Publisher Manifesto – Nick Worth, CEO, Piano
Is it happening again with AI?
When the web arrived, the industry posted its content to get more exposure — and spent the next decade trying to claw back revenue it had handed over voluntarily. When social media arrived, publishers threw open their archives to platforms that captured attention, data, and advertising dollars. Each succeeding wave brought the same promise: reach, relevance, a seat at the table. Each wave ended the same way – lower revenues, smaller newsrooms, greater dependency on the big tech monopolies. AI is the latest, and this wave is a tsunami.
As the CEO for Piano, the global leader in helping publishers monetize their digital content, I have a front row seat to this latest challenge. We work with more than 500 publishers from The Wall Street Journal to Asahi Shimbun to The Telegraph to Süddeutsche Zeitung. Our platform powers digital subscriptions for leading publishers, a business model that developed as a reaction to the rise of programmatic advertising, yet another threat to the industry’s fragile economics.
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 latest threat is an extinction-level event.
AI companies have spent the last four years crawling the web on an industrial scale — ingesting decades of journalism, analysis, and creative work to train models that answer questions directly, without sending readers back to the source. The content that publishers built, funded, and for which they are legally and ethically responsible has been taken without permission, without compensation, and without attribution.
The result: AI search surfaces cannibalize the referral traffic publishers depend on. The scrapers keep coming. And the AI companies — when asked directly — have made their position clear: they'll only pay for content when they have to.
Right now, they don't have to.
Piano’s numbers bear this out. Research on our customer sites shows fewer than 20% use aggressive blocking of AI bots, and 30% have no blocking at all. Without blocking, publishers have no leverage to force AI companies to negotiate.
Publishers must take action. LLMs provide almost no meaningful traffic or revenue to publishers. According to Piano data, less than 0.1% of publisher traffic is coming from AI tools. LLMs have been designed to keep users inside their own environments; links and referrals to original sources are an afterthought.
Google's own pivot is compounding the damage. Since the launch of AI Overviews in May 2024, clicks to publishers are down 49% among publishers tracked by Define Media Group. At Google I/O in May 2026, Google announced the next step: a fully agentic, 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 23% of traffic to the news and media industry — erodes as dramatically as early signals suggest, the economic case for producing original content could face collapse.
The strategy is straightforward: publishers cannot negotiate from a position of weakness. As long as AI companies can scrape content for free, there's no incentive for them to pay. The path to compensation runs through scarcity — and scarcity requires action.
Block the bots. Lock down the content. Build the leverage. Then negotiate.
This isn't naïve. It's the only thing that has ever worked.
How publishers survive
1. Protect your content
The most urgent priority is ensuring that AI crawlers and scrapers can't walk straight through your front door. Most publishers are more exposed than they realize — bot detection audits routinely show that content protection is either absent or trivially bypassed.
There are a few lines of defense:
Declaring exclusions in robots.txt, the most basic tactic, honored by the major LLMs, ignored by most others. As noted earlier, many Piano customers aren’t even doing this.
Blocking at the CDN level. The major CDN providers can block bots before they arrive at your site.
Locking down your paywall, so only known humans can access your site
The threat is more sophisticated than most publishers appreciate. Perplexity, while negotiating deals with some publishers, has been documented deliberately circumventing blocking attempts by impersonating Chrome browsers and other spoofing tactics. Tavily, a third-party crawler used by multiple AI agent companies, openly documents its approach: "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." Lesser-known crawlers like Exa and Firecrawl are barely blocked at all.
The scale of the problem is staggering. People Inc.'s Chief Innovation Officer, Dr. Jon Roberts, told Digiday that bot restrictions resulted in tens of millions of blocked crawl attempts per day across their network.
The most effective blocking, beyond robots.txt, happens at the CDN layer, and publishers need to act decisively to adopt CDN bot defense technology. The major CDN companies – Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, HUMAN, and DataDome — have aligned with publishers and offer sophisticated detection solutions to report on and block bot traffic.
Critically, content protection means locking content for everyone — human and non-human alike. The industry can't yet reliably distinguish AI agents from human readers. The only truly secure solution is to require all readers to register for access and to use server-side or CDN edge content protection that prevents loading full article content for any unknown user.
There is a tradeoff with such tight content protection – some users will leave rather than register to read a single article. But Piano data shows those users are low value anyway, 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.
As AI systems increasingly mediate the discovery of content, the publishers who survive will be the ones with direct, authenticated connections to their audiences — people who log in, who subscribe, who consent to be known. A publisher who knows who's reading, what they care about, and how they engage has something an AI system can't replicate and can't take: a relationship.
Registration is not a friction point. It's a strategic asset.
3. Monetize on your terms
The agentic commerce future — where AI systems pay publishers per crawl, per answer, per piece of content surfaced — is real, but it's not here yet. Emerging platforms like TollBit and Prorata, and standards like x402 and IAB's Content Monetization Protocols initiative are developing the licensing and monetization standards that will define that market. But no one is making meaningful money from bot marketplaces today, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
What publishers should be doing right now is getting the infrastructure in place so that when the market forms, they're ready to capture it. That means having telemetry data to prove what content was accessed and how it was used, having the identity layer to authenticate both human subscribers and authorized AI agents, and having the subscription and monetization stack to convert whoever arrives — human or machine.
Scarcity creates leverage. Leverage creates value. Value creates revenue.
4. Use AI to your benefit
Defense is necessary. But it won’t drive growth. The same AI companies that are threatening publisher businesses also enable capabilities that are valuable as publisher tools — personalization at scale, new “liquid content” creation and distribution models, AI-powered optimization to increase site engagement and conversions. The next generation of predictive systems won’t only identity when a reader is likely to subscribe and surface the right offer at the right moment, they will auto-optimize in real time, improving performance and reducing the required human effort.
The publishers that combine intelligent content protection, known audiences and effectively applied AI tools will build the leverage and moat to sustain their businesses into the future, ready to benefit from new distribution and monetization models that are just starting to emerge.
On the other hand, if publishers collapse and take scaled 24/7 global fact-based journalism with them, the losers will go far beyond media companies. The implications for informed public debate and democracy as well as for the resilience of IP rights are profound.
In the face of this challenge, 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 of that shift. Led by the BBC, Sky, and some of the most influential publishers in the world, SPUR has members across multiple continents, including major publisher associations representing thousands of titles. Thirty new members joined at a single conference in June. During the same event, the publisher of The New York Times stood on stage and called for the industry to stop making the same mistake — to cease giving content away and to demand fair terms.
Alongside SPUR, organizations like the Real Simple Licensing (RSL) Collective and the News Media Alliance are building the infrastructure for collective action. Publishers like The Atlantic and People Inc. have already moved from theory to practice, implementing aggressive bot-blocking strategies and publishing their findings publicly — providing a roadmap for the rest of the industry to follow.
The stakes are high. For publishers, their employees and their business partners like Piano, the AI threat is existential, but all of us need the free press.
Publishers create something irreplaceable. The journalism, analysis, and storytelling that comes from professional newsrooms and media organizations is not a commodity — it's the foundation of informed public life, and it has real economic value that deserves recognition and compensation. It is also, by definition, delivers a human perspective that no large language model can generate. The AI companies themselves understand the irreplaceable value of traditional journalism, 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.
Where Piano fits
Piano was built for exactly this moment. Every product we've built has been in service of helping publishers own their audiences and monetize their content without surrendering control to a platform.
That foundation is more relevant now than it's ever been.
Content protection
Piano provides the tools to implement strict content gating — server-side, edge-based, and client-side — so publishers can lock down their content without sacrificing reader experience. We're working to ensure our clients' paywalls provide real protection, not just cosmetic barriers, and we're aligning that work with the standards SPUR is establishing. We're also tracking promising bot detection and analytics tools that can give publishers the visibility they need to understand how their sites are being accessed — including the crawler-level telemetry required to catch evasive bots that impersonate legitimate traffic.
Identity and audience ownership
Piano's registration and authentication capabilities let publishers build the first-party identity layer that the AI era demands. We believe in the vision of a shared publisher identity — a login that works across properties, makes access frictionless for readers, and keeps the relationship where it belongs: between publisher and reader, not mediated by a platform.
Subscription and monetization
Piano's subscription management platform is the infrastructure publishers will need to monetize content in whatever form the market takes — whether that's human subscriptions, AI licensing, agentic commerce, or models we haven't invented yet. We're investing in AI-assisted subscription tools that make it easier to grow and retain subscribers with smaller teams, because the economics of publishing require it.
Data and telemetry
SPUR is working to establish a standard for what AI companies must disclose — which content they crawled, how it appeared in their answers, whether they sent traffic back. Piano Analytics is positioned to capture those events and give publishers the evidence they need for commercial negotiations. As emerging licensing protocols mature, publishers who have built that evidentiary record will be the ones who can walk into a negotiation with receipts.
Stop making it easy for them.
Lock your content. Gate your pages. Register your readers. Understand who's accessing your site and make deliberate choices about who gets in and on what terms. Join or support SPUR. Demand the telemetry standards that let you see what's being taken.
And then, when you've built the scarcity, when you've established the leverage — come to the table with the receipts.
Piano will be there with you at every step.
