generative AI search

OpenX CTO Joel Meyer, who was named Prebid’s new chairman, previews the org’s next phase and helping publishers navigate competing agentic protocols.

Historically, non-human traffic was viewed on a spectrum from benign to intentional fraud. But AI agents represent a legitimate audience that brands will have to understand and engage.

We’re witnessing the end of the pageview era. But the interesting question isn’t how publishers replace their lost search traffic; it’s what they do with the audience they already have.

The CMS migration helped unify TIME’s fragmented content data after years of platform transitions under multiple owners. This enabled TIME to launch its own AI search product and convert archival content into AI-friendly “markdown” pages.

Atria’s collective approach is a response to growing monetization challenges and the need to protect the value of human journalism in the AI era.

The media brands that remain locked in the traditional marketing funnel are the ones AI content farms will maul first. But if they create a trust-driven marketing flywheel, publishers can keep their businesses alive.

Rather than fighting the rising tide of AI search engines and agentic tools, Microsoft AI’s Nikhil Kolar says publishers and retailers should license access to their sites and create content that speaks directly to AI crawlers.

Consumer trust in AI search is growing; “containerization” is the new ad industry buzzword; and publisher collectives fight back against AI.

LLM environments introduce new dimensions to brand safety and suitability. Understanding them is the starting point for testing ChatGPT ads.

People Inc. previewed plans to downsize by focusing mainly on its key properties. The strategy makes sense considering its publishing portfolio has lost about two-thirds of its Google traffic.

Programmatic enemies make better friends in the AI era; social video projected to outgrow CTV this year; and apps are integrating into chatbots, but where are the users?

Generative AI search has pushed traffic off a cliff across most of the internet, but not on social platforms. Reddit included.

Brave’s chief of ads Jean-Paul Schmetz on competition in the search and browser markets, the fallout from the Google Search antitrust ruling and whether AI search will help smaller upstarts compete with Big Tech.

Should businesses start advertising on AI media platforms? Yes. But it depends on how consumers in your category are already using AI and how quickly your organization can respond.

Freestar CEO Kurt Donnell explains why transparency in programmatic advertising is the open web’s best bet for survival in the AI search era.

For brands, this opens a new lever beyond impressions. For publishers, this is a business problem, as their first-party data and on-site inventory could become less valuable for targeting.

Reddit reported on Thursday $690 million in ad revenue for Q4 2025, a 75% YOY increase. But the company’s stock is down 38% over the past month.

People Inc. is offsetting a 50% decline in Google search traffic through off-platform growth and its highest digital revenue gains in five quarters.

Advertisers are still figuring out what value ChatGPT’s ads may offer. Are LLMs the next frontier for search, or a new channel entirely?

Big TV’s shift to programmatic brings in the performance brands; Meta rolls out premium subscriptions for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp; and Yahoo enters the crowded AI search market.

AirOps’ new Page360 platform helps brands update their content to better perform across traditional search, AI search and online forums.

Publishers have been losing 20%, 30% and in some cases even as much as 90% of their traffic and revenue over the past year due to the rise of zero-click AI search.

The era of “managed decline” is over; the era of existential clarity has begun. Publishers are no longer guessing what the post-platform world looks like. We are living in it.

From headline to punchline, AdExchanger’s weekly comics distill ad tech industry news into something our readers can laugh about. These are our faves of the year.

Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

AI shopping agents are breaking the traditional attribution loop. Marketers must ensure that AI is aware of their brand and track how that awareness influences ecommerce outcomes.

Publisher comment sections remain an untapped source of intent-based data, according to Kelly Andresen, who recently left USA Today to head up comment monetization platform OpenWeb’s direct sales efforts.

Newsweek launches an AI-powered homepage to offset traffic losses from AI search; OpenAI pulls an emergency pivot back to focusing on ChatGPT; and copycats dilute the impact of Spotify Wrapped.

You can’t buy your way to the top of a large-language model. At least not yet. But there are things that brands can do to influence how – and if – they get mentioned, says Tracy Morrissey, SVP of media and performance at full-service agency Innocean USA.

Adobe acquires SEO tech business Semrush; brands want to know what AI search engines think of them; and the LGBTQ community is an under-targeted audience.