How newsletters became publishers’ answer to the AI-induced traffic collapse

Regulators in Europe and the UK are moving to curb the impact of Google’s AI Overviews on publishers, amid concerns that AI-generated summaries and other chatbots are keeping readers from clicking through to the source.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently proposed that publishers be able to opt out of their content being used in AI Overviews. The intervention comes as search traffic to news publishers fell by a third in 2025 and is expected to drop further this year, according to data from Chartbeat.

But publishers aren’t waiting around for policy salvation. Some are taking the legal route and filing antitrust complaints with regulators over the impact of AI Overviews. Others are already looking beyond SEO — with newsletters reemerging as a powerful channel in this new era of media.

Newsletter revenue grew 30% last year at Paved, a newsletter sponsorship platform, even as AI Overviews were eating search traffic, CEO John McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin — as you’d expect, given his role — believes that newsletters have an added strength for advertisers because they land directly in users’ inboxes and command attention.

“For many brands and creators, newsletters now function like owned media channels, combining distribution, community and monetization in one place. That’s why advertisers are increasingly seeing them as premium ad placements,” he said. “Advertisers use them alongside paid social, search, CTV and influencer programs to reinforce messaging in a brand-safe, high-attention environment.”

This bullishness about newsletters is shared by Jamie Credland, CEO of World Media Group, which represents a number of leading global media brands including The Economist, CNN, BBC and The New York Times.

Smart publishers have been moving to one of two models, Credland said: either a subscription model that often includes newsletters or a first-party data model that lets advertisers leverage information about their readers. “The playbook is pretty clear at this point,” he said. “It’s building first-party data and building newsletter strategies.”

Facing growing pains amid new monetization strategies

Despite the promise publishers see in newsletters, this new monetization strategy is not without growing pains. Placing programmatic advertising in emails is an attractive idea, but it’s technically and commercially awkward because of challenges around measurement, format constraints and deliverability, Credland said.

Still, McLaughlin said, programmatic is becoming more viable as tools improve. Paved’s Ad Network, he said, supports always-on buying and automated sponsorship placements across newsletters, including dynamic insertion and yield tools intended to improve click-through and effectiveness rates. Paved says it delivered “billions” of impressions in 2025 and saw an 84% increase in unique users. McLaughlin added that the company will focus on yield optimization and performance intelligence this year.

An overdue measure

Publishers’ control over their content is important to redress what some see as a long-standing imbalance of power that favors the search and AI titan. “Google’s AI Overviews are stealing huge amounts of traffic and, therefore, revenue from publishers,” said Tim Cowen, co-founder of Movement for an Open Web, a campaign group initially set up by marketers supporting the ability to traverse the internet freely. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this piece.

As such, Cowen is disappointed with the measures outlined by the CMA in the U.K., saying that they fall short of what’s needed. “It’ll just stop publishers from being able to access the meager crumbs of traffic that they might get from being present in AI Overviews,” Cowen said.

Regulators may eventually force clearer opt-outs or stronger protections for publishers, but the industry shift is already underway. As search becomes a place where readers get answers without clicking, publishers are rebuilding around channels they can reach audiences directly — newsletters, subscriptions and logged-in products — and the first-party data that makes those audiences valuable to advertisers.

For many publishers, the future may be smaller newsrooms producing less content, but extracting more value from each piece.