Digital Content Next brief puts publisher traffic decline at 22% in 2026, OpenAI court told
What this answers
- How much has publisher traffic fallen since AI Overviews, according to Digital Content Next?
- In a court filing, Digital Content Next said traffic referred to its surveyed members fell a median 22% year over year in an eight-week window in 2026, after a median 10% fall in the same window in 2025. The survey is nonpublic and the trade group is an interested party.
- What did Digital Content Next tell the court in the New York Times v. OpenAI case?
- It filed a proposed amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief on Oct. 29, 2026 backing the news publishers' motion for summary judgment (a ruling without a trial), arguing AI retrieval substitutes for publishers' pages and hurts the market for their work.
Digital Content Next (DCN), a trade group for U.S. digital publishers, filed a proposed friend-of-the-court brief on Oct. 29 backing the news plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment (a ruling without a trial) in In re OpenAI Copyright Infringement Litigation, per the filing and Press Gazette. DCN said a nonpublic survey of its members found median year-over-year traffic referred to them fell 22% in an eight-week window in 2026, after a median 10% fall in the same window in 2025, and that unique visitors to member sites fell 26% from 2023 to 2025 (page views down 18%, visits down 16%). It also said members’ advertising and total revenue each fell 5% in 2025.
The brief says the survey was compiled by DCN itself and not previously published, and does not state how many members responded. DCN is an interested party; it argues the traffic losses show AI retrieval substitutes for publishers’ pages and harms the market for their work, a point that bears on fair use.
Why it matters: Publisher-side traffic losses are now being put before a federal court as evidence on the fair-use "market harm" question, so the 2026 figure is both a data point and a litigation position.
The record: AI training & copyright litigationOpenAIGoogle AI Overviews
Via S.D.N.Y. court filing (In re OpenAI Copyright Infringement Litigation) ↗ · Press Gazette ↗
Posted to the wire October 30, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.