Publishers have argued for two years that AI answer products cannibalize the traffic they depend on. Unsealed court filings now show Microsoft’s own internal numbers agree with them.
On September 17, previously redacted sections of a court filing in the multidistrict litigation before Judge Sidney Stein in the Southern District of New York, brought by The New York Times and other publishers against OpenAI and Microsoft, were made public. The filing includes Microsoft’s own comparison of click-through rates between Bing web search and Bing Chat across publisher domains: Times properties saw declines of 87 to 93%, Daily News domains 83 to 91%, and Ziff Davis properties 51 to 94%. It also shows 87.78% of ChatGPT users visit no external website during a search session, versus 26.91% for Google, and that 36% of surveyed Times subscribers using ChatGPT for news said they no longer feel they need news directly from the Times. Internal communications describe the products as “largely substitutive” of the content they draw on.
For marketing and content leaders, the significance isn’t limited to news publishers. Any brand that depends on organic search referral traffic, and treats AI answer engines as a discovery channel worth optimizing for, is now looking at internal data from one of those platforms admitting that engagement inside the AI product usually replaces the outbound click rather than generating one.
The original insight is what this does to the AI-visibility conversation across martech: teams have been building AEO strategies on the assumption that being cited inside an AI answer is a meaningful proxy for the traffic a search ranking used to deliver. This filing is the clearest evidence yet, from inside one of the platforms itself, that the two are not equivalent, and that AI visibility without a resulting site visit needs its own value model rather than being graded against outbound traffic it was never going to generate. Publishers weighing whether to license content into these products are now doing so with better information than Google’s own contribution-pilot approach has offered so far.
Source: CourtListener docket, The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation
