Bots are the audience now and that changes everything for media
When generative AI was new, the issue of how it worked with copyright law was poorly understood. Over the previous two decades it was generally taken as a given that the mass indexing done by search engines like Google was a necessary part of being on the internet. Google wasn’t reproducing the content—just showing users a headline and a link—so it always functioned more like a distributor than a republisher. {"block Type":"mv-promo-block","data":{"image Desktop Url":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":"","wpCssClasses":""}} AI search engines (a.k.a. answer engines) work differently, of course. They ingest content, summarize it, and merge it with other information relevant to the query to build an answer. Often that’s sufficient, negating any need to interact with the originator of the information—convenient for the user, much less so for the publisher. Worth, revealed in the answer The fact that the user got what they needed, though, underscores the value of the information in the first place, and the evidence of that value is usually right in the answer in the form