Marketers have long suspected that AI chat answers were eating search clicks. A newly unsealed court filing now puts Microsoft’s own measurement behind that suspicion. On September 17, 2026, publisher plaintiffs in multidistrict litigation 25-md-3143 refiled their brief with fewer redactions, exposing internal comparisons between Bing web search and Bing Chat.
The disclosure matters because it is first-party instrumentation, not a vendor estimate. It gives marketers a rare look at how AI summarization changes click behavior at the domain level.
The numbers behind the click collapse
Microsoft compared click-through rates domain by domain. For New York Times properties, clicks fell between 87 and 93 percent. For Daily News titles, the range was 83 to 91 percent. For Ziff Davis properties, it ran from 51 to 94 percent.
The behavioral data points in the same direction. According to the filing, 87.78 percent of ChatGPT users visited no external website during a search, compared with 26.91 percent for Google. A Microsoft survey found 37.2 percent of Copilot respondents would otherwise have used conventional web search. Among New York Times subscribers who use ChatGPT for news, 36 percent said the product means they no longer need news from the Times at all.
Why this matters for search and content teams
The legal fight centers on fair use, and substitution is the fourth fair-use factor. Internal statements make the substitution argument harder to dismiss. Nick Turley, who runs ChatGPT, described the products as “largely substitutive, period.” That is the kind of admission that can weaken a fair-use defense.
For digital marketers, the implication is broader: AI answer engines are not just changing rankings; they can remove the click entirely. If a user gets a complete answer inside Copilot or ChatGPT, no SEO title, meta description or conversion path gets a chance. This shifts performance math from impressions and click-through rates to answer visibility and brand presence inside AI outputs.
Publisher licensing deals add another signal. OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Perplexity and Mistral have all signed deals covering the same category of content, which suggests a paid path is becoming the practical alternative to a fair-use free pass.
What to do now
A practical zero-click substitution test: for a key query, check whether the AI answer lets the user complete the task without visiting your site. If the answer is yes, that query is a substitution risk.
- Audit AI visibility: Track where your brand appears in ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity for priority queries.
- Reduce single-source dependence: Build email, community, app and direct channels that survive referral declines.
- Measure dark traffic: Update attribution to capture AI referrals where available, and model zero-click losses.
- Make content citable: Publish original data, clear definitions and expert quotes that answer generators can surface and credit.
- Explore licensing: Proprietary data and content may be a negotiation asset as AI providers sign publisher deals.
- Test new surfaces: Visual search, social search and connected TV can offset lost organic clicks.
None of this stops the shift, but it changes the response from waiting for traffic to auditing presence, owning the audience and monetizing where the click still happens.
Source: PPC Land
