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2025 was the year of loose ends, according to Digiday executive editor of news Seb Joseph. He and managing editor Sara Jerde joined Digiday Podcast hosts Kimeko McCoy and Tim Peterson to gather together those loose ends and assess which may be tied up in 2026.

Among those loose ends are Netflix’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming businesses, WPP’s turnaround plan, TikTok’s U.S. spinoff, ChatGPT’s expected ad product and the resulting remedies of Google’s ad tech antitrust trial.

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One thing became clear this year: AI platforms are changing where, how and how much referral traffic gets sent to publishers’ sites. 

It’s a topic we covered often this year. ChatGPT referral traffic nearly doubled, but is still a very small percentage of publishers’ overall traffic. Google’s AI Overviews, its AI-generated summaries on the search page, reduced click-through rates across more search queries. And as the year comes to a close, publishers are figuring out how to maintain brand visibility in AI search.

The five graphs below illustrate where AI referrals stand today — which platforms are gaining share, sending traffic and driving conversions. Together, they reveal a new audience pipeline forming outside of traditional search and social platforms, giving a preview of next year’s competitive landscape for publishers.

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