Forbes has joined Google’s paid News AI pilot, giving the publisher a way to study how its journalism performs in AI-driven discovery—while Google gains expanded rights to use enhanced Forbes content.
Speaking at Digiday’s Media Strategies London event, Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould confirmed the agreement is paid but declined to share terms. The pilot is built around experiences that help readers understand a story before they click, including in-depth article overviews on Google News publisher pages and customizable audio briefings, with attribution and links back to publishers.
What the pilot actually delivers
- Google gets expanded rights to Forbes content for AI features such as article overviews and audio briefings.
- Forbes gets performance data across different Google experiences and regular business reviews with Google.
- The insights are meant to show how different categories of content perform in different contexts, so Forbes can improve its own products.
Gould called the partnership a way to learn without having to spend the resources to experiment internally. “Testing comes with costs, especially with AI,” she said, citing human resources, compute costs and token costs.
Referral traffic is falling, and that changes the metric
Forbes says referral traffic is down about 45% year over year. That decline is pushing the company away from page-view scale and toward loyalty, depth and repeat visits. Gould described the page view as “a metric of the scale era,” adding that not all visitors have the same value.
This is not just a Forbes problem. Google has expanded the pilot to more than 400 publications, including the Guardian, the Washington Post and UK publisher Reach. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority is also pursuing measures to give publishers more control and transparency over how Google uses their content in AI search.
Reach CEO Piers North told Digiday the time-limited nature of its agreement lets both parties assess whether the deal is mutually beneficial before renewal. Gould added that AI licensing deals “come in a lot of shapes and sizes,” and that having Google lead paid publisher access is appealing.
What marketers should take from it
AI surfaces are becoming a real discovery channel, but measurement remains patchy. Gould said LLM platforms are “a black box” when it comes to granular performance data. Forbes uses tools such as Profound to track reach and citations, but publishers still lack a clear view of how AI Overviews specifically affect referral traffic.
Forbes is responding by testing personalized homepage experiences, building newsletter sections, and using citation data to support brand partnerships in AI search. The broader lesson for content-led brands: treat AI discovery as a learning channel, while building first-party audience relationships that do not depend on referral clicks.
Source: Digiday
