AI-generated search results are crushing some digital news publishers, and it’s oddly an opportunity for ecommerce brands.
The problem for digital publishers is simple enough. Searchers who query Google often see the answer on-site, eliminating the need to click to, say, CNN, HuffPost, or Business Insider. Moreover, the purpose of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others is to provide answers, not links.
Zero Clicks
Google’s AI Overviews have reportedly cut CNN’s site traffic by about 30%, with HuffPost and Business Insider suffering closer to a 40% reduction, according to a September 2025 report from AI development firm Yazo.
Meanwhile, an August 2025 Digiday article suggests that, in general, digital publishers have lost about 25% of their search traffic due to Google’s AI Overviews.
These dramatic drops in search traffic have prompted some publishers to reassess their content and monetization strategies. Some are going directly to the culprits and securing licensing deals with Google, OpenAI, and others.
News Corp., for example, signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI in 2024, which could generate $250 million in revenue for permitting ChatGPT’s parent company to scrape its content. Hearst, Reuters, Condé Nast, The Financial Times, and many others have reportedly sought similar AI licensing arrangements.
Many digital publishers are experiencing traffic drops due to zero-click search results.
Alternative Revenue
At the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami this month, attendees shared ideas about how digital publishers, small and large, can recover or even boost revenue in this era of AI-driven everything.
Frequent ideas, perhaps surprisingly, involved ecommerce and cost-per-action deals.
It is surprising because many of these same publishers already have product recommendation sites — think CNN’s Underscored — that struggle against AI shopping for affiliate revenue.
The shared ideas fell into three categories.
Direct advertising deals
Digital advertising is chock-full of intermediaries, brokers, and would-be agents, who take upwards of 70% of an ad’s price.
Most publishers have their own direct sales teams, but these teams have traditionally sold ad impressions, which are relatively more difficult to generate owing to the declining traffic.
Hence some conference attendees proposed direct relationships with branded ecommerce sites or marketplaces. One publisher promised a six-figure bounty for someone who facilitated a direct revenue-sharing deal with Amazon.
Others contemplated portals or Shopify apps that would permit even the smallest retailers to post products on a CPA basis.
Pay walls
A second ecommerce-related strategy was to share custom deals with paying subscribers.
In this scenario, publishers would augment their paid services with Groupon-style discounts. Participating merchants would offer some set level of discount — perhaps, 35% — and pay a CPA fee for each sale.
The publisher generates revenue from the purchases while enjoying a new way to sell its premium content. Membership in a publisher’s insider subscription delivers exclusive content unavailable to AI bots and the best deals on products.
Merchants benefit from exposing their goods on publisher websites and pay only when a sale occurs.
Micro marketplaces
The last and most ambitious idea was for publishers to establish their own ecommerce marketplaces and allow participating merchants to list and sell products directly.
Imagine a cooking magazine with a million print subscribers, 15 million monthly website impressions, and 2.5 million newsletter subscribers directly hawking cast-iron skillets and hand-sewn tablecloths for a share of the sale.
The implementation could utilize a marketplace platform such as Mirakl or include only the publisher’s white-label products.
In each case, the publisher generates income from facilitating ecommerce sales.
Opportunity
Ecommerce brands can encourage these sorts of deals. It’s an opportune time for publishers and merchants to explore direct collaborations.
