Smaller pie but pricier slice, bots write bad poetry, and EU targets the scroll

The undocumented Search Console trick, Apple vs OpenAI, the disappearing choice screen, and who's who on LinkedIn - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:33, 16 July 2026

Richard ruminates on... Big Tech's immunity to irony
There is a particular institutional hubris in the boardrooms of San Francisco's tech giants, one that has bred its own immunity to irony. This week, a German regulator ruled that AI search outputs are subject to media law - making Google and Perplexity content providers, not neutral intermediaries - while Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets. Two stories somewhat linked: products built on purloinery facing rules they assumed would never apply to them. Glide's resident popcorn popper considers the drama and where the AI bros are forced to head next.
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Publishing & Media

The new growth formula 
Reuters Institute's Nic Newman, in a speech at the Media Voices Publisher Summit, made a point that AI can do what journalists do, but quicker and better. While it sounds defeatist, it's more directional. According to Newman, AI can now produce what he calls "liquid content", reshaping information into the format the user wants, doesn't matter whether it's Q&A, audio digests, or graphs. The challenge for publishers, is to find out what they do that AI can't replicate. The answer, which he also stated in his annual predictions report, is distinctiveness, such as original investigations, analysis, community events, personality-led journalism, and genuine human connection. General news for general audiences isn't driving growth, where show-based and talent-based models, and an audience built around niches and individuals, are.
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The ad pie shrinkflation
According to new data from Ozone, who tracked 20 billion impressions, publisher ad request volumes have dropped 32-41% year on year in Q2 2026, attributed to zero-click search and in-situ AI answers. But, actual spend is keeping its head above the water, as eCPMs rose 30% in the UK and 7% in the US. The pattern? Curated non-commodity content is worth more.Read
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EU's cookie crumble
How much time and energy do we collectively waste clicking EU-mandated cookie banners? If only there was a simple browser setting which pro-actively asserted your choices across the board. Well, there is: in many US states, Global Privacy Control allows you to pre-filter what you choose to accept or reject. It's pretty good, which is why the EU Commission saw it as a suitable replacement for untold numbers of individual clicks by beleaguered web users, and had massive support within the bloc. Well, up until spooked representatives from France, Germany, and Poland bought into a bunch of fairytale scare stories from Google lobbyists which set their spines slithering down the plughole: they have had the item struck from proposed the new cookie regime. So, keep on clicking on, for now.
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Structure gives it away
A study of over 50,000 AI-generated short stories found way more giveaways than em-dashes and "delve". AI overexplains themes 77% of the time, avoids subplots, rarely plays with flashbacks or time shifts, and can't handle multiple characters or locations well. Certain models showed specific traits: Claude likes flat escalations, GPT loves its dream sequences, while Gemini is a fan of waffly character descriptions. The authors have built StoryScope, which looks at narrative structure rather than surface style and has found that usually the AI-written ones cluster together in "narrative space", while the stories that were written by humans scatter widely.
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The uniqueness score is real
While Google processes 5 trillion clicks to the open web, only around 32% of them end with a click. Even if it may sound grim, that figure is worth fighting for. A patent called "Contextual estimation of link information gain" describes a score assigned to documents based on how much information they add beyond what the user has already submitted. That same patent was cited 24 times and extended in the US to 2039, and combined with leaked systems such as OriginalContentScore and ContentEffort, it shines a light on the fact that Google still rewards originality in some form. However, as little as 10% in a document can make the distinction between reward and failure. Harry Clarkson-Bennett has more details.
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Moments keep audiences
The 2026 World Cup is giving US local publishers something that they aren't used to: a guaranteed reason for new and returning readers to find them again. Boston's El Planeta has partnered with WBUR and given out Panini sticker albums and packs, while The LA Times launches a personalised World Cup dashboard that offered restaurant guides, hikes, and other recommendations which might turn visitors into subscribers. Both of these publishers have used a massive event to demonstrate local expertise and build direct relationships rather than trying to chase traffic.
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Irreplaceable > big
A baseball analyst at a regional sports network built a Substack which covers the minutiae of pitching mechanics only - nothing else - and it's turning into a quiet hit. It's published five mornings a week, and now counts more than 1,300 paying subscribers. The audience includes die-hard fans and fantasy players, but also people who work for major league teams. If the people with the money can't get what they need anywhere else, you don't need a massive audience to profit.
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Search Console shortcut
There is a neat trick to see generative AI performance reports for new platform properties in Google Search Console. By adding "/ai" after "search-analytics" or "discover" in the URL, you can surface data showing how your X, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram content performs in AI search results. By adding "/ai" after "search-analytics" or "discover" in the URL, you can surface data showing how your X, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram content performs in AI search results. While it doesn't work for normal properties yet, for the platform properties it surfaces AI-specific data you won't find through the normal interface.
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AI overviews are content
German media regulators have echoed their courts, and said that content from Google AI Overviews and Perplexity fall under publisher rules, and are not immune from media law. This comes after a Munich court found Google directly liable for false statements its AI Overviews generated. The regulators add that a European Union's Digital Services Act liability exemption doesn't apply because the AI is producing its own statements, and could face the same obligations as any other media provider in Germany.
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Win the citation, lose the ranking
While simplifying content to make it easier for LLMs to quote it sounds like a good idea, it comes with downsides. The same edits which allow content to show up more in ChatGPT and Perplexity also stripped out the depth that Google rewards and thus dropping in search results. Yikes. Since organic search sends far more traffic than AI tools combined, the overall result was negative. Jan-Willem Bobbink shares his thoughts on why optimisation for AI citations is a two-sided sword for now.
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From inside Glide

Paywalling bots not just humans
Hiding paywalled or premium content with client-side JavaScript in the browser became a standard practice for many sites and brands, but it is wide open to abuse, especially by naughty AI bots. Given that they now make up nearly 60% web traffic, that's not good. Anything in the HTML is effectively public, and scrapers will have it without a second thought, as well as those who would merely steal your content to post elsewhere. Server-side gating fixes this by removing protected content before it ever leaves your servers, and somewhat rebalances your ability to have AI licensing talks to boot. Glide CMS allows such a form of gating via its Verify feature, which strips protected content at the API level to bots cant see it, all without needing a developer to implement.
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Big Tech

EU goes after the scroll
The European Commission has formally charged Meta with addictive product design which harms children. The charge targets design architecture such as autoplay, infinite scroll, push notifications, and hyper-personalised recommendation feeds, which the EU wants to become opt-in instead of opt-out. The charge echoes numerous US lawsuits which aim to fundamentally change how the firm's products work. Speaking of which, Meta also pulled its new creepy AI image feature from Instagram, after understandable backlash.
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Partners and opponents 
Apple is suing OpenAI, alleging current and former employees took confidential information about Apple's unreleased products and processes. It doesn't help that the two companies still have a partnership, integrating ChatGPT into Apple devices, making this whole situation even more awkward.
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The Swiss exception 
While Android users in the EU still get asked which search engine they prefer for their new phones, Swiss users lost that luxury. Google has removed the Choice Screen in Switzerland, with no explanation, defaulting everyone to Google Search. Switzerland doesn't fall under EU's Digital Markets Act, so their competition commission has opened a preliminary investigation in which the regulators must prove abuse of dominance the old-fashioned way. Whatever they find could also apply to other phones, which means Apple isn't safe either.
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The age limit debate comes to Brussels
The EU is preparing to propose limits on children's access to social media, with a formal proposal expected in the upcoming weeks. While an expert panel already handed its recommendations, the problem seem to be the member states, as they can't agree on a number: Spain says under-16, France wants under-15, while Estonia believes bans just don't work.
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AI & Copyright

The AI centipede
Bots are becoming dominant, with AI answers being increasingly cited by other AI summaries rather than anything that a human actually wrote. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols shares his thoughts on the topic: model collapse is here, accuracy is eroding, and we'd rather have fast answers than slower ones, even if they are wrong.
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Bot what did it tell you about B2B SaaS sales?
According to a study, 41% of longform posts on LinkedIn are fully generated by AI, making it the platform that is most AI-saturated. X isn't far behind, as only 53% of longform content on X is fully human-authored, while Reddit sits at 13%, and Substack at 10%. 404 Media shares more details.
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