Publishers wrestle with engagement metrics, AI bot blocking and agentic trading

Key points

• Publishers at Digiday's London Town Hall, held under Chatham House Rule, debated new audience value measures beyond page views.
• Several publishers said blocking AI crawlers risks lower discoverability, while LLM click-through rates to publishers remain minimal.
• A Financial Times executive reported one trialist account pulled about a million articles in eight hours from 700,000 IP addresses.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams should expect pressure to adopt shared engagement metrics and to weigh AI crawler access against visibility before setting policies.