By Eleanor Dickinson
Publication Date: 2025-11-18 23:57:00
The head of the IAB Tech Lab called on Australian media owners to join forces and work together to stop AI models from deleting their content, likening the current dynamic to the question: “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
Anthony Katsur, the New York-based CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, said large language models are already killing up to 60% of referral traffic from U.S. publishers, an “unsustainable” trend for the media industry.
Speaking to Mumbrella during an IAB trip to Sydney, Katsur said LLMs perform “between 250 and several thousand” crawls before making a single website visit, compared to about six crawls per visit for Google Search.
“There’s still a debate among some publishers about whether or not to block (LLM crawlers). I would advise any publisher… you should block. A market has never been created for people to give things away for free.”
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As for the market, IAB Australia’s latest annual report is available online…
