AI Agents Are Media’s New Favorite Audience
Every morning, Michelle Seo receives a morning briefing from Chattiana, her Muse artificial intelligence agent.
Chattiana’s briefing lists Seo’s agenda and to-do list, and plucks water-cooler topics from the headlines in her various newsletters along with links to the sources.
“I’m kind of challenging myself as an introvert to start more conversations,” Seo, a San Diego-based public relations consultant, tells WIRED. The newsletter, she says, gives her a sense of the daily news and options for filling an awkward silence on a Zoom call.
Seo is far from the first person to consume her news with an AI assist. In fact, the trend has become so common that some news outlets are starting to produce content that treats AI agents—not human readers—as the intended audience. This can look like anything from feeds optimized for AI to pieces structured to allow agents to create personalized articles.
“We believe that the media ecosystem is changing,” says Axios chief revenue officer Jacquelyn Cameron. ”We see this with open web deteriorating. We see that search is shrinking. We see that hyperpersonalization is surging, that LLMs are becoming more important in the way that people are consuming” their news.
Major publishers have responded to that change in a variety of ways. Many, including WIRED’s parent company Condé Nast, have signed deals to allow AI platforms to surface their content. Outlets are grappling with “generative engine optimization,” or GEO, strategies to ensure articles appear in responses to AI prompts. Last year, AIOSEO, a SEO plug-in for WordPress sites, launched a feature that provides websites with LLM.txt files, which help AI discover and interpret sites’ content.
Others have taken a more defensive posture: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies illegally trained models on reporting. That case is still ongoing.
What Axios and a handful of others are trying, though, represents a more foundational shift in how the media operates—and who its stories are for.
“We have always said,” Cameron says, “that we want to be where the audience is.”
At the Digiday Publishing Summit in September, Axios announced the upcoming launch of Axios Direct: feeds designed for AI agents.
“We do believe that a significant portion of news consumption will move into AI systems, LLMs, and devices,” Cameron says. She describes the feeds as a more efficient way for agents to access Axios content, cutting back on narrative to prioritize structured data—more similar to a Bloomberg terminal than a series of articles.
