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'Never too late' to block AI bots: who's doing it and who's not?
Plus Vox builds 'two-way' relationship with audience on Patreon and five major publishers sue Google over 'deceptive and manipulative' adtech practices
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Welcome to the Press Gazette Future of Media US newsletter on Friday, 23 January.
🚫 The advice at an online publishing event in London this week was that it’s “never too late to block” AI bots from scraping websites without providing payment in exchange.
Most have got this message by now: new data shared with us by Buzzstream shows eight in ten of the biggest publishers in the US and UK are now blocking at least one of the main AI training crawlers while seven in ten are blocking live retrieval bots.
We’ve got a full breakdown of who’s blocking what - and a reminder of why it matters.
But there’s also a warning that typos and misconfigurations may mean publishers think they are blocking the bots but are doing so ineffectively.
And, of course, we know that robots.txt isn’t totally reliable, in part because third-party content scrapers can circumvent it to provide content for AI companies regardless of them being unwanted.
👩💻 Vox has always done things a bit differently, putting focus on explainers early.
Now it’s going big on creator platform Patreon, making it a focus of its existing memberships offering. It’s walking the walk where other publishers are talking the talk on building a closer relationship with their audience.
I spoke to Vox editor-in-chief and publisher Swati Sharma and head of consumer revenue Priyanka Arya about why they decided to be “the first national newsroom to use Patreon at scale” (they believe).
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💲This week I also looked at new estimates suggesting global news media revenue was steady in 2025 on $125.7bn. It was sobering to compare this to the revenue of online publishing giants Google and Meta.
The WAN-IFRA research also indicated publishers are continuing to diversify beyond print and digital, with events, B2B services and platform partnerships all mentioned as growth areas.
And after Press Gazette counted more than 3,000 job cuts in the US and UK in 2025, it was interesting to learn that volatility was higher in developed markets last year with “both the largest staffing increases and the steepest declines”.
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⚖️And we have the final tally of publishers that sued Google over “deceptive and manipulative” adtech practices last week was five: Penske Media, The Atlantic, McClatchy, Conde Nast and Vox Media.
The publishers are arguing Google deprived them of revenue for many years by forcing them into its ecosystem where it could see rivals’ bids through its ad exchange before submitting its own, allowing it to keep prices low.
Meanwhile Google attempted to dismiss Penske’s separate case against it over content appearing in AI Overviews.
The tech giant said it is “not obligated” to include any publisher’s content in search results and that it is “free to set the terms on which it will engage with” them.