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AI licensing, agentic commerce, the robots.txt billing tactic, and why direct traffic to trusted brands is growing. How publishers are replacing pageview-dependent revenue.
Old revenue models assumed growing pageviews and abundant search traffic. That's over. This session brought together businesses as diverse as one of the world's leading affiliate publishers, one of the world's best-known news brands, and many in between to discuss innovative new ways of leveraging brands and how to find defensible territory which AI cannot undermine.
In examples discussed, direct traffic to trusted brands has actually grown since AI answers arrived, particularly where people search for brands by name when they want reliability over algorithm-served summaries. AI's own reputation for being unreliable with the truth is making trusted destinations more appealing, not less.
The room heard of one publisher portfolio which reaches 450 million monthly visits across multiple websites, and app traffic that dwarfs that number in terms of interactions. The portfolio is showing resilience by delivering results and pre-game information for sports, but diversification into video, podcasts, and talent-led content is underway.
Sports-adjacent content has natural protection: the affiliate model is holding up on transactional search terms because it operates in a heavily regulated space that AI companies don't want to touch directly. Informational queries are eroding, but commercial conversion terms remain.
A global news brand is building agentic infrastructure for AI-driven media trading - using AI to surface overlooked commercial products and create seller-side agent marketplaces that can benefit the whole industry and anyone with content.
One global news brand has built a repeatable revenue model by licensing its brand and talent to local-language news operations in other countries: in-country talent produces local news under the brand, while the parent can pull international stories back into its main output. Brand trust as a licensable asset.
A paid streaming news service launched in the US has proved surprisingly successful. International expansion is being explored, and it is another example of premium content finding paying audiences when conveniently packaged as a product.
The session also covered industry initiatives including the SPUR coalition, which has seen multiple large publishers and organisations come together to set out a framework in which AI companies can legally deal with content businesses for use of content.
The Three Cs framework for AI licensing:
Publishers are good at cooperation - shared printworks, shared distribution networks, and shared commercial platforms. That spirit needs to carry into the AI era. Individual deals with AI companies weaken everyone.
AI companies valued at $11+ trillion trained on stolen data. A German court ruled that Google's AI Overviews are Google's own content - not protected third-party results - making Google directly liable for false claims generated by AI. With platforms for so long protected under the US Section 230 law, which shields them from responsibility for content, the judgement is a significant step in reclassifying AI companies as publishers and making them liable for what their products say. Source: LG Munich I, Case 26 O 869/26, 28 May 2026
The robots.txt contract tactic: in a recent innovation, publishers are embedding legally-binding contractual terms in their robots.txt files - setting a fee of £500 per article for unauthorised scraping - and auto-pursuing AI scrapers through county courts. Over 30 websites already participating. A low-cost, high-volume way to create friction while waiting for legislation to catch up. Source: PPC Land / Press Gazette, June 2026
Journalists need to adapt across mediums. It can't just be about the written word anymore. Organisations are looking for people comfortable in front of a camera, on social, on video. People trust people, and raising the profile of internal talent builds loyalty that AI cannot replicate.
"These are people that trained themselves on stolen data. There is no other way to say it other than they are thieves."
"The AI companies would like to own the compensation process. This is like the mob - they come in and steal something and then say they will now run security in all your hotels."
"If publishers had cooperated about the open web in 2001, we wouldn't be in this position now."
"SPUR isn't designed to last a hundred years. It's designed to do a job, to re-establish copyright in an age of AI, and then fade back."
"Direct traffic has actually grown since AI answers arrived. People realised they were looking for a specific thing rather than general information."
"We don't want our journalists to start writing differently to cater to AI. That's on us as the technology people."
"People still trust people. We're really looking at how we raise the profile of our own internal talent."
More from Glide Live: London 2026
Glide Live operates under Chatham House Rules. No speakers or organisations are identified in these summaries unless specifically requested or authorised.
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