--- title: State of AI in Media & Publishing — September 2026 description: "The September 2026 edition of our free monthly report on AI in the publishing web, kept as published: crawler policy, licensing, the AI inside publisher infrastructure, and web performance." url: https://www.artificialpoets.com/resources/state-of-ai-in-media-and-publishing-september-2026/ site: Artificial Poets type: a13s_content date: 2026-09-23T05:16:40+00:00 modified: 2026-10-23T04:07:11+00:00 author: Matias Sanchez Moises --- # State of AI in Media & Publishing — September 2026 ![](https://www.artificialpoets.com/wp-content/themes/a13s/assets/scenes/walled-city-wide.webp) September 2026 edition · Previous edition # State of AI in Media & Publishing: September 2026 This is the September 2026 edition, kept exactly as it was published. The October 2026 edition is out, with every measure taken again on verified publishers. Get the September edition Read the October edition ## 56 pages. Every figure sourced. Inside the report Charts, tables and plain-language analysis you can take straight into a planning meeting. Each finding says where it came from and what that source can and cannot see. - **Measured, not surveyed** Technology fingerprints, public DNS records, robots.txt and llms.txt files, and Chrome’s real-user speed data. - **Read against the industry** Public reporting, deal announcements and court filings put each measurement in context. - **One edition of a monthly series** Each edition keeps its own page and its own download. The newest is always on the main report page. September 2026 edition ## Get the September 2026 edition 56 pages on AI in media and publishing, exactly as published in September 2026. ## What’s inside this edition - **The external record** 2026 in eight storylines: Google Zero, the first content marketplaces, ChatGPT ads, new licensing deals and a wave of lawsuits. - **What media leaders said** The five postures publishers took toward AI, in the words of the executives who took them. - **The technology stack** What runs the publishing web, fingerprinted from live publisher homepages. - **AI inside the infrastructure** Verified AI-vendor enrollments, the AI readers actually meet on the page, and who blocks the crawlers. - **Web performance** Real-user Core Web Vitals for every publisher with field data, and what speed is worth in revenue. - **Infrastructure & the vendor ecosystem** Mail platforms, sender authentication and the vendor trail publishers leave in public DNS. - **The post-cookie readiness gap** Who has the consent and first-party data stack now that consent signals gate Google Ads revenue. - **Outlook** What to watch next, from crawler pricing to the shift from training deals to live retrieval. - **Methodology & sources** How the domain universe was built, what each measurement can and cannot see, and every source cited. ## All editions Free monthly report ## Get the September 2026 edition 56 pages on AI in media and publishing, as published in September 2026.