When the web arrived, publishers posted content to gain exposure — and spent the next decade trying to claw back revenue it handed over voluntarily. When social media arrived, publishers threw open their archives to platforms that captured attention, data, and advertising dollars. Each wave brought the same promise: reach, relevance, a seat at the table. Each ended the same way, with lower revenues, smaller newsrooms, and greater dependency on big tech monopolies. AI is the latest, and this wave is a tsunami. 

As the CEO of Piano, I have a front row seat to this challenge. We work with more than 500 publishers from The Wall Street Journal to The Telegraph to Süddeutsche Zeitung. 

AI is different. Not because the technology is more powerful — though it is — but because the industry isn’t fooled. Media leaders have seen this movie before and realize this is an extinction-level event. 

AI companies have spent four years crawling the web on an industrial scale — ingesting decades of journalism to train models that answer questions directly, without sending readers back to the source. Content that publishers built and funded has been taken without permission, without compensation, and without attribution. 

The AI companies have made their position clear: they’ll only pay when they have to. Right now, they don’t have to. 

Piano’s research shows fewer than 20% of our customers use aggressive blocking of AI bots, and 30% have no blocking at all. Without blocking, there’s no leverage to negotiate. 

Less than 0.1% of publisher traffic comes from AI tools. LLMs are designed to keep users inside their own environments; referrals to original sources are an afterthought. 

Google’s own pivot is compounding the damage. Since AI Overviews launched in May 2024, clicks to publishers are down 49%. At Google I/O in May 2026, Google announced a chatbot-first search experience that will demote the ten blue links that have underpinned the publisher-search relationship for two decades. If organic search — currently 25% of traffic to Piano customers — continues to erode, the economic case for producing original content could collapse. 

As long as AI companies can scrape content for free, there’s no incentive to pay. The path to compensation runs through scarcity. And scarcity requires action. 

Block the bots. Lock down the content. Create leverage. Then negotiate. 

This isn’t unrealistic or mercenary. It’s the only approach that has ever worked. 

1. Protect your content 

Ensure AI crawlers can’t walk straight through your front door. Declare exclusions in robots.txt, block at the CDN level, and lock down your paywall so only known humans can access your site. 

While some AI companies will respect publisher rules, many crawlers do not. Piano analysis of Cloudflare data shows that 70% of bot traffic is unverified. Perplexity has been documented circumventing blocking by impersonating Chrome browsers. Tavily openly states: “The Tavily search crawler does not advertise a differentiated user agent because we must avoid discrimination from websites that allow only Google to crawl them.” 

Content protection means locking content for everyone, human and non-human alike. The industry can’t reliably distinguish AI agents from human readers. The only truly secure solution is to require all readers to register and use server-side or CDN edge protection that prevents loading content for any unknown user. 

Some users will leave rather than register. But Piano data shows that those users are of relatively low value, while registered users are much more likely to return and subscribe. 

2. Know your audience 

Owning a direct relationship with your readers has always been valuable. In the AI era, it’s essential. The publishers who survive will be the ones with direct connections to their audiences: people who log in, subscribe, and consent to be known. 

Registration is not a friction point. It’s a strategic asset. 

3. Monetize on your terms 

The agentic commerce future, in which AI systems pay publishers per crawl, per answer, per piece of content — is real, but not here yet. Platforms like TollBit and Pro Rata, and standards like x402 and IAB’s Content Monetization Protocols are developing the frameworks. But no one is making meaningful money from bot marketplaces today. 

Publishers should be getting infrastructure in place now — telemetry to prove what content was accessed, an identity layer to authenticate subscribers and AI agents, and a monetization stack to convert whoever arrives. 

4. Use AI to your benefit 

Defense is necessary, but it won’t drive growth. The same AI companies threatening publishers also enable valuable tools — personalization at scale, AI-powered subscription monetization. The next generation of predictive systems won’t only identify when a reader is likely to subscribe, they will auto-optimize in real time, reducing the required human effort. 

Something unprecedented is happening. An industry that spent 20 years unable to coordinate is starting to unify. 

SPUR — Standards for Publisher Usage Rights — is the clearest signal. Thirty new members joined at a single conference in June. Alongside SPUR, the Real Simple Licensing Collective and the News Media Alliance are building infrastructure for collective action. The Atlantic and People Inc. have moved from theory to practice, implementing aggressive bot-blocking strategies publicly. 

During that same event, the publisher of The New York Times called for the industry to cease giving content away and to demand fair terms. 

Publishers create something irreplaceable. Fact-based journalism from professional newsrooms is not a commodity — it’s the foundation of informed public life. The AI companies understand this, which is why they are willing to acquire it by any means necessary. 

We believe the AI era doesn’t have to be an existential threat to publishing. But it will mean the end for publishers who wait, who hedge, or who assume the bots will eventually do the right thing. 

We believe the right move is the same one the best publishers made when subscriptions became necessary: be decisive, be clear with your audience about the value you’re offering and build a business that doesn’t depend on someone else’s goodwill. 

We believe in publisher independence. Not as a sentiment, but as a sustainable business model and a critical function of a free society.