ChatGPT is sending more of its traffic to publishers’ sites. 

Of the traffic OpenAI’s generative AI platforms send to external websites, 83% went to news and media sites in April, up from 64% in January, according to Similarweb data shared with Digiday. 

Referral traffic from ChatGPT also continues to grow this year. ChatGPT sent 243.8 million visits to 250 news and media websites in April 2025, up 98% from 123.2 million visits this January, according to David Carr, senior insights manager at data analytics company Similarweb.

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Related Insights

Google on Trial

Assessing the fallout of Google’s ad tech antitrust trial Read More

Participants in the Google antitrust trial are entering the final furlong, with Google on Monday (May 19) countering the Justice Department’s remedy proposals after Justice Leonie Brinkema ruled its ad tech stack a monopoly last month.

Of course, Google’s advocates will point out how the DOJ only won two of the charges it brought against its ad tech stack in the April 17 ruling, using this point to undermine government lawyers’ push for a forced breakup. 

Specifically, the court ruled that Google illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets and unlawfully combined those two services.

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AI may be fueling a fresh chapter in ad tech fraud — and not in ways the industry is ready for.

Generative AI content farms are stealing publishers’ ads.txt files to hijack ad revenue, according to DoubleVerify, which has been tracking the activity since January. 

The tech company has been investigating what it has dubbed “AI slop sites and networks” – one in particular called “Synthetic Echo” – which uses generative AI to mass-produce content and spoof ads.txt files to siphon revenue from legitimate publishers. 

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at what AI Mode, the latest generative AI search experience Google has rolled out, means for publishers’ search referral traffic.

• Users’ queries in AI Mode are two to three times the length of traditional searches, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company’s annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday. Google thinks this means users will discover more web content. Publishers aren’t convinced.
• Local newspapers’ AI-generated content makes up book titles, News Corp introduces mandatory AI training for journalists, and more.

Less clicks, more problems

After months of anxiety and speculation, the rollout publishers feared — Google’s AI Mode in search — has arrived.

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Publishers have long chased growth through social platforms and short-term traffic spikes. These tactics often prioritize volume over value, inflating reach without building meaningful relationships or translating into lasting engagement or revenue.

Without meaningful data or audience insights, personalization efforts fall flat, revenue is unpredictable, subscription offers miss their mark and ad performance suffers. Instead, savvy publishers are leveraging a valuable asset: their own audience data. With the right tools, audience data is the foundation for long-term revenue, activated by personalization and automation through owned channels.

“Given the ongoing challenges in the media and publishing space, such as subscription fatigue, news avoidance and declining trust, it’s increasingly clear that cultivating long-term loyalty is the right path forward,” said Georgia Gkolfinopoulou, senior marketing strategist at Marigold. “With younger audiences favoring new formats like podcasts and short-form videos, it’s vital that publishers adopt informed, channel-specific strategies. 

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WPP has retained its account with Coca-Cola, one its largest clients, according to the global beverage giant’s chief marketing officer Manuel Arroyo.

Writing on LinkedIn, the CMO said Coca-Cola had renewed its partnership with WPP and credited it with delivering “significant value” to the firm, which is one of the world’s largest advertisers.

“I’m happy to share that The Coca-Cola Company has renewed its partnership with WPP Open X as its global marketing partner,” he wrote. “We are living a special moment in marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, and I’m glad to have WPP Open X on our team to help us create the future of marketing.”

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Google’s recent clarification that it can still crawl and index web content — even after publishers opt out of its AI training — serves as yet another reminder of how little control publishers have historically had within the Google ecosystem.

Here’s a look at what’s in and out for publishers in the era of Google AI Overviews and the rise of AI platforms.

In
Strip-mining content
Out
Driving traffic

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As podcast consumption shifts to video, advertisers are treating the format as more premium than ever, drawn by opportunities across multiple channels — and are investing more marketing dollars accordingly.

In the first quarter of the year, ad revenues for podcast representation agency True Native Media jumped 40 percent year over year, according to founder Heather Osgood. “2025 has, so far, been a really strong year for us, and I don’t anticipate, if Trump doesn’t do anything too crazy, that we’re going to see a decrease in that,” said Osgood, who didn’t share exact numbers. “There definitely is an increase in interest in video.”

Other podcast production companies, such as Audacy, Wondery and Pave Studios, also confirmed to Digiday that their ad revenue had increased year over year between the first quarters of 2024 and 2025, though they declined to share specific figures.

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As virtual-world creators begin building large audiences — and real incomes — on platforms beyond Roblox and Fortnite, advertisers are starting to take notice.

A new kind of creator has emerged in the past two years: the user-generated content (UGC) creator, whose preferred medium is three-dimensional virtual items and worlds, rather than audio, video or text. Platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite have led this charge, with Roblox paying $280 million to UGC creators who published digital avatars or virtual worlds in the fourth quarter of 2024. Advertisers have also poured millions of dollars into these UGC gaming platforms in recent years, solidifying their evolution from video games into full-service creator platforms and marketing channels.

In 2025, UGC creators are starting to find success in smaller UGC platforms beyond the major players Roblox and Fortnite. UGC mini-game creator Soydade, who asked to keep his real name private, boasts a following of nearly 150,000 on the UGC platform Highrise, and has earned over $300,000 over the last two years by charging users to play poker games inside a virtual lounge on the platform.

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With mounting pressures to do more with fewer resources, publishers are starting to explore how agentic AI could help them work smarter, faster and more efficiently.

Hearst is testing how agentic AI can improve its processes for its ad sales division, while Thomson Reuters — owner of news agency Reuters — has incorporated agentic AI in its business divisions. And Belgian-headquartered publisher DPG Media has integrated the tools across departments.

Agentic AI refers to systems that can autonomously plan, take actions and adapt to achieve goals, often across multiple steps or tasks. Publishers say they are testing these tools cautiously, exploring ways it can be used to strengthen existing services and bolster productivity rather than reduce headcount.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how Amazon and Netflix offer upfront advertisers more extensive cancelation options, which could affect how upfront dollars are allocated.

• Streamers’ upfront flex
• Streaming, YouTube gain more share of TV watch time
• CBS News chief exits, YouTube Shorts’ ad revenue milestone and more

Streamers’ upfront flex

Sports may be the main selling point in this year’s TV and streaming advertising upfront market, but cancelation options will be a key part of negotiations between buyers and sellers. And Amazon and Netflix appear to have an edge on that front.

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Nate Carter, vp, global sales, agency and identity, Dun & Bradstreet

Marketers today are operating in the aftermath of a fundamental shift. The signals that once powered precise targeting are disappearing. Regulatory crackdowns, shifts in consumer behavior and changes among major ad platforms have all converged to create a fragmented, foggy view of the customer journey. 

Even Google’s announcement that it will not introduce a separate consent prompt for third-party cookies in Chrome changes very little. The reliability of third-party cookies for cross-channel consumer understanding has always been limited. These days, given the deprecation of cookies in other browsers and the rise of so many inherently cookieless environments, the collective signal thrown off by third-party cookies has never been weaker. 

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As economic uncertainty and talk of recession intensifies, automakers face an uphill battle in everything from tariff impacts on production costs to fluctuating consumer spending in response to inflation. 

The uncertainty has left marketers shaken because it’s historically meant cuts to marketing budgets. But as one of the biggest spending categories in media and marketing, auto makers aren’t ready to take their foot off the gas just yet. To put some numbers to it, automotive media spend in the U.S. is expected to hit $31.77 billion this year, up from $29.48 billion in 2024, according to eMarketer.

In January, Digiday reported auto marketers aren’t slowing ad spend in light of tariff tension. Recently, Digiday caught up with Denise Cherry, vp of marketing at Rivian, an electric vehicle company, about how the car brand is navigating economic headwinds, why it’s launching its first ever brand campaign now, and planning for the long term amidst uncertainty.

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Pharmaceutical advertisers are one of the biggest television spenders in the U.S. Collectively, they’ve injected $2.18 billion into linear media this year already, according to iSpot data.

But this year’s upfronts have thrown a spotlight on the growing list of challenges facing marketers in the space, from turbulent economic conditions to the looming threat of a pharmaceutical TV ad ban floated by U.S. secretary of health Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Pharma is the port in the storm. When other categories might be pulling back, it’s not unusual to see pharma stay flat to up, in terms of overall investment,” Publicis Health Media CEO Andrea Palmer told Digiday.

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You’ve seen the headlines: “The TCF is illegal.” “RTB ruled unlawful.” But as usual in advertising, the truth is less clickbait, more caveat.

What did happen is this: Belgium’s Court of Appeal finally weighed in on the long-running saga around the Transparency and Consent Framework — the industry’s de facto permission slip for tracking-based advertising in the European Union. Depending on who you ask, the ruling was a win for privacy, a loss for business or just more fuel for a fight that’s far from over. One thing’s clear: it didn’t end the debate — it sharpened it.

Still parsing it all? We’ve got you. Here’s what actually happened, and what it means for Google, Amazon, IAB Europe and just about everyone else in the tracking-based ad economy. 

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The closure of Microsoft Advertising’s demand-side platform is part of a broader shift toward AI-powered advertising and (arguably) the dawn of a new world order, one where Big Tech and independents operate in separate spheres.

That’s the opinion of several Digiday sources consulted in the days since the May 14 announcement, with some wondering what the second-order impact, or opportunity for both independent DSPs and sell-side players.

Last week, Microsoft Advertising told clients it would stop supporting its demand-side platform, Xandr Invest, starting in February. This was an apparent echo of the planned closure of Microsoft’s retail media network, PromoteIQ, as it appears to be consolidating its online advertising offering. 

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Upfront Week is over; let the upfront negotiations begin. Sorta.

In the past, last week’s Upfront Week presentations by TV and streaming ad sellers would be swiftly followed by the start of the annual haggle with advertisers and their agencies. But the TV and streaming ad market has become more of an always-on marketplace.

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Search marketing, once a relatively narrow and technical sect of marketing, is becoming much more wide-ranging.

One year in from the launch of Google’s AI Overviews, adoption of AI-assisted search tools has led to the rise of so-called “zero-click search,” meaning that users terminate their search journeys without clicking a link to a website.

“People don’t search anymore. They’re prompting, they’re gesturing,” said Craig Elimeliah, chief creative officer at Code and Theory.

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One year after the launch of Google’s generative AI search feature, AI Overviews, publishers are recalibrating.

One publisher is rethinking its SEO strategy, backing away from optimizing content for long-tail search queries. Another is reinvesting in exclusives, scoops and breaking news — prioritizing urgency over evergreen stories. A third is actively working to reduce its reliance on Google for traffic altogether.

These are just some of the ways publishers are shifting their strategies, having learned what’s working — and what isn’t — since the launch of Google’s AI Overviews.

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OK, ad marketplace — media buyers, marketers and all associated media players — what you just experienced this past week wasn’t an upfront. It was a sportsfront.

Sports content, both live games and all manner of shows around sports, dominated the upfront presentations like no other source of programming. From new NBA and NFL rights holders, to sports-themed series, to Michael Jordan returning to TV in some vaguely-defined capacity with NBC Universal’s NBA coverage, sports dominated all the upfront conversations and even some of the prior week’s NewFronts. 

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