By Danny Goodwin
Publication Date: 2026-03-17 15:38:00
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said AI-powered search — especially Google’s AI Mode — is putting the open web’s core traffic model at risk and argues AI search engines must send users back to publishers.
- “I think that the LLMs are one big reason that they’re under threat, with AI Mode in Google being the biggest challenge.”
- “Those publishers deserve [traffic], and we’re not going to have the content to consume to give great answers if publishers aren’t healthy.”
Why we care. Many websites are seeing less traffic from answer engines like Google and OpenAI — and I think it’ll only get worse. So it’s encouraging to see Yahoo trying to preserve the “search sends traffic” model. As he said: “We have very purposefully highlighted and linked very explicitly and bent over backwards to try to send more traffic downstream to the people who created the content.”
Yahoo’s AI stance. Yahoo is taking a different approach from…
