App Strategy, Google AI Overviews, and Chatbots | Adrian, your AI curator

Google’s NotebookLM Offers Publishers a Controlled AI Playground

Press Gazette, The Atlantic and The Economist among initial partners for Google ‘featured notebooks’

Google’s NotebookLM now features curated content from The Economist and The Atlantic, offering a new AI-powered distribution model that puts publisher-approved content at the center.

Readers can interact with these notebooks by asking questions, receiving cited answers, generating summaries, or even creating podcasts—all grounded in the publishers’ original documents. “It’s really taking our content as the starting point,” said The Economist’s Jennifer Devereux, highlighting the ability to “immerse” in trusted journalism in a differentiated, reader-controlled format.

The Observer’s Audio-First Strategy

Media Voices, Why the new Observer retains Tortoise Media’s focus on audio-first publishing

The Observer is doubling down on audio, rebranding all Tortoise Media podcasts under its name following its acquisition and using its app to build loyalty. Younger, female-skewing audiences often discover the brand through podcasts and stick around for more.

With cultural verticals like food and fashion on the roadmap, The Observer is carving out space for slow, smart audio. The app offers a controlled, native audio experience with curated playlists, keeping listeners engaged far better than third-party platforms.

Chatbots are Rebuilding Paywalled Articles From Third-Party Sources

Digital Digging, How AI bots quietly dismantle paywalls via web search

New research from Digital Digging reveals that AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok can reconstruct paywalled articles in real-time, achieving up to a 50% success rate by aggregating publicly available fragments from social media, archives, and secondary coverage. For instance, ChatGPT recreated a Wall Street Journal article in detail without ever accessing it directly.

The Times: From loss-making broadsheet to profit on a tiny screen

Press Gazette, The Times: From loss-making broadsheet to profit on a tiny screen

With 629,000 digital subscribers—most reading via its app—The Times has become a mobile-first success story. Head of digital Edward Roussel credits the app’s curated design, puzzles, and ease of navigation for stronger reader engagement: “It’s what our subscribers prefer.”

Features like finishable story collections and a prominent digital newspaper view foster habit and retention. The app now hosts 20 daily puzzles and refined content sections, preparing for future personalisation.

Google’s AI Summaries Reduce Clicks to News Sites

Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results

Google’s AI Overviews—now shown to millions of U.S. users—are altering how people interact with search. A Pew study of 900 users found that only 8% clicked a search result when an AI summary was shown, compared to 15% without one. Even links within the AI summaries were rarely clicked, just 1% of visits. For publishers, this shift could be a major factor behind declining referral traffic.

News sites made up only 5% of sources in both AI and standard results, while platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube dominated. AI summaries appeared more often in longer or question-based queries, particularly those with 10+ words.