The Media Copilot Who Pays When AI Eats the Web? Bill Gross on Zero-Click Search, and the Conversation Layer
AI engines are siphoning off billions in value from publishers.
Bill Gross says it’s time to flip the model: charge for crawls, share revenue on answers, and build the “conversation layer” that keeps audiences engaged.
If the 2010s were about gaming Google with SEO, the 2020s are about surviving AI’s takeover of distribution. Global pageviews are down 25% in a year, roughly $100B in value shifted from websites to AI engines without compensation. Bots now outnumber human visitors by staggering ratios, and publishers are footing the bill.
On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal talks with Bill Gross, founder of ProRata and creator of Gist AI, an ethical AI search platform backed by 750 publishers. Gross makes the case for a new deal: pay publishers when AI crawls their sites, share revenue when AI uses their work, and build experiences that move beyond “ten blue links” to true conversations with audiences.
Why this matters now:
Web traffic is plunging and is down 250 billion views a day, or about $100 billion a year in lost value. Bots now scrape far more than they give back, with Google at 12:1 and some AI engines hitting 1,200:1, leaving sites like Wikipedia footing huge server bills. Bill Gross’s solution is Gist AI, a publisher-backed search platform with 750 partners, 30 million documents, and a 50/50 revenue share model.
Key Topics:
🔹 The economics of zero-click search
🔹 Why one-time licensing checks won’t sustain publishers
🔹 How “sponsored supplements” could reinvent ads in AI answers
🔹 Why publishers should stop chasing SEO tricks and focus on true value
🔹 What Gross calls the “conversation layer” and why it’s the next big battleground
🎙 Guest:
Bill Gross | Founder & CEO, ProRata | https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgrossidealab
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This episode of The Media CoPilot was produced by Pete Pachal, Executive Producer Michele Musso, and with video/audio editing by the Musso Media team. Produced by Musso Media. © 2025 Musso Media. All rights reserved.
Music: Favorite by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License
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