On this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete sits down with serial founder Bill Gross (Idealab; now ProRata) to talk about rebuilding the economics of the open web for an AI-first era. Gross’s thesis is simple and provocative: if AI engines ingest your work and answer users directly, they should share revenue the way Spotify pays musicians and YouTube pays creators. His team is proving it with GistAI, an ethical, permissioned AI search corpus built with 750 publications on a 50/50 rev-share, powering publisher-site search that cites sources, avoids hallucinations, and routes value back to journalism.
Why this matters now
Zero-click search is quietly hollowing out the web. Bill Gross estimates global pageviews have plunged by about 25 percent in the past year, from roughly one trillion to 750 billion a day…erasing close to $100 billion in annual value at even the most conservative ad rates. That traffic hasn’t disappeared; it’s been absorbed by AI engines, which surface answers without sending users back to publishers. The bots that power those answers aren’t free either: they hammer sites like Wikipedia with enormous server costs while giving nothing in return, since only human visitors donate.
Gross argues the fix is straightforward: pay for the inputs when crawlers scrape content and share revenue on the outputs when that content is used in answers. Right now, the math is badly skewed. Google’s ratio of crawls to referrals has worsened to about 12 to 1, and some AI systems scrape hundreds or even thousands of times for every click they send back. That imbalance marks a sharp break from the web’s original reciprocity. And as the search box evolves into full-blown conversations, the stakes only get higher because the real value lies not in ten blue links, but in sustained, task-oriented exchanges that drive decisions, services, and spending.
What we cover
ProRata’s model: Why rev share beats one-time licensing checks—and how big AI can afford it.
Paying twice (on purpose): Per-crawl fees to cover ingestion costs, plus per-use payments when answers cite your work.
Gist’s progress: From 5 launch partners to 750 publishers and ~30M documents in a RAG system designed to answer accurately-or say “we can’t.”
Distribution strategy: A “powered by Gist” search box that lives on partner sites: answer from the host’s archive first, then expand to the trusted corpus.
Revenue at scale: Targets of 100M searches/month this year and 1B/month next-still tiny vs. Google, but material for publisher payouts.
Ads without corruption: The “sponsored supplement”-contextual, clearly labeled additions after the unbiased answer (no mingling, no steering).
Affiliates & agents: Where commerce fits as assistants proliferate and why multi-step agent reliability compounds (95% accuracy over 10 steps ≈ 59%).
Strategy for newsrooms: Stop gaming SEO; “know your audience and add value.” Own your answer/conversation layer on your site to re-intermediate.
Playbook for publishers (Bill’s take)
For Bill Gross, the path forward isn’t about clinging to the old search economy…it’s about reclaiming control. “Take back search,” he says, urging publishers to offer their own answer engines instead of waiting for Google or OpenAI to send visitors that never arrive. His company ProRata is already proving that an ethical, multi-source search box can keep users inside a publisher’s own ecosystem, while still delivering the context people want.
At the heart of his argument is a new deal: compensation for both inputs and outputs. If AI engines are crawling sites thousands of times a day, publishers deserve to be paid for that bandwidth. And when those crawls turn into answers that replace clicks, creators deserve a share of that revenue too.
But Gross is quick to remind us this isn’t just about transactions, it’s about the very shape of the web. The future isn’t ten blue links; it’s what he calls the “conversation layer,” where users engage in multi-turn, task-oriented exchanges. That’s where value is created, and where publishers have a chance to re-insert themselves if they build experiences around dialogue rather than static pages.
Even advertising, in his view, can be saved, if it’s done honestly. ProRata’s model adds what he calls “sponsored supplements”: clearly labeled extras that appear after the unbiased answer, never inside it. The idea is to make ads genuinely useful, so readers say thank you instead of clicking away.
And perhaps the most refreshing part of Gross’s playbook is what isn’t in it. Forget SEO tricks, keyword stuffing, and the endless gaming of algorithms. “You really can’t game an LLM,” he says. “The shortest path to visibility now is actual value.”
His advice to publishers is deceptively simple: know your audience, add distinctive expertise, and double down on what only you can provide.
Guest
Bill Gross — Founder & CEO, ProRata (parent of Gist.ai).
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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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