Internet Publishing & Web Search Portals NAICS 519290

Nov 11, 2025 - Agentic Search Poses Threat To Industry

• Agentic search, chatbots that summarize information from across the web, could replace traditional search engines as the default gateway to the internet, according to MIT Technology Review. AI agentic search tools like Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s SearchGPT aim to retrieve and repackage information from third-party websites. They return a short digest to users along with links to a handful of sources, ranging from research papers to Wikipedia articles and YouTube transcripts. The AI system does the reading and writing, but the information comes from outside. AI search threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy if it becomes the primary portal to the web, according to MIT Technology Review. News Corp, the parent company of media outlets including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in October 2025 for infringing copyrighted content. News Corp alleges that Perplexity copies news articles, analyses, and opinions "on a massive scale."
• Publishers are printing fewer nonfiction paperbacks, according to Jeffrey Trachtenberg, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covers book publishing and media. New adult nonfiction paperback titles have decreased 42% in the past five years, primarily because new books are typically published first in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook format. Consumers who don’t want to pay $32 for a new nonfiction hardcover book can immediately buy the $15 e-book or you could listen to it on audio, and audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of book publishing today, according to Trachtenberg.

• Bookshop, an online marketplace for independent bookstores, has launched an e-book app for Android and Apple devices. The app allows customers to buy digital books from more than 2,000 partnering independent bookstores which receive a portion of sales. E-books are about 1 of every 6 books sold and independent bookstores aren’t part of that business, according to Bookshop founder Andy Hunter. Amazon is estimated to control as much as 50% of the physical-book market and at least 80% of the e-book market, thanks in part to its popular Kindle e-reader.
• Internet publishing and web search portal industry employment increased slightly and average wages for nonsupervisory employees decreased slightly during the first seven months of 2025, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Internet publishing and search portal sales are forecast to increase at an 8.37% compounded annual rate from 2024 to 2028, faster than the growth of the overall economy, according to Inforum and the Interindustry Economic Research Fund, Inc.