For publishers and advertisers, it’s been easy to collaborate in good times, with 26 of the last 30 years producing double-digit growth for advertising. But in the AI maelstrom still in its infancy, how well will this alliance hold up? I recently spent some time with David Cohen, President and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), on the IAB’s 30^th anniversary to sort out the most pressing issues on the table today and looking ahead.

Content publishers and advertisers have always had a symbiotic relationship – from print to broadcast and cable TV to digital advertising (display and search) to streaming and CTV (connected TV). Advertising was either the sole revenue stream (for broadcasters) or part of the hallowed dual revenue stream of subscription and advertising for most other media financial success stories. Life was oh so good for oh so long.

Despite – or maybe because of – so much long-term success, the terrain is enormously more difficult today, from the fragmented tsunami of content choices for audiences to the elusiveness of reaching some portions of the public that choose ad-free content platforms to the social costs for young people devoting so much of their time and attention to social media outlets whose impact we are just beginning to address.

Although we can try to anticipate the future impact of AI in every sector of the economy, in advertising we don’t need to speculate too much. There is already a dramatic change underway in the advertising world. After decades of publishers and advertisers relying on consumers finding publisher content through topic searches, and advertisers piggybacking on that search to reach those consumers, AI is wreaking havoc.

When users go to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity, the rate of clicking on a link compared with a traditional Google search drops 95-96%. And remember that ChatGPT’s availability to the public is only three years old. Even for those sticking with Google search, the introduction of AI Overviews has reduced the rate of click-throughs by as much as 70% by some estimates. We all know it – if you get your answer in a quick paragraph, how likely are you to go directly to the sources of your answer?

AI was a natural place to start with David Cohen. Cohen told me he sees “glimmers of brilliance” in integrating AI into advertising workflows and production, but far more work to be done in the emerging agentic AI arena. The IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study still sees 9.5% ad industry growth for 2026, with double-digit growth in areas such as social media (14.6%) and CTV (13.8%), but as Cohen noted in his opening address at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting, “we’re on the brink of change at unimaginable speed and scale.”

At the core of Cohen’s concern is LLMs (large language models) scraping the internet for content, blending it into their summary responses, and most troubling, not paying publishers for the content. As Cohen stated as ALM: “Unless we act to protect original human-created content, the internet risks devolving into an echo chamber of recycled, low-quality information.” Cohen made the point that “LLMs need to pay for content much more comprehensively.” As a starting point for what needs to be done, Cohen told me that “publishers need to not just complain but to work together.”

There is certainly a plethora of litigation on this issue today. Major publishers suing to demand fair compensation include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Concord Music Group, Getty Images, Conde Nast, The Atlantic and Axel Springer (owner of Business Insider and Politico). But litigation is a slog and not often a great tool for comprehensive solutions.

IAB is proposing a legislative approach here. The proposed AI Accountability for Publishers Act would demand transparency from bots that scrape publisher content and prohibit that scraping without complying with a publisher’s terms of service, which may include fair compensation.

Before you note the historic inability of Congress to do much of anything these days, it is worth noting the industry’s accelerated focus here and perhaps the legislation will help provide some framework for fruitful intra- and inter-industry collaboration. There is too much at stake for willful blindness on this.

By the way, AI is hardly the only challenge facing publishers and marketers. On many fronts, you’ve the challenge of what Cohen called “short-termism,” driven by quarterly earnings reports that drive “incrementality” rather than a strategic focus on rapidly accelerating secular industry change. It’s less a battle of short-term versus long-term. As the famous football coach George Allen used to say: “The future is now.”

Of course, one can’t ignore the global political and economic environment (but wouldn’t it be so nice if we could?). Cohen sees the “tariff panic” as lessened compared with a year ago, but it’s hard to ignore the possibility of a burst of the stock market’s AI-driven surge, which might well carry a quick and troublesome shadow on marketing spend.

In the industry’s own backyard, marketers and publishers have continued to grapple with the lack of universally adopted for standards in areas such as cross-platform media measurement, ecommerce and the creator economy. Although much of the industry has “privacy fatigue” according to Cohen, that doesn’t wipe away the concerns of global regulators that will only increase in the AI dominated era. Talking about fatigue – at least the discussion of “cookies” has died down. They aren’t gone, but publishers have certainly accepted more of the reality about enhancing their direct relationships with customers and building their own first party data sets.

Ultimately for content publishers, distribution platforms, tech vendors and advertisers, in the midst of almost frightening change in some ways, all would be wise to remember the words from another turbulent time: “Can we all get along?”

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