The squeeze is now two-sided

Apple escalated its iOS 27 blocklist from a handful of names to a remotely-updated list of hundreds of CDPs, DSPs and data vendors, while Google's relationship with publishers was redefined on three fronts in a single week: its ad-tech antitrust case cleared a major hurdle, its AI Overviews antitrust case was dismissed, and its pay-to-contribute pilot turned out to pay most publishers less than 0.1% of ad revenue. The open web is being squeezed between two platforms, each with a different mechanism but the same effect: less traffic, less data, less revenue flowing back to the publishers who feed them.

The pushback is organising

Publishers are no longer litigating one-off claims. A 300-executive fly-in pushed the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, SPUR shipped a telemetry standard and invited the AI giants to its advisory board, and the surviving Google ad-tech claims carry a $1.72bn class-wide damages estimate. The message is consistent: if you want our content, you will measure it, license it, and pay for it.

Some are building around it

GEO went from experiment to a paying revenue line in under a year, Index Exchange is betting that containerization rewrites the economics of the open web, and The Independent doubled revenue to £55m on AI products, video, e-commerce and US expansion. The publishers thriving right now are the ones treating AI visibility, agent traffic and first-party audiences as new assets rather than defending the old search funnel.