Publisher group tells court AI visits fell 26 percent

Digital Content Next, the publisher trade association whose members include The New York Times, asked a federal judge in New York on October 29, 2026 to accept an amicus brief pairing Microsoft's own description of an AI "doom loop" with member figures: a 26 percent fall in unique visitors between 2023 and 2025, and a median 22 percent year-over-year drop in referred web traffic over an eight-week period in 2026.

The Microsoft quotation at the center of the brief was first reported by the outlet on September 20, after the plaintiffs filed a public version of their combined summary judgment brief on September 17, 2026. DCN's brief cites the line to that plaintiffs' brief rather than to the original Microsoft document, and names neither its author nor its date. The brief also cites a remark attributed to OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT — identified in the outlet's earlier coverage as Nick Turley — saying that without traffic flowing back to content owners, "there's no incentive to create content anymore."

DCN's brief argues that retrieval-augmented generation and "grounding" make AI tools' output "a direct substitute for" recent, reliable original content, and that declining publisher revenue will in turn threaten the training data LLMs depend on. A June 2026 DCN member study cited in the brief found advertising generated 84 percent of digital revenue for participating member companies in 2025, with other activities, including subscriptions, generating 16 percent. DCN says its members reach an unduplicated audience of 259 million unique visitors, or 95 percent of the U.S. online population.