Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 as AI search choked the open web - Digiday
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The Programmatic Publisher
Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 as AI search choked the open web
By Jessica Davies • July 15, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
Publisher ad supply fell by up to 40% in Q2 of 2026 as AI era, zero‑click search choked the flow of traffic to news and other open‑web sites, according to new U.S. and U.K. benchmarking data from Ozone, shared exclusively with Digiday.
Despite that steep decline in display ad requests coming from publisher pages, spend hasn’t collapsed at the same rate, with rising eCPMs — particularly in the U.K. — doing most of the work to plug the gap left by disappearing volume.
The data, which tracked approximately 20 billion impressions, revealed that between April and June 2026, publisher ad request volumes were down by roughly 32% to 37% YoY in the U.S and 39% to 41% YoY in the U.K. The data was pulled from the software Ozone runs for a group of premium publisher members — not its own ad sales — tracking how many ad opportunities those sites see and what they sell for. Ozone’s publisher network includes the Guardian, News UK, and Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal.
Across the first half of 2026, combined programmatic spend in Ozone’s U.S. and U.K. publisher cohort was down by 30.6% YoY, in line with the inventory loss, (spend fell 14.3% in U.K. as higher yields bridged the gap, and fell 44% in U.S. due to a smaller yield bump.)
Gabe Dorosz, advertising initiative lead for INMA, said the underlying shape of the U.S. market helps explain that gap. “The U.S. open web is bigger and messier, with a long tail of commodity supply still diluting yields, so the repricing is naturally showing up more slowly but my prediction is it will accelerate,” he said.
The double-digit drops in ad supply are essentially the economic footprint of declining referral traffic: as search and social platforms send fewer clicks out to publisher sites, there are simply fewer pageviews and therefore fewer ad calls to sell against. “There’s a series of fundamental changes in terms of how consumers behave around websites, where they go to source their information,” said Danny Spears, chief operating officer at Ozone. “Platforms, particularly Google, are intervening in the user journey and providing content in situ rather than redirecting to the underlying website as they used to with classic search.”
A less appreciated — and arguably more interesting — dynamic is that some of the supply shrinkage is deliberate, as publishers respond to demand for higher-quality inventory rather than just passively absorbing traffic declines, noted Dorosz. “Some publishers are also deliberately shaping supply, cutting ad load and low-value bid requests to protect or increase attention and price,” he said.
Despite the steep contraction in supply, prices have been moving in the opposite direction. In June, average eCPMs were about 30% higher YoY in the U.K., and 7% YoY higher in the U.S., a sign that buyers are willing to pay more for the remaining inventory.
“The fact that eCPM is increasing is actually a healthy sign of the market because it means that we have scarce resource and people are willing to pay more for it,” said Liza Simonova, senior customer success and GTM manager for Ozone. “But because we have less ingredients to monetize, ultimately the spend is down.”
That pricing pressure isn’t new. Across the first half of 2025, average eCPMs were already up around 42% in the U.S. and 36% in the U.K., even as supply was starting to fall, indicating both markets had become effectively yield-led before this year’s deeper supply shock.
That raises the question of how far publishers can lean on yield before buyers start to walk away. Luke Stillman, md of Madison and Wall argued the ceiling is hard to call, pointing to TV as a precedent. “People were highlighting the risk of a yield‑led market in TV for more than a decade, and yet marketers who prioritize TV are willing to pay multiples of what they used to for the same inventory, despite smaller audiences,” he said. “It’s very difficult to say when ‘enough is enough’ in terms of pricing that actually spurs channel shifts." In his view most of the shift from the open web into walled gardens will happen for other reasons, like “data availability, measurement credibility and convenience,” rather than because prices get too high on publisher inventory.
Several executives stressed that the problem isn’t a sudden loss of appetite for publisher content, but the way people now find it. And that’s not just in relation to AI search, but on what platforms younger eyeballs are consuming their news.
Ozone’s own data shows fewer monetizable pageviews and higher prices on what’s left. That’s a pattern that lines up with discovery...