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BUSINESS

The State of Digital News in 2026: AI Integration, Traffic Shifts, and the Trust Economy

Introduction: The Post-Referral Era of Journalism As we navigate the early months of 2026, the digital news ecosystem has fundamentally shifted from a search-based discovery model to an AI-driven answer economy. The predictions of the mid-2020s have crystallized into hard data: the “referral era,” where platforms like Google and Facebook served as the primary firehoses of traffic to publisher websites,…