September 18, 2026
Sites lose referrals to AI answers: Copilot sent The New York Times 83–93% fewer referrals than Bing
An internal Microsoft presentation from January 2024 recorded that referrals from Copilot to The New York Times websites were 83–93% lower than from traditional Bing. In January 2023, Microsoft Director of Applied Sciences Brent Hecht called scraping "staggering theft on an unprecedented scale." ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote that OpenAI products already largely replace publishers.
Traditional Bing sent readers to The New York Times website. Copilot kept the answer within its own product, and Microsoft called this dynamic a "doom loop" for models and the entire internet.
Data. On September 4, 2026, OpenAI said it trained models on filtered Common Crawl containing billions of web pages. Unsealed materials list more than 91,692 copies of articles from three outlets, over 2m documents from nytimes.com, and at least 160,903 unique works from news outlets in Project Mango. Court filings also allege that OpenAI researcher Nick Ryder told Greg Brockman how to bypass The New York Times paywall, and Brockman responded approvingly. For practitioners, data provenance has become part of evaluating an AI tool.
Public materials place two OpenAI positions side by side: 24 verbatim reproductions in 20m conversations and none in 68,000 audited answers.
Source
