October 2026 edition
State of AI in Media & Publishing
A free monthly report on how AI is reshaping the publishing web, from crawler policy and licensing to the AI already running inside publisher infrastructure.
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The October 2026 edition runs to 58 pages. The PDF starts downloading the moment you submit, and this form always hands out the newest edition.
- What moved since September, measured again on the same 13,509 verified publishers
- Who is adopting AI by type of publisher, and who stopped blocking the crawlers
- Real-user Core Web Vitals for every publisher with field data
- The month’s deals, lawsuits and search-traffic shifts, and what media leaders said about them
Three numbers from the October edition
5.7%
of publishers have put AI to work company-wide
Up from 5.1% in September on the same publishers, a 13% rise in one month. Anthropic gained most: 3.6% of publishers now run Claude across the company.
33.3%
block a major AI crawler by name
Down from 36.0% in September. Most of the drop is Cloudflare sites swapping crawler blocks for a stated policy: the stance is moving from blocking to bargaining.
−40%
Google search traffic to publishers in a year
Chartbeat measured Google Search referrals down 40.2% year on year. AI platforms together send publishers 0.01% of their traffic.
What moved since September
The same 13,509 verified publishers, measured the same way in both months. September is restated on these sites, so every change compares like with like. Changes are in percentage points.
Share of publishers | Sept | Oct | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI company-wide | 5.1% | 5.7% | +0.6 |
| Anthropic (Claude) | 3.0% | 3.6% | +0.6 |
| OpenAI (ChatGPT) | 2.4% | 2.7% | +0.3 |
| Groups using AI | 10.9% | 12.0% | +1.1 |
| Top-10k using AI | 17.5% | 19.1% | +1.6 |
| TollBit licensees | 6.5% | 6.7% | +0.2 |
| Name training bots | 40.4% | 37.8% | −2.6 |
| Name answer bots | 24.9% | 26.3% | +1.4 |
| Block major bots | 36.0% | 33.3% | −2.7 |
| No AI, no blocks | 61.8% | 63.9% | +2.1 |
| Publish llms.txt | 6.6% | 6.9% | +0.3 |
| Hire AI/data roles | 9.0% | 9.0% | 0.0 |
More from this edition
- 6.9%
- publish an llms.txt file, yet 97% of those files are never read.
- 44%
- of publishers with real-user data pass Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 58% on desktop.
- 15%
- of US adults now get news from AI chatbots, up from 9% a year earlier (Pew Research Center).
Inside the report
58 pages. Every figure sourced.
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.
- Verified publishers only
- Every site is checked as a real publisher before it counts: 13,509 of them, from a panel of 39,842 media domains.
- A new edition every month
- The form always sends the newest edition, and every past edition keeps its own page.
Monthly report
State of AI in Media & Publishing
Stay ahead of the latest AI trends and insights in media and publishing. Subscribe and never miss an update.
Publishers are being asked to build app-like, headless, agent-ready experiences on a PHP-and-jQuery foundation. The modernization bill is coming due just as the traffic model collapses.
Matías Sanchez Moises
CEO & Founder, Artificial Poets
What’s inside this edition
- The external record
The month in eight storylines: Google starts paying publishers, search referrals fall 40%, newsroom cuts, new lawsuits, pay-per-use crawling and AI chatbots as a news source.
- What media leaders said
Five postures, three of them new: legislate the bots, publish for agents and agree shared standards, in the words of leaders at TIME, the BBC, Hearst and El Tiempo.
- The technology stack
What runs the publishing web, fingerprinted from live publisher homepages with a new detection engine this month.
- AI inside the infrastructure
Who adopted AI since September and what kind of publisher they are, the AI readers meet on the page, and who stopped blocking 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 and pay-per-use access to the shift from training deals to live retrieval.
- Methodology & sources
How the 13,509 verified publishers were chosen, what each measurement can and cannot see, and every source cited.
Monthly report
State of AI in Media & Publishing
Stay ahead of the latest AI trends and insights in media and publishing. Subscribe and never miss an update.
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Every edition stays online as it was published, with its own download.
About the report
Free monthly report
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58 pages on AI in media and publishing, free, and always the newest edition when you ask for it.