Publishers are tired of rebuilding their businesses every year. In 2024, it was all about the cookie cutoff. In 2025, it was AI disruption.
In 2026, they’re just looking for stability.
Back in January, before Q1 earnings calls and the latest layoff headlines, I asked nearly twenty publishers a simple question: What are you actually looking forward to in 2026 – or hoping will change?
Their answers might sound surprising if your only view of the sell side comes from conference stages. But their themes were remarkably consistent.
No one talked about scale. No one talked about CPM recovery or breakout programmatic growth.
Instead, they talked about traffic volatility, automation replacing teams, curation becoming mandatory, retail media as a growth lever and AI that shows up as more than a PowerPoint bullet.
If you listen to enough ad tech talk, you might think 2026 is the year of AI innovation. But in conversations with sell-side revenue and ad ops leaders, I heard something different. They’re not talking about optimization. This year, they’re more focused on whether the underlying economics of the open web work for publishers.
As one publisher told me, “If there’s no traffic, you’re gone.” Another described Google’s AI Overviews as “the latest zero‑click wall we have to scale – and maybe the one we can’t.”
Traffic didn’t drip. It dropped.
Publishers have always managed through swings. Search algorithm tweaks. Social referral drops. Seasonal slowdowns. That volatility was painful, but it was always familiar.
Several publishers described 2025 as the year they prepared for one disruption and absorbed another. Preparing for cookie deprecation, they invested in identity, curation and signal packaging. They built teams to manage private marketplaces, demand path optimization and cleaner supply.
Then — BOOM! — AI-driven search accelerated. Zero-click results became more common. And, referral traffic plunged. It hit their businesses harder – and faster – than any privacy deadline ever did
“Right when we get a potential save, something new happens,” one revenue leader told me.
Between late 2024 and late 2025, global Google search referrals to news publishers fell by roughly a third. And over the next three years, media leaders expect search traffic to drop by more than 40%, according to a report by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
One publisher told me they “expect to see more and more traffic loss with companies scrambling to make up the revenue.” That could mean cramming more ads onto already cluttered pages or trying to monetize audiences off‑site and on platforms they don’t fully control.
Without traffic, how do you determine auction density and bid competition? Traffic affects floor pricing strategy. It dictates how much headcount a publisher can responsibly carry. When referral traffic softens, or zero-click results expand, that impact ripples quickly through the revenue model.
But publishers aren’t assuming traffic rebounds. They’re modeling around lower, less predictable baselines and restructuring accordingly.
AI is on your org chart now
If traffic has become less predictable, then cost control is becoming immediate.
This year, AI is moving from a shiny new tool to a prominent role on the org charts.
One revenue leader even told me, “We replaced our entire ad ops team with conditional workflows” built in n8n. Others are investing in automation inside their OMSes to reduce manual planning and trafficking across hundreds — sometimes thousands — of products.
And QA and reconciliation work, which used to be a training ground for the next generation of ad ops, has fallen into the grips of the machines as well. Some are even preparing for a day when more dealmaking happens between software agents than humans.
At the same time, SSP partners are embedding capabilities that once required internal teams — such as traffic shaping, ID bridging, and dynamic floor pricing — directly into their platforms.
It’s not that publishers are resisting automation. There’s optimism about agentic workflows and AI-driven planning. But they’re also counting the cost. They’re “afraid we’ll weaken and shrink the hiring pool of our industry,” as one operations leader told me.
That middle layer of yield managers, programmatic strategists and platform specialists that expanded during the programmatic highs of 2021 is now shrinking.
If entry-level trafficking disappears and automation handles the fundamentals, how does the industry train its next generation of operators? How lean can teams become before institutional knowledge erodes?
As more operations get automated and teams get leaner, the question becomes: what can publishers still control?
Increasingly, the answer I heard was curation.
Curation is a must
Multiple leaders told me that curation is no longer simply a differentiator. It’s becoming more of a survival skill. As one publisher told me, “it feels like it’s quickly becoming table stakes,” as low-quality and AI-generated inventory keeps flooding the open exchange. Buyers want proof that their ads are running in clean environments, with fewer hops and fewer surprises.
Transparency is gold now.
They’re “hoping for more clarity around curation and which signals are truly valuable,” another revenue leader explained. After years of adding wrappers, resellers and optimization layers, several publishers described a renewed push to simplify with tighter PMPs, more direct pipes and cleaner reporting.
There’s also a quieter, back-to-basics undercurrent. Sellers are focusing on quality inventory and forming deeper connections with their audiences. They want to show their audiences clearer value, cut the convoluted auctions, and have more direct say over how their supply is packaged and sold.
Underneath the shift to streamline everything is data.
Publishers are investing in aligning their ad tech stacks and BI with best practice tools to see and show how their value travels across the open web, apps, CTV and live events. They need cleaner proof of performance, especially as retail and commerce budgets are demanding outcome-based validation. Reach is no longer enough.
In a year defined by contraction, curation offers one of the few levers publishers still control.
Stability doesn’t mean retreat
None of the publishers I spoke with are anti-AI. They are experimenting with it alongside retail and commerce media, live events, and new formats. Others are doubling down on apps, logins and subscriptions to diversify away from the whims of search and social.
What they’re not doing is pining for a pre-programmatic era or pretending the platforms will suddenly reverse course.
What they want is an economic model that doesn’t require rebuilding the business every January. They want AI to create margin, not just headlines. Retail budgets that convert, not just impress. Quality inventory that commands a premium. And automation that protects the business, not hollows it out.
Publishers aren’t afraid of disruption. They’re just tired of structural whiplash. If the open web is going to remain viable, 2026 can’t be another reset. It has to be a year with fewer rug pulls, clearer rules of engagement and a business model publishers can actually plan against.
