Sponsored by EX.CO • May 27, 2026 •
Shachar Orren, co-founder and CRO/CMO, EX.CO
For three decades, the click was the currency of digital publishing. Someone wrote the headline, someone clicked it and the monetization engine did the rest. It was simple, reliable and scalable.
Then AI arrived.
Zero-click search rates jumped from 56% to 69% in a single year. AI overviews now answer the question before the reader arrives. The article — the foundational unit of digital publishing since the internet began — has become raw material for a machine that returns the answer without the visit. Publishers are losing an estimated $2 billion in annual ad revenue to AI search summaries alone. That number will go up.
