News companies are becoming increasingly familiar with the use of AI, but rapid changes can make it challenging to stay current, let alone prepare for what’s to come. During INMA’s recent Latin American Conference, Jodie Hopperton offered a crash course on AI, Google, and the future of news discovery.

As lead of INMA’s Product & Tech Initiative, Hopperton has focused her attention on how news publishers can respond to the rapid changes and harness them for growth. She gave an overview of chatbots and answer engines, which are significant disruptors to the industry, and explained that they work in a manner that’s more intuitive than basic search.

“It’s intuitive for humans to ask questions and get an answer,” she said. What isn’t intuitive is to type in some keywords “and get some blue links back.” This intuitive, conversational approach of chatbots has helped drive their popularity.

Google’s disruption and the rise of Arc

One of the companies undergoing rapid shifts is Google, which was once the reliable gatekeeper of digital discovery for publishers.

“Google previously dominated search, and it had a very understandable value exchange to us,” Hopperton said. “We gave them snippets of information, allowed them to search our Web sites, and they sent users back to us where we were able to monetise them.”

However, answer engines changed the game and forced Google to disrupt its business model. To protect itself from emerging AI competitors, Google introduced AI Overviews, which offer summarised answers at the top of search results — eliminating the need to click through to publisher Web sites.

“Even if you do get into those top three, people aren’t going to click through as much,” Hopperton said. “And why? Because they’re getting everything they need here.”

While this improves the consumer experience, it presents new challenges for news media companies looking to drive traffic and build relationships with readers. At the same time, there’s a concern around Google Zero, where publishers receive zero traffic from Google due to changing algorithms, increased zero-click searches, and personalised AI-generated summaries.

These disruptions are compounded by platforms like Arc, a browser that lets users radically personalise their Web experience by allowing consumers to remove ads, adjust fonts, and strip out content they find distracting. The implications, Hopperton said, are enormous: “I don’t touch the Web site,” she noted. “So as a publisher, you get no feedback from this.”

A new battlefield for attention

The growing number of browsers that seamlessly blend search with chat-based answer engines have created what Hopperton called the “AI browser wars.”

Players such as Perplexity, OpenAI, and Arc don’t just summarise articles. They analyse the story, compare it with what other news organisations are saying about it, and provide the reader with insights — without users ever needing to visit the homepage and read the actual content.

This revolution in browsing behaviour means content is no longer the final product. It’s raw material for AI to synthesise, remix, and personalise. Hopperton highlighted the concept of “liquid content,” where publishers “can put different things in different places, then allow people to come back and put it out in different ways.” Articles, interviews, videos, and source material will be used to foster deeper personalisation and can be reused across multiple platforms.

“For consumers, there’s going to be greater functionality [and] a much higher degree of personalisation,” Hopperton said. “There’s going to be a lot more audio and visual, almost everything. Now you can hear, you can change, you can get more visuals.”

For publishers, this means rethinking distribution strategies, revenue models, and editorial workflows. Advertising will change, as will internal offers. The challenge will be to learn how to “get the right offer to the right person in the right format.”

This changing landscape leaves news publishers with a greater level of uncertainty. As consumers are given more control over how they receive content, publishers face a growing number of unknowns. One thing, however, is certain: Companies will have to adjust to a world without the data feedback they’ve come to depend on.

“There’s no data feedback loop for content owners, and that’s going to be a real challenge. But you know what? It's a really great user experience. Consumers love it.” 

AI in your ear

The next frontier is audio AI, which provides a frictionless, cross-generational, and deeply immersive experience. 

Hopperton referred to the concept of liquid content again, explaining that in this case, audio content is transformed into formats users can listen to on the go, across smart glasses, smart speakers, and in cars. The emotional trust built through voice is significant: “People believe things more when it’s in your ear and they can hear you,” she said. “It is also generationally agnostic.”

It’s also intuitive, and the idea of getting answers via audio adds a new layer of complexity for the news media industry: “How do you cite that? How do we want our branding to come through?”

As AI becomes more conversational, publishers must decide what branding and attribution look like in spoken interfaces. Even top AI companies hadn’t fully addressed this problem, but “they understand that this is something that needs to be looked at. We need to start thinking about it.” 

What this means for the future

The future, Hopperton emphasised, does not look like today. With so many shifts underway, publishers need to look at the things they have control over.

“We can become more customer-centric for our core users. We can deliver a really good user experience that makes it easy for people to find what they want, how they want, when they want, in the format they want. We can give context information.”

She also encouraged attendees to stop talking about traffic: “These are people. They’re your customers and you’ve got to understand them.”

Companies should be measuring scraper bots to understand where their content is being taken, because “there is zero upside that I see from anyone sharing their content. Start looking at the realistic value of your content.”

Seeing what the bots are trying to scrape offers a good indication of what content is most valuable and can help line out a future path: “The more they scrape in certain areas, you’ll know, maybe it’s travel, maybe it’s sports, that that’s going to help you and do some scenario planning, right? What are your future products? Who are your customers?”

Identifying which content areas drive loyalty and revenue can help with next steps, she concluded: “Do some scenario planning and then make your big bets.”

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