June Cheung.
June Cheung, Head of JAPAC, Scope3
Half of all consumers now use AI-powered search as their primary research tool. By 2028, that US$750 billion in spending will flow through AI-driven discovery. Much of that market is already forming.
For brands, this is a problem. Their own websites account for only 5 to 10 per cent of the sources AI draws on when generating answers. The lion’s share of brand mentions in AI-generated responses come from third-party content, predominantly online publishers.
A brand's visibility now depends less on what it says about itself and more on what credible, independent voices say about it.
Most marketers understand this intuitively. Few have a clear path to building that kind of third-party authority at any real scale.
That gap is a commercial opportunity for publishers, if they choose to fill it.
What brands need is not what most publishers are selling
AI systems reward editorial authority. They cite trusted, independent sources like news coverage, expert commentary, analysis, and community discussion. Brands cannot buy citations directly, but they can invest in presence across publisher ecosystems that strengthens the authority signals AI picks up on. Branded content partnerships, sponsored editorial series, podcast integrations, and newsletter sponsorships all place a brand meaningfully within a trusted editorial environment.
Publishers can and do sell these things. But for most, they sit behind manual sales processes, bespoke negotiations, and lead times that stretch into weeks. They are effectively invisible to the systems brands use to buy media at scale.
The market is already moving. Perplexity has committed US$42.5 million to a publisher revenue-sharing programme tied directly to citations, which suggests the demand is real. But the supply is not structured in a way the market can easily access.
Programmatic was not built for this. Agents are.
Programmatic infrastructure was designed to trade standardised ad units like banners, pre-rolls, and fixed formats at speed. It was never intended to discover, negotiate, or execute a branded content partnership or a podcast sponsorship at scale. That work has always required RFPs, email chains, and manual coordination, which is one reason so much premium publisher inventory remains undersold.
With the benefit of hindsight, the advertising industry spent 20 years confining everything to targeting and pricing parameters and lost sight of what makes marketing effective. Programmatic reduced the publisher’s offering to spots and dots, and was by design incapable of representing what actually makes a publisher valuable.
But we’re on the cusp of being able to right that wrong because agent-to-agent buying changes the mechanics. Through open protocols such as AdCP (Ad Context Protocol), a publisher can build a sales agent that represents their full ad catalogue to brand agents, from sponsored editorial and events through to social collaborations and podcasts.
A brand looking for a five-part editorial series aimed at a specific audience can discover it, negotiate terms, and activate it through a direct agent-to-agent conversation, bypassing the weeks of back-and-forth that would normally slow the process to a crawl. Early agentic marketplaces are already live, with buyer and seller agents transacting through AdCP, and the barrier to building a publisher sales agent is low, with open-source code available on Prebid.org.
Automation that makes editorial value visible
The concern publishers may rightly have is that automation devalues what makes them distinctive, whether that is editorial judgement, audience insight, or the creative packaging that turns a brief into something readers engage with.
Agent-to-agent buying does not replace those things. It brings them front and center. Right now, a niche publisher with a highly engaged audience in a specific vertical has no way of making that visible to a brand agent scanning for the right placement, and an editorial team that produces compelling sponsored content has no mechanism to represent that capability through today’s buying infrastructure.
My team is already working with publishers to make their full catalogues discoverable to brand agents through AdCP, connecting them with brands ready to activate campaigns agentically. The publishers who move first will be the ones brand agents find first. In an agentic model, being seamlessly findable and buyable is the new equivalent of being on the media plan.
The traffic is not coming back. But the value publishers create, trusted content, engaged audiences, editorial credibility, has never been worth more. The question is whether they will build the infrastructure to sell it.