This week’s Media Briefing looks into the emerging vibe shift in AI search: execs are sensing that trust, authority and established brands in LLMs are becoming key advantages for premium publishers.
Publishing execs are sensing a vibe shift in the AI era: LLMs are rewarding authoritative, trusted content, and this may be putting some power back into the hands of publishers.
There’s a growing perception that brand trust and editorial authority are becoming competitive advantages in AI search, with LLMs often surfacing established news brands. It was a hot topic at Cannes – some execs returned from the French Riviera sensing the winds were changing in their favor.
“People don’t trust AI. Marketers have had their fingers burned, and everyone has their personal experience of AI systems lying to them. In contrast, brands are a byword for trust. Trusted brands will continue to play a bigger role in the future,” Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc., told Digiday after Cannes.
David Rubin, chief brand and communications officer of The New York Times Company and publisher of Wirecutter, said he was seeing the media and marketing industry agree at Cannes that in the AI world, “trust is likely to matter more than ever and be elusive and hard-won.”
Jack Koch, svp of research & insights at the IAB, said the industry has reached an inflection point: last year, publishers were concerned about LLMs impacting their referral traffic and content discovery and distribution, and the lack of attribution in AI search – but now publishers are seeing AI search usage tick up, measuring the value of their content to LLMs, and are looking for distribution and monetization opportunities.
The IAB published a report last week that shows daily usage of AI is on the rise, but AI users don’t really trust what the LLMs are telling them. After surveying 500 Americans, the IAB found that 40% of AI users are now daily users, yet 57% said they routinely double-check what AI tells them, even among the heaviest users. Sixty-percent said a company’s reputation directly affects how much they trust its AI – meaning brand credibility is now a currency inside AI, according to the report. Respondents said they needed product improvements around more accurate answers and cited sources before they could rely more on AI outputs.
That creates a financial opportunity for publishers. Publishers have signed licensing deals to fill that gap with trusted content, according to the report. Eighty-percent of publishers described the net impact of LLM-driven discovery as positive.
“We believe this is the start of a new ecosystem. It really is that flywheel of content creation, content discovery, fair compensation. So this all really depends on that ecosystem – the credible content that people want AI to provide. Publishers receive not only the value but the traffic, the attribution, the measurement, the control, and of course the compensation,” Koch said.
Even Perplexity was pitching this in a recent presentation last month at an IAB Tech Lab event. Perplexity’s goal, according to Perplexity’s head of publisher partnerships, Jessica Chan, is for its AI answer engine to be “accurate and verifiable,” and working with trusted media partners is what will give the platform an advantage.
Publishers’ authority in LLMs are beginning to take shape as monetizable opportunities, too. They are figuring out how to make revenue from AI visibility and GEO products centered around branded content. According to the IAB report, 51% of the 110 U.S. publishers surveyed have already signed AI or LLM licensing deals, and another 35% are negotiating one right now. Large publishers are moving faster in this space, with 60% having signed deals, compared with just 20% of smaller independent publishers.
As Digiday has previously reported, mid-sized and smaller publishers don’t necessarily have the time or resources to cut licensing deals with AI companies, or have the scale to attract their attention.
(Digiday has tracked AI deals between publishers and tech companies here.)
“I think this will become an increasingly important narrative over the next 12 to 18 months. As discovery shifts from search engines to AI assistants, marketers will increasingly ask not just, ‘Do I rank on Google?’ but, ‘Does ChatGPT know my brand, trust my brand, and recommend it in relevant prompts?’ Publishers with strong editorial authority and proven AI visibility will be best positioned to answer that question,” said Nina Gould, chief innovation officer at Forbes.
Mike Peralta, CRO of Future, said the publisher consistently appears in AI-generated responses on topics where its titles have genuine authority.
“I don’t think it’s about AI companies favoring premium publishers but more so the models recognizing the same expertise and trust that their human users have valued for years when making a decision,” Peralta said. “LLMs are incredibly powerful, but premium publishers provide the expertise and real-world experience that fuel them. That’s why I think stronger partnerships are so important. AI companies need trusted, authoritative content, and publishers should share in the value they help create.”
But that value exchange isn’t really fair yet as the IAB’s report stressed. Only 51% of respondents believed LLMs will become an important source of value for their business. Four in 10 (41%) view LLMs as a persistent discovery challenge rather than a business opportunity – that share rises to 56% among news and financial publishers.
Publishers are selling their AI visibility and GEO insights to brands based on the pitch that they are trusted sources in AI answer engines. But the data on this remains largely anecdotal and reliant on ad-hoc testing by analytics firms.
“We found that news publishers continue to rank among the most frequently cited sources used by LLMs to generate answers,” said Adelle Kehoe, director of product marketing at Similarweb, citing a recent Similarweb report on the impact of AI visibility. “We see this as an opportunity for publishers to lean further into areas of their business where visibility can be monetized, particularly their commercial brands, affiliate content and e-commerce experiences.”
Authority does help boost a publisher’s visibility in AI answer engines, but it’s not the only factor LLMs use to weigh which brands to source. It helps larger publishers, but smaller, niche publishers have an advantage here too – if their content answers a prompt specifically, that sometimes outweighs a more established publisher’s authority in the subject matter, noted Leigh McKenzie, Semrush’s director of online visibility.
Webflow, a visual web development platform, created an “AEO Maturity Index” that assesses a company’s SEO and GEO performance. The data showed that the more prepared a company was for GEO, the higher the mention and citation rates in AI answer engines, according to Guy Yalif, chief evangelist at Webflow.
“When we looked at those that were higher maturity, brand mattered,” Yalif said. Larger companies had two-times higher mention rates, 60% higher citation rates and 80% higher share of voice in AI search, according to the findings.
“The high-performing large brands tended to get there because of their authority. The smaller brands tended to get there because of stuff they did,” Yalif added.
Josh Blyskal, AI strategist at Profound, said their tests showed LLMs favor trusted brands.
“You can’t beat not having the authority,” he said. “But if it’s [a brand] with authority who has kind of the answer versus [a brand] without authority that definitely has the answer, it’s going to be a little more closely tied… Sometimes it will go to the [brand that’s] more specific and offers more utility to the answer engines… But authority always matters, much to the annoyance of hundreds of thousands of small publications.”
What we’ve heard
“If you’re a publisher that’s gone from 100 million to 23 million pageviews a month as a result of search, and you’re looking for a way to cut costs, then you’re looking to outsource. We made the shift 10 years ago. Heavy is 300 journalists run by five people. We outsourced everything… A lot of large publishers with fairly significant built-in costs, they’re going to be forced to make those changes now, and it’s going to be painful for them.”
— Simon Assaad, CEO of Heavy
The Professional Publishers Association has launched a Publisher AI Licensing Framework this month, an interactive tool designed to help publishers assess their exposure to AI bots and identify the right commercial strategy.
The tool – created by the U.K. trade body, which has 250 publisher members – allows publishers to input factors such as annual revenue, business model and content vertical. It then generates an “AI impact score,” with recommendations on AI licensing, copyright protection and revenue opportunities. The idea is publishers can audit their exposure to the agentic web, said Sajeeda Merali, CEO of the PPA.
For example, a publisher with a “significant impact” score was recommended to “maximize exposure and visibility through AI chatbots; leverage volume in licensing deals.” Another publisher with a “low impact” score was given the recommendation to “protect the niche – leverage the value of unique content.”
The tool also predicts a publisher’s traffic loss over the next four years. The publisher with a “significant impact” score was predicted to lose 38.7% of its traffic, whereas the publisher with the “low impact” score saw an 11% predicted traffic decline.
The tool also recommends a range of priorities for publishers navigating the AI licensing space, such as content licensing deals (with suggestions of which organizations to partner with) and copyright protections (such as managing robots.txt to block bots, or work with CDNs like Cloudflare or Akamai).
Merali said members had recently become interested in finding their place in the AI licensing marketplace to find new sources of revenue at a time when referral traffic was declining, but needed help navigating the landscape.
“The challenge that our publishers have is that they do not have the scale. They have real specificity,” Merali said. “In reality, scale largely dictates who gets invited to that deal room.”
About 73% of publishers without an AI licensing agreement said that their main barrier was lack of access, she noted. Those publishers were not approached by tech companies for AI licensing deals, or the deal terms were inadequate, she said.
But having a deal does not automatically protect a publisher from revenue impact. Of the AI licensing deals the PPA analyzed, the typical multiyear agreement brought in under 1.25% of annual publisher revenue, according to Merali.
“That is nowhere near enough to offset traffic losses that publishers will be seeing,” she said.
Numbers to know
$100 million: The revenue Newsweek expects to bring in this year for the first time since 2012, despite traffic falling 75% year over year.
$5 million: The amount of additional funding OpenAI is investing in the American Journalism Project (as well as $3 million in tech credits) over the next two years to help local news organizations.
45%: The quarter-over-quarter growth of AI agent traffic in Q2 2026, according to a DataDome report.
What we’ve covered
In Graphic Detail: AI visibility is no longer about referral traffic
- Publishers have mostly moved on from focusing on whether AI answer engines like ChatGPT would send enough referral traffic to offset declining clicks from traditional search.
- Publishers are now beginning to treat AI answer engines less as a source of human referrals and more as a distribution layer. A number of new reports and analyses of agentic traffic trends highlight why publishers are building updated strategies around AI visibility, in a web ecosystem now made up of more bots than humans.
Read more here.
Accenture and Whalar on their playbook for the creator economy
- Last month, Accenture Song acquired creator and social agency Whalar along with its scaled creator engagement tools and growth capabilities.
- Accenture didn’t buy Whalar for its creator relationships – it bought the operational layer that makes those relationships more tangible and sellable. As more and more creators look for long-term partnerships rather than one-off deals, this is a crucial building block.
Read the conversation with Accenture Song’s Bryan Yasko and Whalar’s Emma Harman here.
WTF is LLM honeypotting?
- Publishers and e-commerce brands under siege from AI crawlers are starting to fight back with an old security trick updated for the LLM era: “LLM honeypotting.”
- The term refers to a deception tactic that lures bots into plausible-looking but ultimately useless information like content mazes, driving up their compute costs and polluting their models. The goal: break the economics of large‑scale scraping.
Read more here.
Why a once-anonymous creator unmasked herself to build a bigger media brand
- In 2018, Kristi Cook was an anonymous YouTuber making videos about internet celebrity drama and gossip, with only her disembodied voice doling out the week’s hottest gossip. The channel became wildly popular, garnering over 700,000 subscribers in just a few years.
- three years ago, Cook revealed her identity in a highly publicized video, opened her up for more opportunities, like interviewing celebs at red carpet events for her new channel, getting UTA representation, and inking an audio-video deal with The Roost
Read more here.
Creators are crashing through Hollywood, but there’s a ceiling
- Hollywood has courted creators for several years, but in the past few months, there’s been a full-blown creator invasion.
- Two YouTube-born horror films became box office blockbusters (Obsession and Backrooms, which, as of writing, have respectively earned $426 million and $357 million), private equity firms are raising funds to buy meme IP like Skibidi Toilet, and new studios are launching that focus on acquiring and scaling creator content.
Read more here.
What we’re reading
Publishers are reevaluating their relationship with Google
USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc. and Reuters are all evaluating how (or if) they will continue to work with Google, as the value exchange of access to their content in return for search referral traffic has deteriorated, The Wall Street Journal reported.
News Corp sues AI search engine Brave for copyright infringement
News Corp has sued Brave, an AI search engine, for copyright infringement, claiming the company masks its web crawlers so that publishers cannot detect or block them, as well as generates summaries of its news articles without permission, Semafor reported.
Business Insider is overhauling editorial strategy to prioritize original reporting
Since Jamie Heller joined Business Insider as editor in chief in September 2024, the amount of original, exclusive and breaking news content published has more than doubled, now making up more than 80% of its output, Nieman Lab reported. The push is part of a larger overhaul away from aggregated news content.
Keeping AI guidelines up to date are now a newsroom leadership priority
Newsrooms are moving beyond one-time AI policies and toward adaptable frameworks that can keep pace with rapidly changing technology. Columbia Journalism Review spoke with newsroom leaders, media execs and academics to better understand how newsrooms can write and implement AI policies.
Cosmopolitan hires first social-only columnist
Cosmopolitan has hired content creator Julia Mervis as its first social media-only columnist. The series, “Life According to Julia Mervis”, will appear exclusively on Cosmo’s Instagram and TikTok accounts.