AI Mode isn’t just the name of Google’s newest search product. It also describes the present period of digital media — and the theme of this September’s Digiday Publishing Summit.
AI is no longer the next epoch of the platform era. It’s the present. Publishers are seeing generative AI chatbots siphon search traffic at the same time as they are having to defend against AI crawlers scraping their sites. They are generating revenue from the chatbots’ parent companies while developing new revenue models for the potential day when the open web gives way to the agentic web. They are incorporating AI technologies into virtually every facet of their businesses, from ad sales to editorial products, from subscription paywalls to programmatic sales.
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