“Every brand in the world should know its worth in the age of AI.”

For two decades, the playbook was the same for almost every publisher: publish, get indexed, and get ranked. Search and Discover became the default entry point, and newsrooms organised themselves around it by writing headlines designed to appeal to algorithms, being rewarded by volume and page views that could be sold to advertisers.

Kleine Zeitung was good at that game, but Sebastian points out that they came away unimpressed. “We’re incredibly successful on Google Discover. But what exactly does ‘successful’ mean? We get traffic from people who just read something and then leave. We can’t sell them any adverts. They’ll never buy a subscription.”

He calls it “rented reach” — “because it’s not actually ours.” So losing it doesn’t worry him. “For the last 15 years, we’ve been solely focused on how do we get people to look at Google? How do we get those three seconds of attention?” His conclusion: “It’s just not about attention anymore.” "I think it’s about attachment."

Today, the model is destination-based. The reader comes to you — opens the app, visits the site, picks up the edition — and everything you build is designed to draw them back to a place you control.

Krause expects a large proportion of that to be reversed. Readers will hand over part of their media intake to an assistant and let it do the fetching: wake me at six, pull content from my three subscriptions, summarise what matters, and read it to me in the car. You are no longer the destination; you are a source that the assistant draws on. His team calls the model ‘news as a service’: ‘You basically buy the right to use the content, but on your terms.’

Crucially, the underlying business model remains the same. “If you have a subscription, you’re free to use an agent to access the content however you like. But it’s always part of the subscription.”

Kleine Zeitung opened its pages to AI crawlers and tracked what they actually took. What they found was that the archive was not as valuable as they had thought. Archives seem valuable because they are large, but size does not equate to scarcity: the material is static, it has already been scraped for years, and most of it exists in some form elsewhere.

What AI systems actually want, in the case of *Kleine Zeitung*, is up-to-date, local reporting. In short, material that exists nowhere else and cannot be pieced together from other sources. That reshaped editorial policy too. “The only question that really matters in a newsroom these days is … what is it that only you can report? If the answer is nothing, don’t do it.”

Kleine Zeitung now blocks AI crawlers by default, then selectively grants access via TollBit, which identifies each crawler and logs the requests it makes. This transforms anonymous scraping into a metered transaction with a known counterparty.

To encourage AI scrapers to pay, *Kleine Zeitung* has made it cost-effective for them. Every page is generated twice — the full HTML version for human readers, and a stripped-down version for machines that reduces crawler token usage “by roughly 98 to 99 per cent”. A crawler that would otherwise spend sixty seconds and a million tokens parsing a page and discarding most of it receives a clean result almost instantly, for a small fee.

That makes the fee a no-brainer. “You’re going to save money. You’re going to find the content you need. And it’s costing you less than sifting through the entire HTML and then discarding 99 per cent of it.”

Subscribers, meanwhile, can connect their own assistant for free. Crawlers come in through the front door and pay there.

Despite all the talk of infrastructure and AI, Krause believes that what endures in an agent-mediated web are the people behind it.

“It’s completely the other way round,” he says. Readers used to come via the brand and then discover the journalists. “Now you get to meet the people first. You meet them on social media. You find them offline, you find them at events. And those people draw you to the brand.”

His advice to publishers is to find the people who can live up to that trust, and then get out of their way. “Make room for them. Open the door for them, and step aside.” Because, as he puts it: “The brand is just the platform. The product is the people.”

Second publication courtesy of Twipe, Original text