Glide Live: London 2026 - AI, zero-click search, and the publisher fightback

Google referral traffic is down 34% YoY. 68% of searches end without a click. 57.5% of web traffic is bots. The keynote at Glide Live: London set out what publishers can do about it.

by Rich Fairbairn

Published: 20:30, 01 July 2026

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 relentlss 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 eh state of the market and demonstrated how publishing technology is responding. 

Google referral traffic is down 34% YoY. 68% of searches result in zero clicks and 57.5% of web traffic is bots. But 33,000 clicks per second still reach the open web, and digital ad revenue hit $294.6 billion in 2025. The opportunity has narrowed, but not disappeared.

Google referral traffic decline

Two-year trajectory, by publisher size:

• Small publishers: -60%
• Medium publishers: -47%
• Large publishers: -22%
• Overall YoY decline: -34%

Source: Chartbeat / Axios, March 2026

Where do Google searches end up?

• 68% zero-click (no click to any website)
• 21% to the open web
• 11% to Google properties (YouTube, Maps, Shopping, etc.)

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.

Bot traffic overtakes human traffic for the first time

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. Tools like Auto Browse in Chrome and Gemini Intelligence on Android put into the hands of users agents - explicitly, or in the form of features - that can do everything a person once did online, including comparing and buying products or services, and other tasks also routinely reliant on using publisher content. Source: Cloudflare / Matthew Prince, June 2026

Digital ad revenue is still growing, just not the publisher slice

But the pie is also 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

What this means for site owners

Search is no longer a reliable front door - if it ever was, many say. The future is centred around direct relationships, new business models, and media owners and publishers who can adapt and use these changes to their advantage - including serving those AI agents and making their own. Trusted content is what so many of those third-party AI agents will need to function and succeed in their own spaces.

The legislative fightback: CMA, EU AI Act, and SPUR

Legislation is catching up. The UK's CMA forced Google to give publishers AI opt-out rights and clear attribution in search. The UK also dropped its proposed broad AI training copyright exception, while the EU AI Act now requires AI providers to disclose training data and comply with copyright law, facing fines up to €15m or 3% of global revenue. Elsewhere 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

• SEO in an AI world: what's still working for publishers in 2026
• Revenue beyond the pageview: new business models for media companies
• A modern subscription success story: from 7-minute checkout to all-time highs
• AI in practice: where publishers draw the line on trust and automation
• Building audiences you actually own: habits, frequency, and the Rule of Three
• Sports clubs are publishers now: content operations, player audiences, and owned-channel revenue
• Eight themes from across the day

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