How Apple Intelligence could impact publishers

Apple will begin introducing artificial intelligence capabilities to its devices with the release of iOS 18 later this year, and the availability of its latest beta version is giving publishers an early sense of how the new features might impact their products and businesses.

Publishers are now beginning to evaluate how “Apple Intelligence” could change the way audiences interact with their content on Apple devices and how it might impact their ability to connect with audiences via email, notifications, and other channels.

Some key features have caught publishers’ attention so far, and some say they expect to adapt their approaches and tactics to optimize for AI-enabled Apple products. These include:

Email prioritization

AI-driven prioritization will be applied to the inbox of Apple’s native Mail application and will surface priority messages prominently at the top of users’ inboxes. Apple’s documentation says prioritization is intended to “elevate time-sensitive messages,” so publishers’ email content that is not deemed timely or relevant to specific users could see its prominence reduced as a result. It’s safe to assume prioritization could also be expanded to factor in variables other than time sensitivity. Over time it could boost the prominence of emails from specific publishers based on engagement levels, for example, or prioritize emails relating to specific subjects and topics most relevant to specific users’ tastes, interests, and behaviors. 

Notification prioritization

Apple is also applying prioritization features to its on-device notifications. In Apple’s words, “Priority notifications appear at the top of the [notification] stack, letting you know what to pay attention to at a glance,” meaning notifications that are not deemed as urgent or relevant to users will be relegated further down the stack and potentially off of users’ home screens altogether. Publishers have stepped up efforts to push audiences to native apps in recent years, largely to take advantage of push notifications which have proved effective for driving engagement and loyalty – particularly among their paying subscriber bases. Apple taking a heavier hand in filtering notifications could limit their effectiveness for some publishers.

Content summarization

New AI summarization features in both the Mail inbox and the native notification stack could have the largest implications for publishers. In the iOS 18 beta, email preview content in notifications is already being replaced with AI summaries, and entire e-mails can also be boiled down to a few sentences in the inbox by tapping a “summarize” button that appears alongside messages. “Tap to reveal a summary of a long email in the Mail app and cut to the chase,” Apple’s documentation says. Similar summarization is also being applied to notifications more generally, which means Apple could – in theory – reword and rephrase publishers’ content in some contexts to emphasize certain information.

Outside of the potential editorial impact of Apple representing and filtering content, summarization raises a handful of questions and potential concerns for publishers from a product and business perspective, including:

• Reduced engagement: AI-driven summaries in email inboxes could greatly reduce user engagement with publishers’ email products, potentially removing the need to even open emails to derive value from them. That could also mitigate the efficacy of curiosity gap subject lines and preview content for email newsletters, which some publishers have used to help boost open rates in recent years.
• Diminished advertising and sponsorship value: Lower email open rates and reduced engagement with content are bad news for publishers’ advertising and sponsorship efforts. If fewer users open emails and engage directly with their content, publishers’ ability to deliver value to partners could be diminished.
• Reduced brand exposure: If users do begin interacting with Apple-produced summaries rather than publishers’ content directly, the ability for publishers to express the identity of their brands – both visually and through the tone and voice of their copy – could also be limited. 

Web page summarization

Summarization features are coming to Apple’s default Safari browser, too. “Reader Mode” has been baked into Safari for years, but the feature is flagged more prominently in iOS 18 and, crucially, it also offers the ability to summarize web page content on-demand. It remains to be seen if on-page summarization will ultimately be offered outside of reader mode, but the ability to summarize web pages with a tap could be problematic for publishers if the behavior were to become widespread. 

Publishers prepare

The impact of Apple Intelligence features on publishers’ products and businesses will depend largely on how widely and frequently Apple users interact with them. Their significance could ultimately be minimal if Apple fails to deliver a compelling or improved user experience or if audiences decide they prefer to interact with publishers more directly. Regardless, platforms stepping between publishers and their audiences is rarely a good thing for publishers. At best it requires publishers to adapt their processes and approaches to ensure their content is optimized for specific platforms or segments of their audiences. At worst, their ability to engage with audiences and/or monetize their content is reduced significantly.

Publishers are continuing to monitor the evolution of the iOS 18 beta and will observe its wider rollout closely in the Fall. Ultimately it seems safe to assume they’ll need to adapt their tactics and approaches to some extent. The question at this point is how significant those changes will need to be.