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This week's blog comes from Megan Schertler, Co-Founder of Real Life Media, who shares her insights into the impact AI is likely to have on the branded content industry for the next twelve months and how publishers, brands, and print media can succeed in this environment.
Almost every founder conversation I have had so far this autumn circles back to the same question, which is whether the flood of AI-generated content is a storm to shelter from or a tide that will eventually go back out. My answer is that it is neither, because the next twelve months will not treat publishers as a single category. They will sort them, and the line doing the sorting is already visible in the data for anyone willing to read it as a forecast rather than a headline.
The supply side is not in dispute. At the FIPP World Media Congress last October, Hearst's Joe Martin, citing Axios data, told delegates that AI-generated websites had grown by roughly 700 percent in a single year. The curve has not flattened since, and NewsGuard, which tracks AI content farms dressed up as news and information sites, counted 3,749 of them across 16 languages as of June 2026. Graphite's analysis of English-language articles sampled from Common Crawl, published in October 2025, found that AI-written articles overtook human-written ones in November 2024 and have held at roughly half of new output ever since.
What makes that last study useful for prediction is a second finding that got far less attention, which is that most of those AI articles barely surface in Google or ChatGPT at all. The flood is not beating publishers in search. It is doing its damage from two directions at once, because the open web fills with cheap sameness that lowers trust in everything a reader encounters there,while the AI answer layer quietly absorbs the demand that used to arrive as clicks. When Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025, users who saw a Google AI summary clicked a traditional search result 8 percent of the time, against 15 percent when no summary appeared, and only 1 percent clicked a source cited inside the summary itself.
Publishers have already felt the first year of this. Chartbeat data published in Reuters Institute's Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report showed Google search referrals to publishers falling 33 percent in the year to November 2025, and the 280 media leaders surveyed across 51 countries expect search traffic to fall by a further 43 percent over the next three years. A decline of that size, compounding on top of what has already been lost, changes the terms of the business itself.
So who gets squeezed over the next twelve months? The answer is any publisher whose product can be substituted by a summary, which means titles built on answering questions an AI can now answer for free, distributed through search and monetised through programmatic advertising that is itself competing against content farms for the same budgets. For these businesses the coming year will not look like a collapse so much as a slow tightening, where traffic falls, the inventory that traffic produces becomes less valuable, and every attempt to make up the difference with more volume only deepens their resemblance to the machines they are competing with. Mid-sized, digital-first titles with print treated as a legacy line are the most exposed of all, because they have neither the scale to negotiate licensing deals with AI companies nor the distinctiveness that would make a reader seek them out by name.
The publishers positioned to benefit are the ones whose value cannot be summarised, because it lives in a point of view, a named editor, a community that knows each other, or a physical object that someone chose to pay for and keep. Trust is the currency that moves toward them. Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026, published in June and drawing on roughly 2,000 respondents in each of 48 markets, found overall trust in news at 37 percent, the lowest since the survey began measuring it, while only 20 percent said they trust the news answers they get from AI chatbots, and 62 percent said they are concerned about fake news online. An audience that anxious about provenance does not stop wanting information. It starts paying closer attention to where information comes from, and it rewards the sources that can prove a human stood behind every page.
Print carries a structural advantage in that environment which has nothing to do with nostalgia. The entire economics of the AI flood depend on a marginal cost of publishing that is close to zero, which is precisely what paper, printing, and distribution refuse to offer, so the cost that made print look inefficient in the era of free digital reach now works as a filter the flood cannot pass through. Every printed issue is, in effect, a signed statement that someone thought this was worth the expense of making, and over the next year I expect that signal to be read more clearly by two audiences who arrive at it differently: mature readers who are reassessing a digital ecosystem they no longer trust, and younger readers who are discovering editorial curation for the first time as an antidote to algorithmic saturation.
Brands will follow those readers, although more slowly than the traffic charts move, because budgets lag behavior and measurement lags both. The publishers who will capture that shift are the ones who spend the coming year making their trust legible, documenting who their readers are, how long they stay, and why they come back, so that the case for their pages is made in evidence rather than sentiment. For founders, the practical implication of all this is a question worth answering before the next budget cycle rather than after it: how much of your revenue still depends on attention you rent from a platform, and how much comes from relationships you own? The titles that shift that ratio in the next twelve months, through subscriptions, events, membership, and a print product people are proud to hold, will spend 2027 on the right side of the sorting.