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Star numbers show Google referral traffic is down 34% YoY, 68% of searches end without a click, and 57.5% of web traffic is bots. The keynote at Glide Live: London set out what publishers can do about it.
No talk about publishing and media in mid-2026 can avoid what everyone in the industry already knows: Google search and social referrals are in relentless decline, and AI is both the cause and the opportunity. That was the starting point for the keynote at Glide Live: London 2026, which set out the state of the market and demonstrated how publishing technology is responding.
The numbers aren't good, if you are a numbers-based publisher. Google referral traffic is down 34% YoY, 68% of searches result in zero clicks, and 57.5% of web traffic is now bots. But 33,000 clicks per second still reach the open web, human traffic is slightly up (+3%) and digital ad revenue in the US alone hit $294.6 billion in 2025 as global revenues for ads continued upwards. And where you have ads, you need content to set them against or wrap around.
The opportunity has narrowed, but not disappeared.
Two-year trajectory, by publisher size:
Source: Chartbeat / Axios, March 2026
Source: SparkToro / Similarweb, June 2026
The Google stats are stark in showing the loss of traffic passed on to site owners, and also just how much stays on Google itself or their other properties.
The majority of web traffic is now machine-generated: 57.5% of all global web requests are bots, overtaking human traffic for the first time in history. Product development by Google like Auto Browse in Chrome and Gemini Intelligence on Android put agents into the hands of users - explicitly, or masked by friendly features - which can do almost everything a person once did online, including comparing products or services, buying them, and other tasks also routinely reliant on using publisher content. Source: Cloudflare / Matthew Prince, June 2026
As mentioned above, the pie is growing. There are more channels than ever giving more content to more people, and the surrounding revenues are rising too: US digital ad revenue hit a record $294.6 billion in 2025, up 14% YoY; European digital ad spend crossed €118.9 billion in 2024, up 16%. Globally, the upward figure for the market is approaching $800 billion. Huge parts of those totals are earned for commercial activity adjacent to or boosted by content and creative outputs, so while the slice to publishers becomes smaller, digital revenues themselves are increasing. Sources: IAB / PwC, 2025; IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark, 2024
Search is no longer a reliable front door - if it ever was, many would say. The future is centred around direct relationships and new business models, and favours media owners and publishers who can adapt and use these changes to their advantage - including serving those new AI agents and making their own agents. Boiling it down, trusted content is what many of those third-party AI agents will need to function and succeed in their own spaces, and that is good news for people whose industry has been built on providing it.
Legislation is somewhat catching up. The UK's CMA has forced Google to give publishers AI opt-out rights and clear attribution in search, while the UK has also dropped proposed exceptions for AI text and data mining copyright exceptions. Meanwhile the the EU AI Act now requires AI providers to disclose training data and comply with copyright law, facing chunky fines of up to €15m or 3% of global revenue.
Elsewhere technical standards initiatives like SPUR are gaining both impetus and traction. Rather than watch from the sidelines, the industry is fighting back, because they know the AI companies and the future agentic web need publishers more than they'll admit. Sources: CMA, June 2026; UK Gov, March 2026; EU AI Act, August 2025
A series of sessions and panels followed throughout the day, with two beliefs connecting every session:
AI isn't coming - it's here. So now what?
Publishers already have massive new audiences arriving at their sites. They're just not people.
More from Glide Live: London 2026
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