AI search is turning the world of publishing upside down. And while several large publishers including Nine, News Corp and the ABC have moved to limit some LLMs crawling their content and striking commercial deals with others, indie lifestyle publisher Man of Many is taking a different approach — and it seems to be generating results.
Since opening its site to AI crawlers earlier this year, the publisher has recorded 1.3 million AI crawler visits each week and referrals from AI platforms are accelerating.
Referrals from Claud and Gemini, Google’s LLM, have surged 594 and 539 per cent, respectively. Organic search traffic, it said, has also climbed 49 per cent since February.
Speaking to B&T following this week’s IAB Australia Discovery: AI & Search Summit, co-founder Scott Purcell said allowing LLMs to crawl Man Of Many’s reviews, buying guides and editorial content is less about chasing clicks and more about ensuring the publisher is visible wherever consumers are searching.
“The main reason we’ve chosen not to block [the crawlers] is that there’s no benefit to blocking currently,” Purcell said.
“Essentially, you’re choosing for your content not to be visible on those surfaces, and there’s no benefit that comes from doing so.”
Purcell’s comments came after appearing on the panel alongside The Guardian’s Zoe Featherstone, Are Media’s Clare Morton and Zero Digital Sports GM Nick Splitter. Together, they discussed how AI is reshaping search, audience acquisition and content discovery — and their differing moves to mitigate its effects.
While discussion around AI often centres on disappearing referral traffic, Purcell argued publishers should be putting their focus on the visibility inside the AI platforms themselves.
Following the panel, Purcell shared additional traffic and engagement data exclusively with B&T, revealing that while AI referrals remain small, crawler activity has exploded.
Man of Many now receives around 1.3 million AI crawler requests every week, tracked through Cloudflare and AI analytics platform Tollbit.
He said that Amazon, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Apple are all crawling the site’s content to either train models or cite trusted editorial within AI-generated answers.
Google, Bing and Amazon are the most prolific crawlers, Purcell said.
The panel discussion during the IAB Summit earlier this week.Purcell said the publication continues to focus on appearing where their audience “likes to consume information”.
“We ourselves are using AI day to day for advice at home and different questions, so it makes sense for us as a publisher to be present in those spaces as well,” he added.
While AI bots are crawling the site millions of times every week, they’re sending very little traffic back.
Across July, LLM referrals accounted for just 0.3 per cent of total sessions, while Google organic search and direct traffic still generated around 70 per cent of Man of Many’s audience.
The findings challenge one of the biggest assumptions surrounding AI search — that AI users are more engaged.
According to Man of Many data shared with B&T, Google organic visitors recorded a 22 per cent higher engagement rate and spent 43 per cent longer on site than visitors arriving from AI platforms.
“The industry line that AI traffic is higher intent does not hold in our data,” Purcell said.
ChatGPT, however, was the standout exception.
While many ChatGPT users bounced quickly, those who stayed viewed 15 per cent more pages per session than Google users.
Meanwhile, Man of Many said Kagi — a paid ad-free search engine — as well as Claude and Gemini all sent better-qualified visitors than ChatGPT, despite each accounting for less than 0.05 per cent of overall traffic.
“Google organic and direct are still around 70 per cent of all traffic between them,” Purcell said.
“Everything else, LLMs included, is noise by comparison at this point.”
Despite embracing AI discovery, Purcell stressed Man of Many has no intention of publishing AI-written articles. Instead, he credits banning AI-generated copy with helping the publication outperform many publishers in search.
During the panel, Purcell revealed Man of Many’s organic search traffic has increased while much of the publishing industry has experienced declines.
“One of the key contributors to that is we’ve banned the publishing of AI content to our sites,” he said on the panel.
“We use AI in the preparation of our content and research and things like that, but we make sure everything published comes from our expert journalists.”
He argued publishers should invest in the kind of journalism AI simply can’t reproduce.
“Focus on what AI can’t reproduce,” Purcell told the IAB crowd. “Original human experience, actually trying products, breaking news, original photography—that’s the valuable information AI can’t produce itself.”
One example is Man of Many’s list of Australia’s best food brands, which has grown more than 600 per cent year-on-year because every recommendation came from first-hand testing.
Zoe Featherstone of The Guardian agreed with Purcell’s view, arguing AI summaries have only reinforced the importance of trusted journalism during major news moments.
“We have trusted, fact-based original journalism that people, when a specific news moment hits, will invariably come to the source — a trusted source — to validate information they’re seeing,” she said during the panel.
“We’re building direct relationships through our app, newsletters and podcasts because that’s where we can better understand our audience.”
There seem to be many ways to skin the AI search cat. And that it will take some time before the industry lands on a best practice.
