Data and AI leader Magda Wood shares a preview of her session at the upcoming PPA Festival, where she will be launching a new AI framework for publishers, and discussing “Who owns the future of publishing: LLM licensing framework” with Tom West, chief exec of PLS. 

We keep repeating the same bleak picture: Publishers expect search traffic to fall by up to 40% over the next three years; AI bots now account for one visit for every 31 human visits to publisher sites (up 60% in a single year); and click-through rates from AI applications are minimal and are not translating into a meaningful source of audiences. 

Yet a percentage of publishers surveyed as part of our new PPA research reported no meaningful audience impact at all. What are they doing differently? Are licensing deals a way forward to reduce the impact?

These are the questions at the heart of our research project, Strategic Choices for AI Licensing, that I developed for the PPA and will be sharing at the PPA Festival on 6 May. Some of the key findings that Tom and I will explore include:

Disruption is not uniform

B2C publishers are the most significantly impacted, with 67% reporting major audience disruption, compared with 27% of B2B and hybrid organisations. Lifestyle publishers facing intense competition are particularly exposed. By contrast, niche publishers with strong direct audience relationships through subscriptions, events and proprietary data, are proving more resilient. Quality content and deep relationships with audiences remain difficult to substitute.

Not every deal is a good deal

Across 63 tracked licensing agreements, the average multi-year deal is worth less than 2.15% of annual revenue. Most are RAG deals – agreements that grant retrieval-augmented generation rights, allowing AI systems to access and surface publisher content in responses. These arrangements come with their own risks: click-through rates from chatbots have fallen, even for publishers with deals in place. Entering an agreement without the right protections and commercial terms could risk long-term damage to a publisher’s business model.

The market is moving fast

The good news is that conditions are starting to shift. Regulatory pressure is increasing, following a backlash that saw the Government step back from its preferred option to make AI scraping easier. At the same time, content marketplaces from Microsoft and Amazon are emerging, while infrastructure tools such as Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control now offer more meaningful technical protection. Collective licensing frameworks are also developing solutions tailored to publishers that lack the scale to negotiate alone.

What next?

At the PPA Festival, we will launch a full diagnostic framework, the deal considerations that separate a good outcome from a damaging one, and the strategic pathways available to publishers of different sizes and business models. 

It will allow you to assess your audience impact; set priorities based on what you stand to lose; and, if you enter a deal – bilateral or collective – ensure it is structured around the right conditions, not just the fastest offer on the table.

The window to act strategically is narrowing. It is worth continuing the conversation.

To see the full PPA Festival 2026 agenda click here.

Any questions surrounding the PPA’s work with Government on the impact of AI, contact Eilidh.Wilson@ppa.co.uk