Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone warned Wednesday that artificial intelligence is threatening the survival of digital publishers by using their content to generate answers without sending readers back to their websites, calling the breakdown of that relationship an “existential issue” for the industry.
Speaking at the Paley International Council Summit in New York, Lanzone said AI-powered search engines have upended a decades-old arrangement in which publishers allowed search engines to crawl their websites in exchange for referral traffic.
“For the first 27, 28 years of the internet, there was a social contract” between publishers and search engines, Lanzone said. That arrangement has changed as AI companies increasingly answer users’ questions directly, giving them fewer reasons to visit the original websites.
Lanzone cited traffic declines of 60% to 70%, though he did not identify specific publishers or a timeframe. “You can’t run a business that way,” he said, arguing that AI companies could do more to link readers back to the sources behind their answers. Bluesky COO Rose Wang raised broader concerns about Big Tech’s growing control over how information is distributed online.
News publishers have been losing traffic from search engines while weighing deals to license their content to AI companies. Google announced changes to its AI-powered search features last week to make links to original sources more prominent. Separately, more than 400 publications are participating in its News AI licensing program, including CNN, Axios and the Financial Times.
In court documents unsealed last month, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, warned internally that publishers faced an “existential threat” as AI products increasingly replaced visits to their websites.
Yahoo is taking a different approach with Yahoo Scout, an AI search tool launched in January that provides answers while linking users to the websites supplying the information. Lanzone said Yahoo wants to return to its roots as a gateway to content across the internet.
Wang, meanwhile, described today’s internet as an era of “technofeudalism,” comparing major technology platforms to landowners who collect payments from creators and developers operating on their property.
She argued that users should have greater control over their identities and data rather than relying on a handful of companies to determine how content is distributed.
Bluesky’s technology allows people to move between compatible social media apps without losing their profiles or followers.
Asked what advice she would give Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Wang described the three as “monarchists” with fundamentally different views about the internet’s future.
Rather than trying to change their minds, Wang urged companies supporting the open web to work together and send traffic to one another instead of remaining dependent on the largest technology platforms.
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