AI visibility is becoming publishers' newest currency

Publishers including Axios, Forbes, Time, and The Washington Post are using their prominence in AI answer engines as a new metric to attract advertisers. The measurement tools remain inconsistent and lack standardization, with no single analytics firm emerging as the go-to. Time uses bot traffic as a proxy metric, ranking in the 98th percentile for AI bot activity among nearly 7,000 publisher sites in TollBit's network.