• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 9 hours ago

Forbes' main digital traffic source to the publisher’s site is still search -- but it is under pressure as Google, Microsoft, Meta, Yahoo and others integrate artificial intelligence into search results to complete with newer engines from entrants such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and more.

“We still see a good chunk of traffic coming from traditional search, but it has declined dramatically,” Nina Gould, chief innovation officer at Forbes, told MediaPost. “We are focused on owning the direct relationship with our audience.”

Humans process and synthesize content differently than agentic bots. Bots require simplified content so bots can interpret it more easily, which makes the word “innovation” in Gould’s title at Forbes so interesting. 

The shift to AI does not preclude readers, new and established, from coming to the site. Forbes does see an audience coming from chat-type search. It’s a much smaller amount, but when they arrive at the site, they stay longer, read more, and subscribe.

“All in digital publishing have come to terms that [from search] audiences may be smaller,” Gould said. “When you chop off that funnel and the firehose, that first click from Google, it takes a lot of the audience, but leaves you with those who are loyal.”

Expectations about personalization continue to shift. Gould aims to create site experiences that deliver unique content that readers cannot find elsewhere, using deeper audience insights to provide more value.

As chief innovation officer, Gould oversees Forbes’ brand approach to product innovation and AI transformation, keeping humans at the center of AI like how the publisher uses technologies to connect with its audiences. She spearheads products, technology and design; audience acquisition and affiliate teams; and more.

“Humans remain at the center,” Gould said. “You cannot replace humans with AI.”

The traditional internet economy based on platform referrals and clicks from search continues to dwindle, prompting publishers to find additional sources of revenue.

OpenAI is investing a lot in its ad business, and Gould believes the company will eventually move publishers deeper into revenue mix. When asked if OpenAI and others are reaching out to publishers like Forbes to form new types of revenue relationship, Gould said, some are and some are not.

It seems many feel they have what they need, but others are looking at different relationships with publishers.

“OpenAI is investing in their ad business, and I think at some point publishers will be in the mix, but we also have a relationship with them as an ad partner,” she said. “They are very interested in building their enterprise business.”

AI data licensing deals have grown out of regular types of licensing deals, but any new type of agreement for content comes with challenges become there’s no established ecosystem.

“How do you price your entire catalog of content?” Gould said. “Or how do you think about ad-hoc pricing for AI agents or bots that want to use your content for retrieval.”

Many bots just take the content, and it’s like playing “whack-a-mole to get them not to,” Gould said.

Even when AI companies come to the table wanting to make deals, she said, without a central ecosystem to set pricing, it’s a daunting and difficult task.

“How do you set pricing for assets that publishers have monetized differently for the entire publication’s existence,” she said.

Cloudflare reported in June that automated bot requests now account for 57.4% to 57.5% of global web traffic, outnumbering human-generated traffic. It did so earlier than expected because of a surge in AI agents.

Use of agentic for consumers and reader will continue to grow. This means publishers like Forbes need to recognize bots and humans.

“We can’t ignore them, because ultimately they reach a human,” Gould said. “We are looking at how bots interact with our content. What they favor and decide whether to block or not to block them. We need to pay attention and deliver the content they came to look for on behalf of the human with attribution.”

Brands still have relevance with marks of expertise and authority in a world that has become increasingly murky, she said.

Instead of asking, “Are you human?” Google, Cloudflare, and others began developing new technology made public in June that asks questions like, “is this browser being controlled by a human, a malicious script, or an authorized AI agent?”

Cloudflare officially announced the foundational Private Access Control Tokens (PACT) initiative with other partnership such as Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox with a goal to create a new underlying internet privacy and bot-filtering standard that could support Gould’s initiatives.

Gould said most in publishing have had a crash course in AI, but agentic is a real question mark, even Mark Zuckerberg clearly thinks we are a day away from agents running everything, but she doesn’t think it will progress that quickly

“There’s a contrarian backlash coming from a certain segment of society,” she said. “Silicon Valley is in a bubble in terms of how they see AI. There’s a lot of motivation for them to be in that bubble and to see AI as an investable force forward to bring humankind into a better place. I don’t think it will progress in that type of linier way.”