The content with a fighting chance, France's social ban, and the industrial destruction of books

The tech SEO that actually works, more WordPress hacks, Sony's 30,177 reasons to sue, and fines for style not content - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:32, 23 July 2026

Harry Clarkson-Bennett on... the young audience problem
Publishing gurus DJB Strategies tracked 15 leading UK publishers over several years to reveal quite how much and why younger audiences are a shrinking slice of a shrinking pie - and AI isn't to blame says Harry Clarkson-Bennett writing for Content Aware. Popular sites which used to rely on audiences coming direct to their door have all lost significant traffic to other channels, but the issue is worst for 18-34-year-olds, as shown in the consultancy firm's new Emerging Audiences Index. The ones standing firm are those which give younger audiences who display less loyalty to media brands a reason to come back: specialist social brands, recognised voices, and genuine personalisation. Inherited loyalty no longer seems able to drive growth strategies anymore, and while scale is relevant it's not a solution as the void between awareness and retention grows. Read the article to access the Index.
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Publishing & Media

Human voice beats AI
The UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) has a new study which looked at the impact of AI overviews on traffic. It's not good. The long-term AI Publisher Impact Study tracked 10.8 billion pageviews across eight major UK publishing groups, revealing that organic Google Search referrals fell 7.1% in a single quarter in 2025, the same in which Google's Search revenue grew 12%. If the trend continues, pageviews from Google will be halved by Q3 2027. Not everyone is in the same boat though: news publishers saw only (!) a 5% decline, and consumer and B2B sites dropped 18%, while how-to and guide content fell over 20%. On the upside, opinion, commentary, and interviews content managed to actually grow - the non-AI stuff. As is surely now default thinking in publishing and media, content which has an explicit human touch and point of view can deflect AI substitution the best, while things a chatbot can clone or summarise easily are most at risk. AOP boss Richard Reeves dives in.
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Engagement IRL 
According to a YouGov study, over a quarter of UK adults believe their media consumption negatively affects their wellbeing, with the biggest complaint being spending way more time than they plan to. It hits younger adults worst, where nearly half of 18-24 year olds report sleep disruptions and reduced attention spans. The report is the fourth in a series on media consumption habits, having covered TV, streaming and social media usage, short-form vs. long-form video consumption, and whether smartphones impact attention spans.
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Bans, quinze, et scans
France has become the first EU country to ban social media for children, specifically the under-15s. The bill passed this week also bans mobile phones in high schools, with carve outs for accessing educational sites and sources, and is due for enforcement from the start of the new school year in September. Typical enforcement questions remain over how to verify users via techniques like face scans and ID matching without causing more harm than good.
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Is the newspaper editorial vanishing?
Pulitzer nominations for newspaper editorials have dropped from 101 in 1995 to just 25 in 2026, and now being merged into a broader category on opinion pieces. Some of the largest US newspaper companies have already pulled back, with one of them, Gannett, saying how editorials were an oft-cited reason for cancelled subs. Opinions may be free, but they rarely come without cost. A former USA Today editor-in-chief claims the reduction represents a loss of newspaper soul and proposes a low-cost alternative for newsrooms still holding power to account, particularly as research shows most Americans still value press criticism where it's needed. Nieman Lab shares more details.
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The technical SEO checklist
The list of technical checks and improvements for better SEO never quite ends - so how do you prioritise? Clearing 301 redirects, taking milliseconds off Core Web Vitals, and removing ancient meta keywords might all be on your list, but will they be worth it? Search Engine Land suggests you should meet at least one of three criteria: directly impact revenue, enable other work which impacts revenue, or prepare your site for AI-driven search, and overall prioritise what's needed over what's most obvious.
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No more Mr. Nice EU
The EU Commission has published guidelines on transparency obligations for providers and deployers for the EU's AI Act, which come into effect on August 2nd. Providers must let users know when they're talking to a chatbot, watermark AI-generated media, disclose deepfakes, and label AI-generated text on public interest matters unless a human has reviewed it. Standard editing tools such as spelling and grammar correction are safe, but anyone with a consumer-facing bot, image generator, or voice tool in Europe has a small window to get their affairs in order.
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Bin there, done that
Books data company ISBNdb is helping AI labs get their hands on guaranteed slop-free books from before the AI era, pre-2022, at up to a million books per order. They are then scanned, shredded, and recycled, which according to a federal judge makes the practice legal fair use because the originals were destroyed. The company has strict NDAs to make sure buyers stay anonymous, as the words "AI company" and "destroys books" isn't likely to generate good headlines. Rare book sellers report huge bulk orders since April, while ISBNdb believes that what they're doing is not literary or knowledge destruction, but merely the book completing its lifecycle. 404 Media shares more.
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Another WordPress attack
Two chained vulnerabilities in WordPress 6.8 and 6.9 allowed unauthenticated remote code execution on stock installs, no plugins required. Patches were released Friday, but exploitation began on Saturday and by Sunday researchers found tens of thousands of attempts and over 100 backdoor admin accounts. If you waited until Monday to patch, check how it went. While WordPress did force auto-updates for affected sites, users should still check for any rogue admin accounts, malicious plugins, and suspicious files.
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From inside Glide

End the workaround era 
A sports editor with nowhere to put match scores will use the body field, while a site user who wants to filter results by scores is going to be frustrated as the site can't filter free text. A common problem, with a common cause: the CMS treats every piece of content as identical. Glide's innovative Article Types give each content type its own super-definable fields, workflows, taxonomies, and API output, so editorial teams stop forcing structure by hand and the front end stops guessing what it's been given. When a CMS knows what's in it, things are much easier.
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Zawya launches on Glide
Middle East and Africa business news site Zawya.com has launched on Glide, making it the fourth London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) title to run on the platform. The migration moved 4 million articles (including a back-catalogue stretching to 2005), consolidated six upstream news feeds into one workflow, and connected bilingual English-Arabic publishing across editorial teams in three countries - all managed from one CMS instance. Zawya joins DealWatch, IFR, and PFI, meaning four financial-markets publications serving four continents in three languages now share one authoring environment.
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Big Tech

Billions for piracy, not copyright
A federal judge gave the final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers, the largest in US copyright history. Each work will get around $3,000, with the estimate being 500,000 titles. The issue for many creators is the fact that the judge ruled that the training of AI on copyrighted text is fair use - the issue was the way Anthropic got the works, and not how it used them. Other lawsuits, against Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI, are still ongoing.
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A two edged ruling
A US federal court has axed Google's lawsuit against SerpApi, a company that scrapes Google's search results, rejecting their attempts to use the DMCA to control who has access to publicly available pages. SerpApi called it a win, but for publishers who are watching, the situation is a bit uncomfortable because if public pages can be legally scraped - even with the owners objection - then the same logic protects AI companies who want to scrape publisher content.
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AI & Copyright

Sony doubling down on lawsuits
Sony Music has filed a second lawsuit against Udio, claiming that 30,117 sound recordings have been copied for training, without any permission. While during Discovery in the first trial from 2024, Sony has used audio fingerprinting and found only "a small portion" of what they claimed was used, however Udio has admitted that its models were trained on a large amount of recordings which "presumably included" some of Sony's catalogue. While Universal and Warner already settled with Udio, Sony is still holding its ground and seeking up to $150,000 per work infringed.
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Four studies, one message
Four different studies published in July, conducted by Manifold, Promptarmor, Semgrep, as well as a team of independent researchers, have reached the same conclusion: while the AI models all behave differently, they are plagued by common security failures.
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Pop slop splurge purge
Over the past year, Spotify has removed more than 75 million "spammy" AI-generated tracks. The company has nothing against authorised remixes, AI-assisted mixing, and legitimate AI compositions, but it does have beef with mass uploads, fake metadata, voice cloning, and artificially short tracks designed to grab the royalties. As the detection improves, so will the spam operations, blending in minimal human edits to evade filters.
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