Kleine Zeitung’s plan for a web run by AI agents

Sebastian Krause thinks AI agents will be “the biggest disruption we’ve ever seen” — and that it’s good news for publishers. Ahead of his session at the Digital Growth Summit in Leuven on 15 October, 2026, the Head of Product & Data at one of Austria’s largest regional dailies explained why.

Google traffic was never worth what we thought

For two decades the playbook was the same for almost every publisher: publish, get indexed, and get ranked. Search and Discover became the default front door, and newsrooms organized themselves around it by writing headlines for algorithms, getting rewarded by volume and page views that could be sold to advertisers.

Kleine Zeitung was good at that game, but Sebastian notes they came away unimpressed. “We are crazily successful on Google Discover. But successful means what exactly? We have traffic from people who just read something and then they’re gone. We can’t sell them any ads. They will never buy a subscription.”

He calls it “rented reach” — “because it’s not ours, actually.” So losing it doesn’t frighten him. “For the last 15 years, we’ve been solely focused on how do we get eyeballs on Google? How do we get those three seconds of attention?” His conclusion: “It’s just not about attention anymore. I think it’s about attachment.”

Where AI assistants come into play

Today the model is destination-based. The reader comes to you — opens the app, visits the site, picks up the edition — and everything you build is designed to pull them back to a place you control.

Krause expects a large slice of that to invert. Readers will hand part of their media diet to an assistant and let it do the fetching: wake me at six, pull from my three subscriptions, summarize what matters, read it to me in the car. You are no longer the destination; you are a source the assistant draws on. His team calls the model “news as a service”: “You basically buy the right to use the content, but on your terms.”

Crucially, the business model underneath doesn’t change. “If you have a subscription, you’re free to use an agent to access the content however you want. But it’s always part of the subscription.”

“Every brand in the world should know what they’re worth in the age of AI.”

Kleine Zeitung opened its pages to AI crawlers and tracked what they actually took. What they found was that the archive was not as valuable as they thought. Archives feel valuable because they are large, but size is not scarcity: the material is static, it has already been scraped for years, and most of it exists in some form elsewhere.

What AI systems actually want in Kleine Zeitung’s case is current, local reporting. In short, the material that exists nowhere else and cannot be assembled from other sources. That reshaped editorial too. “The only question that really matters in a newsroom in this age is … what is it that only you can tell? If the answer is nothing, don’t do it.”

How you actually get a bot to pay

Kleine Zeitung now blocks AI crawlers by default, then selectively opens access through TollBit, which identifies each crawler and logs what it requests. That turns anonymous scraping into a metered transaction with a known counterparty.

To incentivize AI scrapers to pay, Kleine Zeitung has made it cost advantageous for them. Every page is built twice — the heavy HTML version for human readers, and a stripped-down version for machines that cuts crawler token use “by roughly 98 to 99 percent.” A crawler that would otherwise spend sixty seconds and a million tokens parsing a page and discarding most of it gets a clean answer almost instantly, for a small fee.

That makes the fee an easy yes. “You’re going to save money. You’re going to find the content you need. And it’s costing you less than looking at the whole HTML and then throwing 99 percent of that away.”

Subscribers, meanwhile, connect their own assistant for nothing. Crawlers come through the front door and pay at it.

“The product is the people”

For all the infrastructure and AI-talk, Krause believes that what survives in an agent-mediated web is the people behind it.

“It’s completely flipped,” he says. Readers used to arrive through the brand and then discover the journalists. “Now you get to meet the people first. You get to meet them on social. You find them offline, you find them at events. And those people attract you to the brand.”

His advice to publishers is to find the people who can carry that trust, and then get out of their way. “Make room for them. Open the door for them, and step aside.” Because, as he puts it: “The brand is just the platform. The product is the people.”