Rising demand among marketers for AI search expertise is driving more agencies to create specialist units intended to help clients navigate the tech and its impact on consumer habits.

In recent months media shops like Jellyfish, Wpromote and Kepler have each launched or expanded AI search services that offer clients a means of partially gauging how applications like ChatGPT and Gemini represent and understand their brands.

Among the advertisers attempting to measure the “share of model” (as opposed to their share of market) within large language models (LLMs) is consumer pharmaceutical firm Haleon. The company is currently testing how Meta’s Llama model represents its Advil and Emergen-C brands in user-generated search results.

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At first glance, Cluely reads like a parody of startup culture. A 21-year-old founder broadcasting viral videos about chatting on job interviews, dating with AI overlay and hosting parties shut down for “too much aura”. 

And yet here we are: Andreessen Horowitz just led a $15 million investment into the startup that turns a person’s screen into an invisible assistant — a kind of real-time whisperer for meetings, sales calls and even exams. 

Or at least that’s what it wants to be. Because Cluely launched a narrative before it launched a tool. And somehow, it’s working. 

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This week’s Media Briefing looks into Cloudflare’s new tool that lets publishers block all AI crawlers – at the click of a button – and why publishers are celebrating.

• An end to publishers’ AI crawler Whack-a-Mole
• Google ends tests of a feature that previewed recipes, Forbes CEO shares AI strategy, and more.

Cloudflare’s red-button blocker

Publishers everywhere have had reason to celebrate this week as a single Cloudflare toggle gave them a rare, decisive victory in the battle to keep AI bot crawlers off their content.

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Condé Nast execs are pressured to retain ad dollars after Anna Wintour announced last week that she will no longer oversee the day-to-day operations of Vogue, the luxury brand she has led as editor-in-chief since 1988.

Wintour will remain in her broader roles as Condé Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director for Vogue. And while it’s too soon for the ad industry to record a change in brands continuing to advertise or not, one agency exec acknowledged to Digiday the weight of Wintour’s moves: “[ad money] flows to Vogue because of Anna.”

Wintour has become synonymous with the Vogue brand. But the fashion media landscape has changed since Vogue’s print-dominant heyday. Brands are contending with shrinking referral traffic, ad dollars are shifting to search and social, the creator economy is booming, and generative AI technology is curating fashion and summarizing content in search engines.

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Georgina Bankier, vp, global platform partnerships, Dun & Bradstreet

In today’s fractured media environment, connected TV and retail media are dominating advertiser attention — and their budgets.

CTV ad spending is projected to reach $33.35 billion this year, while retail media’s 19.7% growth will be more than double the growth in overall digital ad spending (8.8%). At the same time, emerging opportunities in digital out-of-home and audio are gaining ground as marketers seek new ways to engage audiences during their daily lives.

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AI bots scraping publishers’ sites for real-time information are now scraping publishers’ sites more than the bots used to train large language models. And they’re harder to detect.

That’s according to the latest report from TollBit, a data marketplace for publishers and AI companies. From Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, bot scrapes used for Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, per site grew 49%. That is nearly 2.5 times the rate of training bot scrapes (which grew by 18%) in the same time period. 

An increase in bots scraping content from publishers’ sites represents a threat to their businesses. But scraping for AI training and scraping for real-time outputs present different challenges — and some opportunities — for publishers. And not all of them are fully understood. 

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Future is betting on AI to boost recirculation – and make that stickier audience more appealing to advertisers.

The publisher’s new proprietary AI-powered content categorization engine, called Advisor, acts like a “brain” trained on Future’s internal data, according to Jamie Samuel, head of commercial products at Future. Built into its audience data platform Aperture, Advisor lets Future quickly test an “unlimited” number of approaches to keep users engaged on its sites, ranging from chatbots to content recommendation widgets, he said.

Advisor uses machine learning and OpenAI’s large language models to analyze articles in real-time across Future’s over 50 publications, including Marie Claire, Who What Wear, Tom’s Guide and The Week. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how mobile still accounts for an overwhelming majority of YouTube video views and why some Gen Z viewers aren’t tuning into YouTube on TV screens.

• Screen check
• Let’s talk CTV in NYC
• YouTube vs. TikTok vs. Instagram: What Gen Z really watches in 2025
• Brands on the big screen, TikTok & Instagram on TV screens and more

Screen check

This year marked a milestone for YouTube. People are spending more time watching the platform’s videos on TV screens than any other device. But there’s a but. Actually two buts.

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As Substack invests in video content, the platform’s smaller creators stand to gain the most subscribers and advertisers by embracing the medium.

Over the past year, Substack has considerably expanded its video tools for both creators and audience members. In January, Substack launched live video as a tool for all users. In early March, the company enabled video posts for mobile users for the first time; two weeks later, the platform rolled out its first TikTok-style video feed.

Six months into 2025, however, Substack’s video push has resulted in mixed results for creators on the platform, with the impact of video on individual Substackers’ subscriber growth varying widely depending on the size of the creator’s following, according to an analysis of over 58,000 active Substack accounts by Subalytics, an influencer marketing platform with data on Bluesky, Substack and Medium creators. (Substack has not publicly disclosed how many accounts have been active on the platform in 2025, but the company’s founders shared in a December blog post that “more than 50,000 publishers” had made money on Substack in 2024.)

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Sources tell Digiday that Integral Ad Science has entertained suggestions of splitting from Publica, amid further speculation of take-private plans.

At the same time, there is consistent speculation that Criteo is considering a potential divestiture of its BidSwitch assets. This comes amid speculation of its own future on the public markets.  

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Welcome to the era of the ad network arms race. Over the past year, retail media and other ad networks have been pulling out all the stops to convince media buyers that they’ve evolved from performance-driven tools into full-funnel media ecosystems.

Related Insights

Retail Media Rewritten

Retail media hits maturation curve, eyeing brand budgets with full-funnel makeover Read More

With more than 250 ad networks — and counting — all fighting for the same ad dollars, the competition is getting stiff, and the RMN space is becoming increasingly crowded. Amid the so-called retail media gold rush, Kristi Argyilan, the global head of Uber Advertising, turns to her own RMN playbook.

Dubbed the “godmother” of retail media by AdExchanger, Argyilan has seen the ad network category from every angle — buyer, seller, publisher, and client. Argyilan’s retail media scorecard dates back to her stint as president of Target’s Roundel back in 2019, svp of retail media at Albertsons Media Collective in 2021 and global head of Uber Ads since last December.

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Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel.

TV and streaming are one and the same in the eyes of today’s consumers, and, therefore, marketers. As a result, the majority of marketers are directing ad spend toward TV, with a focus on ads that drive impressions and branding.

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Advertisers aren’t feeling the direct blow of generative AI on traffic the way publishers are. But they see what’s coming. Tripadvisor, for one, is already adjusting its strategy as the foundation of search starts to shift. 

It’s not going full Dotdash Meredith – the publisher has openly braced for a future without Google traffic – but a recalibration is clearly underway. 

“Google’s AI mode in search is going to eat large chunks of search,” said Matthew Dacey, CMO at Tripadvisor. “It’s going to happen fast as they [Google] push it and more people subsequently adopt it.”

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Michael Silberman, evp of media strategy, Piano

Between AI search summaries and declining referrals from social media, publishers are feeling the pressure when it comes to site traffic.

Piano’s data backs this up: Between 2022 and 2024, benchmark data across Piano clients found that traffic growth was fairly flat — it increased by only 5%. The uncertainty in site traffic means that each unique visitor is now even more valuable.

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Faceless creators are taking over social media. Now, they’re coming for brands’ influencer marketing dollars.

Influencer and creator marketing is steadily gaining ground in ad budgets — Unilever, for example, plans to significantly boost spending on social channels in 2025. Amid this shift in priorities, advertisers are looking beyond high-profile, personality-led creators. They’re increasingly tapping into a broader ecosystem that includes faceless creators — accounts that build massive followings without a central on-camera figure. And these creators are raking it in. 

Over the past three months, AffiliateNetwork.com — a network of faceless creators across social platforms — has grown from 5,000 members to 21,000, according to numbers shared by its founder Roman Khaves, who said that top creators in the network had made an average of $30,000 to $40,000 per month in brand deals. Media buyers at Publicis and Dentsu also said that faceless creators represent an increasing share of their clients’ influencer marketing budgets, although they declined to share specific figures.

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Roblox is officially the home of the most popular video game of all time — but marketers are still unsure of the platform’s value as an advertising channel.

This is despite a recent boom in attention on the platform. On June 16, “Grow a Garden” — a Roblox experience in which users can feed and grow virtual plants and animals — surpassed 16.4 million concurrent active users, overtaking Fortnite’s 2020 Galactus event to become the most popular video game in history by peak concurrent players. Last week, the game shattered its own record, swelling to 21.6 million concurrent users.

The expansion of “Grow a Garden” has put a spotlight on the continued growth of Roblox, regardless of marketers’ demands for more transparency about the value of Roblox advertising.

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Today’s teens and twentysomethings are the future of TV audiences. So it’s always worth keeping current on what’s keeping — or has lost — their attentions.

At this year’s VidCon — the annual Comic-Con for the creator economy — more than a dozen Gen Z attendees weighed in on the video apps they are most and least likely to watch, including which two they’re addicted to, which one was described as “hell on earth” and which is only used for school or by their parents.

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Integral Ad Science, a publicly listed ad tech company with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion, is the subject of a potential takeover by private equity, according to recent reports — but interest is wavering.

Today (June 30) marks the fourth anniversary of IAS’ initial public offering. Potential suitors sent out due diligence notifications to audit partners during the last quarter, albeit opinions are mixed as to the most likely outcome, according to Digiday sources.

KKR is out

Late last year, separate reports suggested that IAS was about to be taken private. Business Insider cited sources claiming that PE giant KKR was the firm, following an article from Bloomberg that reported it was exploring future options with Jefferies Financial Group.

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Two years after its launch, The Trade Desk’s Kokai tool has acquired a mixed reputation among the agency media buyers it was designed for.

Kokai was supposed to be the DSP titan’s next shield against the tech giants. The hope was that by making ad inventory on the web easier to invest in, brands and buyers would buy more ad inventory outside the walled gardens.

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While TikTok’s U.S. lifespan remains uncertain, the entertainment app is firmly focused on its future.

“When I met with TikTok last week, they were talking me through their product roadmap for the rest of the year,” said one Cannes Lions attendee, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly about what they discussed during their meeting with TikTok at the festival. 

A big part of that roadmap includes evolving their eight-month-old AI-campaign tool, Smart+, so marketers have more control over how it buys their ads.

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