For three decades, the article was the atom of digital publishing — searchable, linkable, the thing around which everything else orbited. It turns out that what made it so useful to readers also made it useful to machines that would rather not send those readers anywhere at all.

The numbers have arrived, and they are not subtle. According to recent data, so-called zero-click searches — queries answered by artificial intelligence summaries before a user ever reaches a publisher's site — have risen from 56 percent to 69 percent in a single year. Publishers are estimated to be losing some $2 billion annually in advertising revenue to these AI-generated overviews, a figure that seems unlikely to shrink.

This has prompted a growing number of media companies to reconsider a format question they had not needed to ask since the early days of the web: What if the article, as a unit of content, is simply too easy to intercept?

The answer, for many, appears to be video. Text can be scraped and summarized; a video, while not immune to transcription, resists the shortcut in a more fundamental way. The experience of watching, the argument goes, cannot be flattened into a search result. (Whether this remains true as AI video tools improve is a question publishers are choosing not to dwell on at the moment.)

The advertising market has already placed its bet. Global video ad spending is projected to reach $236 billion by 2026, according to Statista, making it the largest format category in digital advertising. Time magazine, for its part, reports that vertical video commands CPM premiums of 25 to 40 percent over standard display inventory — not because it changed what it covers, but how it packages it.

Publishers who have spent recent years diversifying into subscriptions, newsletters and events now find themselves adding another layer to the fortress. The hope is that video represents something more durable than a defensive crouch — an experience that cannot be summarized away, a format that requires the visit.

Whether that hope proves justified may depend on how long "watching" remains something a machine cannot convincingly replace.

Original story published in Digiday: "Why publishers are betting on video to counter AI search"