving beyond traditional SEO to win inside AI-generated answers,” he said. “That’s where Scrunch’s AXP is a critical advantage, delivering content in a format AI agents can read and use, without disrupting the human experience, allowing brands to become the trusted sources that power those answers.”

The GEO space is becoming increasingly competitive as brands seek visibility in the AI experiences where consumers are spending more time. Scrunch previously raised $26 million, including a $15 million Series A last summer led by Decibel, with participation from Mayfield, Homebrew, and others.

The deal logic is in the numbers. Scrunch told ADWEEK last year that conversion rates in AI search are three to five times higher than in traditional online search, citing its own data. “A visitor coming from AI search is buying faster than a traditional organic visitor,” Andrew said at the time. Independent verification of those figures was not provided.

Third-party research offers some corroboration. In research conducted by Akamai, AXP-enabled webpages saw a 364% lift in brand presence in responses to non-branded AI prompts and a 218% spike in citations appearing in AI responses.

Stine said the combination would allow brands to “show up with greater clarity, authority, and relevance so they can build trust, increase share of voice, and influence decisions early in the buying journey when it matters most.”

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For a while, it seemed like Google Search was in trouble.

Seemingly caught by surprise by the AI revolution that ChatGPT sparked, Google looked old and confused as upstarts like OpenAI and Perplexity pointed to a new future that replaced the “10 blue links” with question-and-answer conversations. Google’s first steps into this future were unsteady, with error-filled answers epitomized by the infamous glue-on-pizza moment. Some suspected, for all its scale and influence, a post-Google world was near.

That looks a lot less likely after this week. At Google I/O, the company confidently showed us its version of our informational future. And while it might be post-search, it’s not at all post-Google. Google is expanding its use of AI Overviews, meaning more searches will include the top-of-page summaries, and it’s adding a query box within them. When a user engages with it, they’re kicked to AI Mode, which abandons the “10 blue links” altogether.

In addition, Google.com now has a “+” icon, similar to its Gemini chatbot. If user engages with it and uploads a file or photo, that will also take them to AI Mode. It’s now extremely difficult to search on a Google product without AI being part of the result. You can still find your page of links by switching to “Web,” though that option is often buried.

So, far from the future where search is competitive again, it’s increasingly looking like a new future that’s the same as the old future. Even if you look just at AI chatbots, the Gemini app is now at 900 million users, making it about as big as ChatGPT. That doesn’t even count AI Overviews and AI Mode, which have 2.5 billion and 1 billion users, respectively, according to the company.

The bots ARE the traffic

The obvious consequence of all this is more searches will begin and end in the query. For publishers, that continues and likely accelerates the ongoing traffic apocalypse. We may, however, have to update our vocabulary: Google Zero—which was supposed to connote an environment where the clicks from Google search were basically nil—feels imprecise.

That goes double when you consider that, as humans spend more time in AI interfaces, a commensurate amount of bot activity spreads out from those queries. So the future isn’t Google Zero. It’s Google Bot Infinity.

So the future is a world where people happily chat—either via typing or speech—to Google, and those Google bots bring the right information and context to answer them. More accurately, those bots bring what they deem as the right information and context to queries. AI systems prioritize information differently from traditional search, looking for information that both fits a pattern but also includes novel and authoritative elements. This is manifesting into the new-but-rapidly-evolving field of GEO, or generative engine optimization. Google’s renewed push into AI experiences means the battle for presence in answers is no longer a side bet. It’s the game.

That’s the media story here in Google’s renewed rise. Once laughed at for how far behind it was in the AI race, it’s now architecting the future where it’s still in charge. Judging by its balance sheet—with earnings steadily increasing even as competitors rise—it’s found the right balance of building the new while preserving the old. Even as it demotes the “10 blue links” that built the company, it’s offering a bevy of new ad products in conversational search that spin up generative ads on the fly. It clearly has the confidence that it can make money in an AI world.

Brands might be less confident about that, and publishers even more so. Authority in AI answers is nice, but monetizing has so far been a challenge.

Credibility is the new click

But it’s not nothing. If Google’s AI layer becomes the place where people encounter information, then presence inside that layer becomes a form of distribution. A publisher cited consistently in answers about politics, technology, health, finance, or culture has something valuable: proof that it owns authority in a category. The old metric was how many people Google sent to you. The new one may be how often Google needs you to make its answers credible.

That may not produce the same clean, scalable ad business that search referrals once did. But it points to a different one. Advertisers have always wanted to sit next to authority. They sponsored sections, bought podcast reads, backed newsletters, underwrote events, and cut direct deals with creators because association matters. If a publisher becomes one of the sources AI systems repeatedly rely on, that authority can be sold directly—not necessarily through Google, and not necessarily as a banner ad awkwardly stapled to a webpage.

That’s the hopeful version of Google Bot Infinity. Publishers may lose a lot of casual traffic, and pretending otherwise is foolish. But the ones that produce distinctive, trusted, deeply useful work still have leverage. The job now is to make that work legible to machines without making it lifeless for people.

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Publishers expect to lose 43 percent of their search engine traffic over the next three years as AI-powered “answer engines” keep users from clicking through to news sites.

That’s the stark finding from the Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report, released today, which surveyed 280 digital leaders across 51 countries.

The damage is already underway. Data from analytics firm Chartbeat shows Google search referrals to news sites dropped 33 percent globally between November 2024 and November 2025. U.S. publishers got hit harder, with a 38 percent decline.

Google’s AI Overviews now appear atop roughly 10 percent of U.S. search results, driving up “zero-click searches” where users get answers without visiting any website. The feature has rolled out to 120 markets.

ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users are increasingly searching for news within the chatbot. But it’s not replacing Google traffic: ChatGPT delivers just 0.02 percent of all publisher referrals compared to Google Search’s 7.3%.

The report coins a new acronym newsrooms need to learn: AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. It describes techniques for getting content surfaced within AI chatbots and overview boxes. Traditional SEO agencies are scrambling to add these services, while new specialist consultancies like Discovered Labs and analytics tools like Otterly.AI are launching to help publishers track visibility within AI systems.

A shift (back) to original reporting

Publishers are already shifting priorities. The report found they plan to deprioritize “old-style Google SEO” this year. Instead, they’re focusing on YouTube, AI platforms, and TikTok.

The content strategy is changing too. Publishers plan to cut back on service journalism and evergreen content that AI can easily summarize. They’re doubling down on original investigations, on-the-ground reporting, and human stories that chatbots can’t replicate.

“Journalism’s best response is to double down on the things that make us valuable and unique,” Taneth Evans, head of digital at The Wall Street Journal, told the Reuters Institute. “This year has seen most waking up to the importance of quality, originality and direct, meaningful relationships with our audiences.”

That sounds like a win for readers hungry for substantive reporting. But there’s a catch: investigations and on-the-ground work cost more and require experienced journalists. Service journalism and evergreen content were cheaper to produce and kept larger staffs employed.

The report describes an emerging “barbell effect” in the industry. On one end: human-driven distinctive journalism. On the other: AI-automated content at scale. Publishers stuck in the middle risk getting squeezed out entirely.

For now, most publishers say AI hasn’t cut jobs. Two-thirds reported no staff reductions from AI initiatives. But as the traffic squeeze tightens and the pivot to expensive distinctive journalism accelerates, that math may change.

For newsrooms, the playbook that worked for two decades of Google dominance is being torn up. The question now: Can they write a new one fast enough?

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