Microsoft’s own Bing data now puts a number on the AI traffic squeeze. In a newly public filing in the publisher copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft, internal figures show Copilot reduced publisher click-through rates by up to 94% compared with traditional Bing web search.
The September 17, 2026 filing from The New York Times, the Daily News titles, Ziff Davis, the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Intercept lifts redactions on traffic data and internal messages that were hidden when the motions were first lodged.
What the Bing numbers show
According to Microsoft representative data cited in the brief, overall click-through rate reduction between Bing Chat and Bing web search was 87–93% for The Times’s sites, 83–91% for Daily News sites and 51–94% for Ziff Davis sites.
That is not accidental. The brief says Microsoft’s Copilot home page greeted users with: “Instead of clicking through links, we can talk through whatever you’re curious about.” Microsoft’s lead counsel described chatbots as “actually designed to answer your question” rather than just serving a list of links, according to the filing.
The legal claims are also sweeping. The publishers argue OpenAI and Microsoft infringed copyright at five stages—acquisition, training, grounding, outputs and data swaps—and that fair use excuses none of them. Internal messages quoted in the brief include a Microsoft scientist referring to the practice as an “astonishing theft” and a Microsoft document warning of a “doom loop” that threatens the web’s content supply chain.
Why marketers should care
This is more than a publisher legal battle. If AI chat answers satisfy user intent, the click—and the landing page visit, ad impression, affiliate click and lead form behind it—never happens. OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT is quoted in the filing calling publishers’ situation an “existential threat” and saying ChatGPT answers are “largely substitutive, period.”
Microsoft’s own survey expert reported that 37.2% of Copilot respondents would otherwise use conventional web search, according to the filing, which suggests the lost click is not simply additive.
The same dynamic applies to brand, e-commerce and lead-gen content. Search is no longer a predictable blue-link path; it’s an extraction layer that can answer without sending traffic.
What to do about it
- Audit AI visibility: Ask whether ChatGPT, Copilot and Google AI Overviews cite your brand for your money keywords.
- Optimize for extraction: Publish clear, quotable definitions, stats and structured data that AI systems can cite cleanly.
- Diversify beyond organic clicks: Build email, community, direct and social channels so one AI change doesn’t erase demand.
- Track AI referral separately: Treat chatbot traffic and classic search traffic as distinct funnels with different conversion behaviour.
The strategic bottom line
The copyright question will play out in court, but the marketing lesson is already clear: answer engines are compressing the click supply. Brands that measure success only in rankings and blue links will keep watching up to 94% of those clicks disappear. The winners will optimize to be the source AI cites and then convert that presence through strong landing pages and first-party data.
Source: PPC Land
