What happened. In the copyright case brought by The New York Times and other publishers against OpenAI and Microsoft, the plaintiffs’ brief entered the record on 17 September in partly redacted form. According to the brief, Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, wrote that “our products are largely substitutive”. A note from an OpenAI software engineer is plainer still: however prominently the links are shown, users will not click. By Microsoft’s own data, Copilot’s click-through rate to Times sites is 87-93 per cent lower than classic Bing search. One Microsoft document calls the situation a “doom loop”. This is evidence chosen by the plaintiffs. The court has not ruled.
The bigger picture. The AI companies’ business model rests on keeping the user inside the answer. Publishers and brands have rested on traffic for twenty years. The two models collide on the same screen, and the brief shows the answer-makers knew it from the start. Meanwhile, in IAB’s survey of 10 September, 76 per cent of advertisers made “optimising content for AI answers” their top priority. The industry is rushing into a channel whose owners wrote down that the traffic will not come back.
For executives: Price visibility in AI answers as a reminder investment, not a sales channel. Measure visits and sales separately, and do not count a “we got cited” report as success on its own.