AI mode

Welcome back, everyone. I have long felt like we are between eras in media, when the old models are clearly deteriorating but the new ones are still taking inchoate form. It’s clear that the traffic models that sustained much of digital media are waning in effectiveness, for sites big and small. The big tech companies that control distribution couldn't be more clear to publishers: relying on traffic as a mainstay is the riskiest of propositions.

The biggest risk I see at publishers is being paralyzed by the uncertainty of these momentous changes. A frustration with the slow pace of response has permeated many of my recent discussions with publishers. The reality is not making a choice is a choice. Publishers need to continue to operate their current businesses while building for a rapidly changing environment.

That kind of bias to action was a theme in The Rebooting’s Online Forum yesterday. Aaron Segal, principal product manager at Recurrent, walked through how the company approached a multi-brand CMS migration, what they learned from it, and how it’s shaping their AI and product roadmap moving forward.

“A migration will take however long you give it,” said Aaron. “We scoped tightly, launched fast, and improved after.”

Click bot activity has continued to climb across many types of email deployments. Omeda’s latest benchmark report shows that audience promo emails had the highest rate of bot-driven clicks, while newsletters remained the most reliable signal of human engagement. With ISPs cracking down on low-quality signals and opens becoming less dependable, the risks of inflated or misleading metrics are growing.

Omeda’s quarterly report breaks down the latest performance data and emerging patterns, including:

The media business used to revolve around the annual upfronts. These anachronisms were a glitzy manifestation of the power of scarcity that made media not just a fun business but a good one. It set the marketplace, with the power on the sell side and scarcity driving urgency. The ad market has mostly shifted from that model to a spot market, epitomized by programmatic ad distribution. 

The upfronts are no longer where you gauge the state of the ad industry. It’s better instead to focus on the giant tech companies’ developer conferences, where they signal the strategic direction they will take – and all those downstream of Big Tech adjust accordingly.

The shift is underway from a page-based web to a protocol-driven, agent-mediated one. Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are in arms race to build an agentic web that might give lip service to the open web of old but will act nothing like it. They’re redesigning the interfaces that govern how content is discovered, rendered, and monetized. The web is moving to AI mode.

Based on my conversations and recent moves by the tech giants, here are five shifts that matter:

Google's generative AI features are reshaping the search experience from link-driven discovery to synthesized, zero-click answers. The ripple effects are already visible: “We have to build direct connections with users because we can’t count on Google traffic anymore,” a publishing executive said. The pageview—long the unit of value—is no longer guaranteed. You need a plan for a world where traffic trickles in from summaries, not links.

As one exec put it, “The web is no longer something you visit. It’s something you command”. New protocols let AI agents transact directly with sites. That makes the agent, not the human, the primary consumer of content. If your site isn’t structured for AI legibility, you’re invisible. One publishing exec captured the mood: “No one has a real strategy for this yet. It’s business as usual plus AI tacked on.”

Clicks, time-on-site, and pageviews are all eroding in meaning. Traffic to websites will be majority bot. Clicks will be majority bots. It’s bots all the way down. At the Media Product Forum, one executive summed it up bluntly: “We agreed that pageviews are waning in importance, but replacing them is complicated. Singular metrics often incentivize the wrong behavior."

Expect metrics to shift toward outcomes, completions, and recurring engagement, especially as more consumption happens inside AI interfaces that don’t report traditional analytics. The vision peddled by Meta and other tech giants is they want to transform advertising into buying distribution and replace proxy metrics with an AI-enabled black box that acts like a customer vending machine. That is a pitch tuned perfectly for the ears of a CFO.

The old bargain—publish quality content, optimize for keywords, earn traffic—is collapsing under the weight of generative AI. “We’re seeing less and less value from traditional SEO efforts, but no one knows what replaces it,” a publishing executive said at MPF.

The good news: in a world flooded with synthetic content and “astroturf slop,” publishers with real editorial standards could re-emerge as vital trust signals. The bad news: that trust doesn’t yet come with a business model. One promising development comes from ProRata, a startup from search pioneer Bill Gross that analyzes chatbot outputs to determine which publisher content is being used. The hope is that this signals the beginning of a grand bargain, where publishers become wholesale suppliers of high-integrity information to the agentic web.

In a protocol-era web, the most defensible asset is brand. When every site becomes a backend for agent-driven tasks, it’s the publisher with the known voice, trusted reputation, and differentiated point of view that gets surfaced. “The goal is to make your brand something the agents want to surface,” one executive noted.

Publishers with deep audience connections can then build shoulder businesses in events, products and more to build alternative economic models that aren’t about putting ads on webpages. The strongest will shift more of their businesses to direct audience monetization via subscriptions and memberships that go beyond access to content. Text-based publishers will need to scramble to create more interactive forms of content.

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