AI Traffic: Low Referrals, High Costs, Publishers Pay
This analysis by the Prebid LLM Taskforce examines the economic impact of AI-driven traffic on publishers. It highlights that while AI crawlers are increasingly consuming publisher content, they generate minimal referral traffic (under 1% of pageviews, or 0.016% per Longitude Ads). Publishers face high costs from serving automated requests, infrastructure outages, and defense measures, while revenue shifts to AI platforms like OpenAI and Google. For example, Google Search revenue grew 19% to $60.4B, but Network advertising for publishers fell 4%. OpenAI projects $2.5B ad revenue in 2026 and $11B in 2027, while not planning to share with publishers. The article cites zero-click rates of 68% in US Google searches in 2026 and a scrape-to-referral ratio of 227:1, indicating a broken bargain where content is monetized elsewhere. It concludes with calls for publishers to adapt measurement and explore licensing, though noting most lack scale for significant deals.