Microsoft's AI Scraping Record Has a 93% Click Drop

Unsealed filings in The New York Times’ copyright case say Microsoft’s Copilot answer engine drove click-through rates to the Times domain down as much as 93% versus traditional Bing search, according to TechCrunch’s report on the unredacted filings. The same material describes more than 91,692 copies of publisher works in OpenAI’s mid-training datasets, more than 2 million documents from nytimes.com in a Common Crawl-derived dataset, and at least 160,903 unique works assembled for Project Mango; TechCrunch notes that much of the new detail comes from The Times’ brief while the underlying exhibits remain sealed. Builders should file the 93% figure as a distribution problem, not only a copyright dispute: answer products that replace referral traffic make licensing, provenance, and publisher economics operating inputs, a sharper version of the referral economics behind AI search.