Glide Live: London 2026 - What the media industry's leaders are doing about AI, search, and revenue

News, specialist, and sports brand publishers gathered behind closed doors in London to talk about how they are defending against AI rivals, falling trust amongst populations generally, and fading reliance on search and social.

by Rich Fairbairn

Published: 19:46, 01 July 2026

A day of advice and inspiration

On 17 June 2026 Glide brought together a top tier mix of media and sports industry experts in a closed room for Glide Live: London, the first in a series of invitation-only events built for media sector leaders to share ideas and actions on what is working to grow revenue and engagement against the headwinds of AI and search.

The "anti-conference" turned on its head the usual woe-is-me predictions that all media businesses are doomed in the face of AI consumption and social and search platform cannibalism. Rather than head in the sand, the mood was about looking the future in the eye and having a plan.

Representing more than 40 individual brands, attendees ranged across news, advocacy, science, sport, and entertainment, with publishers and orgs as varied as the BMJ, Which?, the Daily Mail, CNN, Channel 4, PokerOrg, Formula 1, The FA, Arsenal, Watford FC, Better Collective, The Spectator, DC Thomson, and SportsBeat.

Hosted by Glide Publishing Platform's Denis Haman and Rich Fairbairn, leadership figures discussed topics around SEO in an AI world, new revenue streams, engagement strategies that work, how sports clubs are effectively publishers now, the real world red lines around AI usage, and insight into a famed subscription title's record-breaking success. 

The mood was not complacency or resignation, but of opportunity and purpose. The industry knows what it's up against, and that it has crucial things emerging adversaries do not: trust, direct audience relationships, and decades of audience-building that no model can replicate overnight.

From this page you can read anonymised summaries of each session. The detail was in the room, not in these pages, but the themes are clear and transferrable to any media team or business.

Key numbers from the day 

57.5% of all web traffic is now bots. 33,000 clicks per second still reach the open web. 78% retention when you get a reader back three times in one week. £500 per article billed to AI scrapers through local county courts. $11+ trillion in AI company valuations built on content taken without consent.

The detail behind these numbers - and the strategies, tactics, and candid disagreements that produced them - is in the session summaries below.

Go to each session summary

• Keynote: what's ahead for publishing in an AI-dominated web. The numbers on bot traffic, zero-click search, and why the pie is growing even as the slice shrinks
  
  
• SEO in an AI world: what's still working for publishers in 2026. Three leading news SEO specialists on Discover volatility, AI citations, and why brand is the new SEO.
   
• Revenue beyond the pageview: new business models for media companies. AI licensing, agentic commerce, the robots.txt billing tactic, and why collective action beats individual deals.
  
  
• A modern subscription success story: from 7-minute checkout to all-time highs. How one title rebuilt its entire subscriber infrastructure in seven months and hit record numbers.
  
  
• AI in practice: where publishers draw the line on trust and automation. A consumer brand and a scientific publisher on human-in-the-loop, hollow papers, and why under-investment is the bigger risk.
  
  
• Building audiences you actually own: habits, frequency, and the Rule of Three. Puzzles as retention engines, personality-driven newsletters, and why 78% stick if you get them back three times in a week.
  
  
• Sports clubs are publishers now: content operations, player audiences, and owned-channel revenue. A national FA, a Championship club, and a tournament creator programme on what happens when sport builds like media.
  
  
• Eight themes from across the day. The pattern that connected every session, from trust as currency to quality over quantity.

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Glide Live operates under Chatham House Rules. All content anonymised. No speakers or organisations are identified in these summaries unless specifically requested or authorised.