TLDR
News Corp Australia published The Prompt Report: Retail on 15 September 2026, a free PDF telling brands how to get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The actual product sits behind the download: paid AI audits, workshops and content creation delivered through agency partners Medium Rare Content Agency and Suddenly.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The playbook is the pitch
News Corp Australia dropped a free retail playbook on 15 September 2026, and the download link is the least interesting part of it. The first report focuses on the retail sector, providing brands with a clear roadmap to get recommended across AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and sitting behind that free PDF is a commercial suite of AI audits, workshops and content creation packages, delivered through content agency partners Medium Rare Content Agency and Suddenly.[1]
Mike Cook, Head of Search, AI and Emerging Platforms at News Corp Australia, is leading the series. "AI recommendation isn't about prompt tricks, it's about building a trusted reputation across authoritative domains that these systems have every reason to cite," Cook said.[1] That sentence doubles as a sales argument: News Corp's mastheads are precisely the kind of authoritative domain Cook is describing, and the consulting offer turns that asset into a billable service.
The number anchoring the urgency
Cook put a figure on the problem in the launch materials: "With over 57%* of web traffic now non-human, discoverability is no longer just a technical search problem, it is a total brand strategy."[1] That asterisk matters. Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report, the most cited independent measure on automated traffic, found automated internet traffic surpassed human activity, accounting for 51 per cent of all web traffic, six percentage points below the figure News Corp is using in its pitch.[3] Prompt the Market could not independently verify Cook's 57 per cent figure, which comes from News Corp's own release.
The gap between 51 and 57 per cent will not move a brand manager. The directional claim holds either way: more than half of all traffic online now comes from bots, crawlers and AI agents rather than human eyeballs, and if that is true, the old rules around search rankings and banner placements solve for the wrong audience.
A sector-by-sector consulting rollout
Upcoming editions of The Prompt Report will cover the travel, food, beauty and luxury goods sectors, a sequencing that maps almost exactly to the sectors where News Corp Australia's lifestyle mastheads hold their strongest editorial positions.[1] Each new edition creates a fresh lead-generation event and a new round of sector-specific audit conversations with agencies.
News Corp is not the first to move here. IAB Australia published its LLM Prompting Framework in 2025 and Salesforce released its own AI playbooks for marketers this year, both positioning themselves as strategic advisers on generative AI. What separates the News Corp offer is the combination: a free consumer-facing report tied directly to a named commercial delivery mechanism, through identified agency partners, with a confirmed sector pipeline behind it. The report is available at lnkd.in/gv6HuD47.[2]
News Corp's sales team can now walk into an agency briefing with a sector report and an audit proposal rather than a rate card. Whether the paid services behind the free download convert at the rate the launch implies becomes clearer once the travel edition lands.
SOURCES & CITATIONS
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is The Prompt Report: Retail?
Who built the report and who delivers the paid services?
What sectors are covered next?
What is the automated traffic figure cited in the report?
Xaviery Malinao writes for Prompt the Market on how brands and agencies are adapting to answer engines, drawing on Bushnote's work with clients across search, AI search and content.
