USA TODAY Co. reported second quarter results on August 6, 2026 showing average monthly unique visitors down to 158 million from 180 million three months earlier, digital advertising revenue of $79.8 million, and a chief executive who now attaches a rough timetable to blocking Google's crawler.

The publisher behind the USA TODAY Network and the United Kingdom's Newsquest posted total revenues of $536.3 million for the three months ended June 30, 2026, a decline of 8.3% year over year and 6.1% on a same store basis. Net income attributable to the company was $9.1 million, or $0.06 per diluted share, marking a second consecutive quarter in the black. Total Adjusted EBITDA came to $56.9 million against $64.2 million a year earlier, and the margin narrowed to 10.6% from 11.0%.

Management reaffirmed full year guidance without changing a single line of it. The quarter itself, however, contains the more instructive numbers for anyone buying or selling advertising inventory on the open web.

Audience contracts while the company argues quality replaces quantity

The headline audience figure fell hard. USA TODAY Co. counted 158 million average monthly unique visitors in the second quarter, split between roughly 107 million across the United States media network, measured by Comscore Media Metrix for June 2026 on desktop and mobile, and roughly 51 million from the United Kingdom digital properties measured through Adobe Analytics. In the first quarter of 2026 the same metric stood at 180 million, and in the third quarter of 2025, when the company still traded as Gannett, it reported 187 million.

Barton Crockett of Rosenblatt raised the drop directly on the earnings call. Kristin Roberts, President of USA TODAY Media, attributed it to referral mechanics rather than demand. According to Roberts, the decline reflects lower referrals from traditional search caused by changes in how consumers discover content, and reach now extends well beyond the company's owned and operated properties.

Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Reed was blunter about how the company now values the metric. "I'm just being vague here, whether it's 180 million uniques or 150 or 140, what really matters is ARPU per unique," he said, drawing an analogy to the subscription business, where the company shed volume in 2025 and grew revenue afterwards.

That framing has a cost attached. Fewer sessions mean fewer impressions, and impressions are what media buyers purchase. The company's own disclosure ties the two together: digital advertising revenues of $79.8 million were down from $87.9 million, a decline of 9.2%, with the 10-Q attributing the fall primarily to lower national programmatic and sponsored link revenues, partially offset by higher classified spend.

Three roughly equal pressures on digital advertising

Chief Financial Officer Trisha Gosser broke the advertising shortfall into components when pressed by Matt Condon of Citizens JMP. According to Gosser, three factors drove performance: the impact of search on the business, the loss of a programmatic partner during the quarter, and a platform policy change that affected one of the company's sponsored link partners. "I would say each one of those is fairly equal in size on the impact year-over-year," she said.

Neither the departed programmatic partner nor the platform whose policy changed was named. The disclosure still matters to the sell side of the market, because it separates AI driven search decay from ordinary counterparty churn and platform rule changes, three things frequently collapsed into a single narrative about publisher decline. Gosser also noted a partial offset: premium sales on the company's platform grew year over year, and RPMs improved through the quarter.

Within the USA TODAY Media segment alone, digital advertising fell 11% to $66.9 million. Newsquest's digital advertising edged up 1% to $12.9 million, helped by currency. Digital marketing services, sold by the LocaliQ unit, dropped 15% at USA TODAY Media and 9% at the segment level.

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Licensing revenue swings as forecast

The line the company calls digital other, which bundles AI partnerships, content licensing and syndication, grew 20.2% year over year to $20.4 million. Measured against the first quarter, though, it fell sharply: the first half total of $54.2 million implies roughly $33.8 million booked in the first three months.

That gap is the lumpiness management flagged in the spring. In the first quarter, digital other revenues had grown 125.6% year over year on the strength of agreements with Meta and Microsoft, the latter tied to the Publisher Content Marketplacethe company joined in October 2025. Gosser told analysts at the time that second quarter growth would moderate. It did.

Reed said more agreements are in progress without naming counterparties, and described a technical prerequisite the company is now working on by the hour: reformatting editorial output so machines can parse it. "We recognize that we have to create and format content for humans and for machines," he said.

The two audience framing recurred throughout his prepared remarks. "What that means is we are now effectively serving two audiences, human readers and the AI platforms that surface our work to them," Reed said, adding that a far broader universe of crawlers and scrapers seeks to ingest the same material without agreements in place.

Reed attaches a range to the Google question

In late July, Reed told The Wall Street Journal it was time to take a stand, placing USA TODAY Co. among the publishers openly weighing whether to cut Google off entirely. On August 6 he supplied something closer to a timeframe, though still not a commitment.

Asked by Condon whether shutting off Google crawlers was philosophically on the table, Reed answered yes, then qualified it. Search revenue on the platform is small, he said, and much of the traffic search delivers is one and done. "I think that that day is getting much sooner now than it was a while back. I don't know if it's nine months, 12 months, 15 months, definitely there's a line of sight there," he said.

He also stated a preference. "We're actually more hopeful that we can be proactive with Google in negotiating a fair licensing deal," Reed said, describing an outcome where the company's content appears in both conventional results and AI summaries. If a deal requires blocking first, he said, the company will block.

Search has not stopped working everywhere. Roberts pointed to FIFA World Cup coverage across the USA TODAY Network, which generated 97 million page views with search driving nearly 65% of that traffic. The company treats breaking news, sports and entertainment as categories where it retains a right to win.

The wider measurement picture is less forgiving. Research covered by PPC Land found AI Overviews cut outbound publisher clicks by 39.8% in the first randomized study of the feature, while Index Exchange data showed 69% of publishers on its platform recorded year over year declines in ad opportunities during 2025, averaging 14%. Chartbeat figures showed small publishers losing 60% of search traffic over two years. A study of 44 major United States publishers, by contrast, found aggregate organic search traffic rose 5% since AI Overviews launched, with the gains concentrated among institutional brands.

Palantir enters the publisher data stack

Reed referenced work with Palantir four times across prepared remarks and questions, describing it as an attempt to convert anonymous audience interactions into known, orchestrated first party relationships. The stated applications are the right content, the right advertisement, the right embedded commerce placement and the right subscription offer at the right price, all decided in real time.

Roberts gave a concrete example on the commerce side. Much of the company's affiliate business has historically relied on manual processes to connect offers with content. According to Roberts, the Palantir work matches affiliate products and offers to relevant content at scale, which would extend monetisation across sports, entertainment and dining categories in real time.

Reed set expectations on ownership and timing. "It's important to note all of our data remains our data," he said, adding that actions and intelligence take place on the company's platform and that no existing technology is being replaced. He said the company will evaluate conversion, retention, engagement and revenue per user, and expects to discuss financial upside more specifically over the next two quarters. None of it sits in the 2026 forecast.

The arrangement follows a pattern visible elsewhere in advertising infrastructure. Zeta Global and Palantir announced a partnership on June 23, 2026 to rebuild Zeta's Data Cloud on Palantir Foundry, one of several deals connecting first party signals to media execution disclosed around Cannes Lions.

DeeperDive engagement data

The company disclosed usage figures for DeeperDive, the generative answer engine built with Taboola that USA TODAY Network deployed as the first United States publisher in June 2025. Since launching in September of last year, readers have submitted more than 50 million questions, with average daily activity now exceeding 390,000 interactions.

According to Reed, tests comparing pages carrying DeeperDive against pages without it produced longer time on site, higher advertising revenue per session and stronger subscription intent. No absolute figures accompanied those comparisons. The product has since been adopted by other publishers outside North America and Europe.

Subscriptions trade volume for price

Digital-only subscription revenues reached $45.6 million, up 6.8% and the second consecutive quarter of year over year growth. The mechanism is price, not volume. Digital-only ARPU hit a record $10.47, up 34.4%, with the USA TODAY Media segment at $11.03 against $7.92 a year earlier. Newsquest moved the other way, down 5% to $5.70.

Paid subscriptions tell the inverse story. Total digital-only subscriptions stood at 1,442,000 at June 30, 2026, down 16% year over year. USA TODAY Media fell 19% to 1,287,000 while Newsquest grew 23% to 155,000.

Roberts declined to project the ARPU rate forward. "We would not extrapolate a 34% ARPU growth rate indefinitely," she said, attributing the increase to subscriber mix, more consistent offers, less reliance on deep discounting and the removal of low value subscriptions. Volume declines moderated during the quarter and the start-to-stop ratio improved sequentially. Marvel Comics was added to the Play platform during the period, and Roberts said the audience engaging with that content has been overwhelmingly new to the company.

LocaliQ and the small business channel

The LocaliQ segment, which sells digital marketing services to small and medium sized businesses, remains below year ago levels but improved sequentially on every metric management tracks. Core platform revenues were $106.3 million, down 9% year over year and up 7% from the first quarter. Core platform ARPU reached a record quarterly high of $2,908, up 3% year over year and 4.1% sequentially. Average customer count of 12,200 was 12% lower than a year earlier but 300 higher than the first quarter. Segment Adjusted EBITDA of $13.2 million produced a margin of 12.4%, an expansion of 560 basis points.

Balance sheet and the Google gain contingency

Cash and cash equivalents stood at $86.7 million at June 30, 2026 against total debt principal of $970.5 million, including $722.7 million of first lien debt. Net debt was $883.8 million. The ratio of first lien debt net of cash to trailing twelve month Total Adjusted EBITDA stood at 2.3x, down 14% year over year. The company prepaid $17.7 million under its 2029 term loan facility during the quarter and carries an effective rate of 8.9% on that facility. Roughly $96.9 million remains authorised under the stock repurchase programme, with no shares bought back in the first half.

Free cash flow reached $19.6 million, up 11.2%, while cash from operations grew 8.6% to $35.4 million. Operating expenses fell 7.8%.

One line in the income statement carries an unusual composition this quarter. Other income and expense, net, was a benefit of $14.8 million in the quarter, of which Google litigation costs and other legal settlements contributed $11.3 million of income, a figure the filing notes includes litigation reimbursements. The company filed its civil action against Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. in the Southern District of New York on June 20, 2023, alleging monopolisation of advertising technology markets and deceptive commercial practices. It accounts for the matter as a gain contingency, meaning any recovery is recorded only when resolved.

Reed said the company expects a ruling on Google's summary judgment motion around September, and that the remedies decision in the Department of Justice ad tech case, where structural divestiture of AdX and behavioural alternatives were argued in November 2025, could arrive at any point. He was explicit that neither is priced in. According to Reed, the outlook contains no specific upside from a more open advertising ecosystem that might follow the remedies, nor from the company's own suit.

Why this matters for marketers

Supply is the first consequence. A publisher network that shed 22 million average monthly unique visitors in a single quarter, while stating openly that it prefers a smaller and better identified audience, is a publisher network generating fewer addressable impressions. Buyers holding open exchange budgets against premium news inventory face a shrinking pool at the same time as the company reports its premium direct sales growing.

Second, the composition of the decline is unusually well itemised. Search decay, the exit of an unnamed programmatic partner and a platform policy change each contributed roughly a third of the year over year advertising shortfall. Only one of those three is structural to AI. The other two are the ordinary hazards of intermediated supply chains, and they arrived in the same three months.

Third, the licensing line is real but volatile. Revenue of $20.4 million in the second quarter against roughly $33.8 million in the first shows what quarterly recognition looks like when contracts are few and large. Publishers building financial plans around AI licensing are building on a base that moves by 40% between periods.

Fourth, the Palantir arrangement signals where publisher monetisation is heading. Identity resolution and real time decisioning applied to first party signals is the same architecture retail media networks have used to command higher CPMs. If it works at newspaper scale, the pricing gap between known and anonymous inventory widens further, and marketers buying reach without identity will pay for a diminishing asset.

Finally, Reed's nine to 15 month range converts a rhetorical position into a planning input. Cloudflare's default blocking of training and agent crawlers on ad bearing pages for new domains takes effect on September 15, 2026. The infrastructure for withdrawal is arriving before the decisions are made.

Timeline

Summary

Who: USA TODAY Co., Inc. (NYSE: TDAY), the publisher of the USA TODAY Network in the United States and Newsquest in the United Kingdom, with the LocaliQ digital marketing brand serving small and medium sized businesses. Speaking on the earnings call were Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Reed, Chief Financial Officer Trisha Gosser, and USA TODAY Media President Kristin Roberts, with questions from Giuliano Bologna of Compass Point, Matt Condon of Citizens JMP and Barton Crockett of Rosenblatt.

What: Second quarter 2026 results showing total revenues of $536.3 million, down 8.3% and 6.1% on a same store basis; net income attributable of $9.1 million; Total Adjusted EBITDA of $56.9 million; digital revenues of $254.3 million or 47.4% of the total; digital advertising of $79.8 million, down 9.2%; digital-only subscription revenues of $45.6 million, up 6.8%; digital other revenues of $20.4 million, up 20.2%; and average monthly unique visitors of 158 million against 180 million in the prior quarter. Full year 2026 guidance was reaffirmed unchanged.

When: The quarter ended June 30, 2026. The earnings release, Form 8-K and Form 10-Q were filed on August 6, 2026, with the conference call held that morning at 8:30 A.M. Eastern Time.

Where: Operations span the national and local United States markets served by the USA TODAY Network and the United Kingdom properties operated by Newsquest, which contributed 13.1% of total revenues in the quarter. The company is headquartered in Pittsford, New York, and its Google litigation is pending in the Southern District of New York.

Why: The results quantify what happens to a large news publisher's advertising economics when search referrals recede, a programmatic counterparty leaves and a platform policy shifts within the same three months, each contributing roughly equally to a 9.2% decline in digital advertising revenue. For media buyers, the 22 million sequential drop in unique visitors reduces available premium news impressions while the publisher redirects effort toward identified users and licensed content. For publishers, the swing in licensing revenue from roughly $33.8 million to $20.4 million between quarters illustrates how few and how large the underlying contracts remain. And Reed's nine to 15 month range for potentially blocking Google's crawler moves an argued position into something closer to a scheduled decision.