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Google revamps Discover page to show content from creators

Google announced on Wednesday that it’s updating the Discover page in its flagship Search app to allow you to follow specific publishers and creators to surface more content from those you like. The update follows a feature Google rolled out last month, allowing users to pick their choice of news sites and blogs for the Top Stories section in search results. In the weeks ahead, Google says people will also start to see different types of content on Discover, including articles, YouTube Shorts,

Google's AI Overviews 'Misconduct' Undermines Publishers Who Create Content, Lawsuit Says

Penske Media, which owns publications including Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, is suing Google, alleging that the search giant is illegally using their content and that of other publishers to fill out the AI Overviews that have become a fixture at the top of Google search results. In a lawsuit filed Friday in US District Court for the District of Columbia, Penske argues that Google's "misconduct" through its monopoly in online search has coerced publishers to acquiesce to misappropriatio

Rolling Stone Publisher Sues Google Over AI Overview Summaries

Google has insisted that its AI-generated search result overviews and summaries have not actually hurt traffic for publishers. The publishers disagree, and at least one is willing to go to court to prove the harm they claim Google has caused. Penske Media Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, sued Google on Friday over allegations that the search giant has used its work without permission to generate summaries and ultimately reduced traffic to its publicati

Perplexity's definition of copyright gets it sued by the dictionary

Merriam-Webster and its parent company Encyclopedia Britannica are the latest to take on AI in court. The plaintiffs have sued Perplexity, claiming that AI company's "answer engine" product unlawfully copies their copyrighted materials. They are also alleging copyright infringement for instances where Perplexity's AI creates false or inaccurate hallucinations that it then wrongly attributes to Britannica or Merriam-Webster. The complaint , filed in New York federal court, is seeking unspecified

Online Media Brands Hope a New Protocol Will Stop Unwanted AI Crawlers

Online media brands, including Yahoo, Quora and Medium, are taking a new step to prevent AI companies from copying and using their content to train models without their permission. The publishers, including CNET's parent company Ziff Davis, see this new tool, called RSL, as another way to ensure large AI developers don't use their work without payment or compensation -- an issue that's already led to a host of lawsuits. RSL, which stands for Really Simple Licensing, is inspired by Really Simpl

Reddit is testing a way to read articles without leaving the app

As AI tools gobble up news publishers’ traffic on traditional referral platforms like Google, Reddit is offering publishers another way to share their content — within its app. On September 10th, Reddit announced a slew of new features available to some publishers that are meant to help them better understand where their stories are being shared and to encourage them to post more on the platform. On the user side, the most significant change is a test that allows readers to open article links d

Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions.

Leading Internet companies and publishers—including Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, Medium, The Daily Beast, Fastly, and more—think there may finally be a solution to end AI crawlers hammering websites to scrape content without permission or compensation. Announced Wednesday morning, the "Really Simply Licensing" (RSL) standard evolves robots.txt instructions by adding an automated licensing layer that's designed to block bots that don't fairly compensate creators for content. Free for any publisher to

Publishers fear AI summaries are hitting online traffic

Publishers fear AI summaries are hitting online traffic 54 minutes ago Share Save Suzanne Bearne Technology Reporter Share Save Getty Images Newspapers are banking on online revenue to replace falling circulation When actress Sorcha Cusack left the BBC drama Father Brown in January, it made headlines, including for the newspapers owned by Reach, among them The Mirror, and the Daily Express. But the story did not generate the traction the Reach newspapers would have expected a year ago, or eve

How to Add WIRED as a Preferred Source on Google (2025)

As you’ve probably noticed, Google has gotten … weird lately. Weirder? It can be hard to find the search results you’re looking for. Between AI summaries and algorithm changes resulting in unexpected sources, it can be tricky to navigate the most popular search engine in the world. (And publishers are feeling the strain, too.) Earlier this year, Google updated its algorithm. This is nothing new—Google updates its algorithms hundreds of times per year, with anywhere from two to four major “core

Google’s AI Ambitions An ‘Existential Crisis’ For News Online

Amid mounting concerns over its monopoly in online search, Google’s intensified integration of artificial intelligence into how it presents the world’s news outlets is prompting a seismic shift in the digital journalism landscape. Major publishers worldwide report plunging traffic and revenue, fueling fears that their traditional business models are under existential threat, The Guardian reports in a deep dive into how the industry is reacting. It posits that Google’s rapid rollout of AI-drive

Why the New York Times Claimed Life Had Been Found on Mars

If you followed news about either the media industry or space exploration back in 2021, you probably remember when the New York Times accidentally published a story claiming that watermelons had been found on the planet Mars. "Authorities say rise of fruit aliens is to blame for glut of outer space watermelons," read the story, which the newspaper deleted less than an hour later, but is still accessible in an archived snapshot. "The FBI declined to comment on reports of watermelons raining down

How to Stop Google from AI-Summarising Your Website

Google has introduced AI-generated summaries in its search results—known as AI Overviews—which often pull your content into a snippet that may generate traffic away from your site. While it seems like a "feature," these summaries force site owners into a no-win choice between giving up control or visibility—arguably a dark pattern tactic by Google. To make matters worse, while there are regulatory investigations underway in the EU and UK striving to hold Google accountable, there’s still no goo

Perplexity Will Share Revenue From AI Searches With Publishers

Artificial intelligence systems need content to produce results, and they've been criticized for not paying the people who wrote and edited that content. Now, Perplexity AI, the AI-powered search engine, is introducing Comet Plus. This new subscription tier will distribute revenue to publishing partners whenever readers use AI to glean or deliver journalistic content, the company said in a blog post on Monday. In the AI age, high-quality information is key, and Perplexity contends that publishe

Perplexity has cooked up a new way to pay publishers for their content

Perplexity is launching a new revenue-sharing plan for publishers that will pay them every time its AI assistants use an article to answer a question, The Wall Street Journal reports. Perplexity is launching the plan (and partially paying for it) with a new Comet Plus subscription that gives subscribers access "to premium content from a group of trusted publishers and journalists." Comet Plus costs $5 per month, and based on Perplexity's description, it's primarily designed to account for the a

Hundreds of Thousands of User Chats with AI Chatbot Grok Are Now Public

Does what's said between you and your AI chat stay between you and your AI chat? Nope. According to a report by Forbes, Elon Musk's AI assistant Grok published more than 370,000 chats on the Grok website. Those URLs, which were not necessarily intended for public consumption by users, were then indexed by search engines and entered the public sphere. It wasn't just chats. Forbes reported that uploaded documents, such as photos, spreadsheets and other documents, were also published. Representa

Trump admin. is muffling CDC’s flagship health journal, report finds

The flagship health journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has grown quiet this year, and a report from MedPage Today indicates that a variety of actions by the Trump administration may be to blame for hamstringing the critical resource. Most strikingly, sources told MedPage that the journal's scientific articles must now obtain clearance for publication from health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has no health, science, or medical back

Researchers value null results, but struggle to publish them

Credit: Getty Scientists overwhelmingly recognize the value of sharing null results, but rarely publish them in the research literature, according to a survey. The findings suggest that there is a need for increased awareness of how and why to share such data, as well as for changes in how research productivity is assessed. The survey drew responses from 11,069 researchers in 166 countries and all major scientific disciplines. It found that 98% recognize the value of null results, which the su

Supply-chain attacks on open source software are getting out of hand

It has been a busy week for supply-chain attacks targeting open source software available in public repositories, with successful breaches of multiple developer accounts that resulted in malicious packages being pushed to unsuspecting users. The latest target, according to security firm Socket, is JavaScript code available on repository npm. A total of 10 packages available from the npm page belonging to global talent agency Toptal contained malware and were downloaded by roughly 5,000 users be

Google Discover adds AI summaries, threatening publishers with further traffic declines

As publishers fret about decreased traffic from Google, the search giant has begun rolling out AI summaries in Discover, the main news feed inside Google’s search app on iOS and Android. Now, instead of seeing a headline from a major publication, users will see multiple news publishers’ logos in the top-left corner, followed by an AI-generated summary that cites those sources. The app warns that these summaries are generated with AI, “which can make mistakes.” Image Credits:Google The feature

Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022)

Today in Tedium: It’s easy to forget now, but desktop publishing was an immensely innovative thing when it emerged within the computing industry in the early ’80s. While at its heart a mishmash of hardware and software cleverly combined for a single goal, it was an empire builder, one that helped create new businesses and improve the status and positioning of existing ones. And with the decline of print as a medium, it can feel kind of old hat, but lots of stuff still gets typeset every single d

California lawmaker behind SB 1047 reignites push for mandated AI safety reports

California State Senator Scott Wiener on Wednesday introduced new amendments to his latest bill, SB 53, that would require the world’s largest AI companies to publish safety and security protocols and issue reports when safety incidents occur. If signed into law, California would be the first state to impose meaningful transparency requirements onto leading AI developers, likely including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI. Senator Wiener’s previous AI bill, SB 1047, included similar requireme

Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It

Today in Tedium: It’s easy to forget now, but desktop publishing was an immensely innovative thing when it emerged within the computing industry in the early ’80s. While at its heart a mishmash of hardware and software cleverly combined for a single goal, it was an empire builder, one that helped create new businesses and improve the status and positioning of existing ones. And with the decline of print as a medium, it can feel kind of old hat, but lots of stuff still gets typeset every single d

EU Slaps Google With Antitrust Complaint Over AI Overviews

A group of publishers has filed an EU antitrust complaint against Google over its use of AI Overviews, according to a report from Reuters last week. AI Overviews are AI-generated results trained on content across the internet that appears at the top of Google searches. The complaint comes from a group of independent publishers who want the EU to take some action against Google scraping and repackaging their content, according to a document seen by Reuters. "Google's core search engine service

Google faces EU antitrust complaint over AI Overviews

In Brief A group known as the Independent Publishers Alliance has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission over Google’s AI Overviews, according to Reuters. The complaint accuses Google of “misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss.” It also says that unless they’re willing to disappear from Google searc

Substack brings new updates to livestreaming as it increases video push

Over the past year, Substack has considerably expanded its video tools for creators, evolving from a platform primarily dedicated to newsletters. On Wednesday, Substack announced new features aimed at helping publishers grow and promote their livestreams. The recent update enables creators to share clips of their live videos on Notes, and Substack will notify them in real time about the performance. This way, publishers can determine which clips they should upload to other platforms, such as Yo

Elon Musk’s X Is Turning Community Notes Over to AI

Artificial intelligence chatbots are known for regularly offering dubious information and hallucinated details, making them terrible prospects for the role of fact-checker. And yet, Elon Musk’s X (née Twitter) plans to deploy AI agents to help fill in the gaps on the notoriously slow-reacting Community Notes, with the AI-generated notes appearing as soon as this month. What could possibly go wrong? The new model will allow developers to submit AI agents to be reviewed by the company, according

ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines

Referrals from ChatGPT to news publishers are growing, but not enough to counter the decline in clicks resulting from users increasingly getting their news directly from AI or AI-powered search results, according to a report from digital market intelligence company Similarweb. Since the launch of Google’s AI Overviews in May 2024, the firm found that the number of news searches on the web that result in no click-throughs to news websites has grown from 56% to nearly 69% as of May 2025. Not sur

Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker

Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker 45 minutes ago Share Save Chris Vallance Senior Technology Reporter Share Save Getty Images Millions of websites - including Sky News, The Associated Press and Buzzfeed - will now be able to block artificial intelligence (AI) bots from accessing their content without permission. The new system is being rolled out by internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare, which hosts around a fifth of the internet. Eventually, sites will be able to

Pay up or stop scraping: Cloudflare program charges bots for each crawl

Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites. In a blog Tuesday, Cloudflare explained that its "pay-per-crawl" feature is currently in a private beta. A small number of publishers—including AdWeek, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Gannett, and Ars Technica owner Condé Nast—will participate in the experiment. Each publisher will be able to set their own prices that bots must pay before sc

Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping

Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider that serves 20% of the web, announced Tuesday the launch of a new marketplace that reimagines the relationship between website owners and AI companies — ideally giving publishers greater control over their content. For the last year, Cloudflare has launched tools for publishers to address the rampant rise of AI crawlers, including a one-click solution to block all AI bots, as well as a dashboard to view how AI crawlers are visiting their site. In a 20