Publishers: own the experience, own the audience

The noise around AI and publishing is growing louder. Each month brings another lawsuit over publisher scraped content — and another reminder that the real challenge isn’t legal, but existential.

In the end, it won’t come down to who wins in court, but who ultimately owns the consumer experience.

AI is already reshaping how people search, learn, and decide. Large-language models are fast becoming the first touchpoint for everything from news to product research. But as LLM Answer Engines grow, they’re doing so by scraping and crawling publisher content — without sending users back to the publisher’s website to continue the conversation.

Some see licensing publisher content to AI companies as a stopgap measure. But monetizing your IP while losing the audience is a short-term trade that leaves publishers with less control and fewer options — nothing more than a mere ingredient in the LLM’s controlled narrative.  

But no matter how the lawsuits or licensing deals play out, the publisher website remains your most powerful way to engage your audience. It is the place where you can still define the experience, build your brand, and offer something that no third-party AI interface can replicate.

Don’t sell your content. Sell the experience

The task for publishers is clear: create a new model that reinforces your publisher site as the destination for users. That new publisher model is agentic. It means shifting from static pages and passive impressions to intelligent, adaptive AI-native conversational experiences. AI enables automation, but also interactivity. And that opens the door to a new kind of consumer engagement and publishing model.

That model is built on Brand Agents: AI-native interfaces that live directly on your website and inside your content. These agents engage your readers in real time and turn passive content into active value. They offer help, context, personalization, and commerce within the experience you own.

Sell agents, not ads

Publishers can sell Brand Agents to advertisers the same way they sell ads today — except instead of offering static placements, they can offer adaptive, in-experience engagement. Advertisers configure these agents to deliver personalized, real-time messaging that aligns with the publisher’s editorial context and the user’s needs in the moment.

Agentically rendered experiences create engaging new opportunities for publishers to apply content and context to guide users in the moment for unprecedented 1:1 personalization: surfacing insights, answering questions, and driving real action. 

Agents don’t interrupt the experience. They are the experience, and they unlock a new foundation for engagement and monetization.

The shift to agents creates value across the funnel: more time on site, higher engagement, richer first-party signals, and able to drive monetizable actions like subscriptions, sales, or leads.

Agents turn content into conversations, visits into journeys, and audiences into customers. Ads preserve publisher economics, but agents expand them.

AI is already transforming how consumers interact. The question is whether that interaction happens on your terms or someone else’s.

If you’ve ever asked how your content can do more: this is the answer.

Reach out to our team at Firsthand for more details on our Publisher Brand Agent Platform. Let’s partner to build what’s next and ensure publishers stay in control of brand and customer experience. 

Agents, not ads.