Maybe Google Zero is Good for Publishers

There's less of the open web left, but what remains commands a price premium.

Jul 27, 2026

New data shows that the number of pageviews online publishers are serving continues to decline at an alarming rate. But it’s not all bad news. The pageviews that remain are being monetized at higher rates, replacing at least some of the lost income from what used to be Google’s traffic spigot.

At least that’s the take from Digiday, reporting on new figures from adtech company Ozone.

For years, programmatic ad networks and the firehose of traffic from Google search results, Google News, and Google Discover meant display ad space was essentially unlimited, and that drove down prices as a result. But it turns out that once you shut off a huge chunk of that firehose, the remaining traffic becomes more valuable. Digiday says, “Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 of 2026 as the AI era, zero‑click search choked the flow of traffic to news and other open‑web sites.” But at the same time, "Despite the steep contraction in supply, prices have been moving in the opposite direction...a sign that buyers are willing to pay more for the remaining inventory."

It’s a rare bit of good news for online publishers in what has been a seemingly endless season of bad news. And it makes sense, because both publishers and advertisers are still trained to think in traditional terms—ads go on web pages, where eyeballs view them. AI is taking a lot of those eyeballs, but it’s—at least for now—hard to actually, you know, advertise on AI.

The New York Times recently noted that while people are spending more time than ever on Google, they’re interacting with “conversational responses written by Gemini” rather than following outbound links to the open web. And while that’s good for Google, I suppose, it’s contributing to the traffic cliff many publishers are facing.

One stat that jumped out to me from the Times article: “People are spending one to nine more minutes in AI Mode than on traditional Google searches.” And even scarier, “in about 75 percent of sessions, users never left AI Mode for the web.” That means Google is becoming more like the classic AOL or Facebook model—a walled garden that lets you in, but is not very eager to let you out again.

We’re still left with the long-tail problem of what, exactly, these AI answer engines will serve up to readers in the long term if the rest of the traditional web publishing market collapses. Which, despite an uptick in CPM prices, seems increasingly likely. The entire news and information industry depends on solving that long-tail problem in a way that works for publishers.

Digiday, again: “The double-digit drops in ad supply are essentially the economic footprint of declining referral traffic: as search and social platforms send fewer clicks out to publisher sites, there are simply fewer pageviews and therefore fewer ad calls to sell against.”

The end of reading

If you treat yourself to the relative luxury of reading one 8,000-word magazine article this month, make it “The End of Reading is Here,” from the current issue of The Atlantic.

In it, Rose Horowitch ties in everything from Marshall McLuhan to Ptolemy to make the case that we are close to, if not already in, a post-literate age. The most frightening idea proposed by the article is that the past few hundred years of widespread literacy—aka, the ability and opportunity to read—will end up as a short blip in human evolution.

I’ll share one short excerpt, which backs up my experience with a high schooler at home—who routinely receives short excerpts to read instead of full-length books or even traditional textbooks.

Some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” [Harvard’s Margaret Rennix], said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.

That’s right, we’re now gatekeeping knowledge by locking it up … inside books.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. More books are being published than ever, even if a certain percentage of them are AI slop. I personally have 2-3 books going at once, through a mix of Kindle books, Libby library loans, Netgalley previews, and vintage paperbacks. If there’s one beneficial habit I’ve adopted over the past couple of years, it’s to wind down each and every day with only an E Ink screen, reading until it drowsily drops from my fingers.

What I’m reading, watching, playing

I just finished season two of the excellent Aussie crime dramedy Dead Loch, which has one of the best foul-mouthed protagonists since Peter Capaldi in The Thick of It.

After I devoured A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper, I was delighted to learn that the novel was a semi-sequel to his 2023 book, Everybody Knows. If anything, I liked Everybody Knows even more, and reading them out of order gave me new insights into the earlier work.

I’d call the PC game Esoteric Ebb talky, but since there’s no voice narration, only endless blocks of text, it’s more read-y than anything else. From some of the creators of the critically hailed Disco Elysium, it’s so similar in vibe that I’ve seen people cast it as part of the new gaming sub-genre, “Disco-like.”

Chris Hoffman

Jul 28

Thanks for sharing the Digiday story. I'm hopeful that business models will be worked out, long-term.

(I recently played Esoteric Ebb, too. Great game!)

Victor OBrien

Jul 27

Too many walled gardens from Google to LinkedIn to YouTube. These platforms owning the advertising and value is a dangerous thing for all media and free expression. It’s almost like going back to when we had just three broadcast news channels that controlled all visual media.

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