This week, as the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics coincide, The Athletic, a New York Times publication, is featuring live blogs and video coverage that are more difficult for AI bots.
At least, that’s the hope.
Live blogs have been around for years, but The Athletic sees the live format as a way to keep viewers on its platform while preventing its reporting from being collected and reused by AI tools.
“One of the things that AI is weak at is live experience, so we can be that expert for you in the moment. Humans are always going to be faster,” said Sarah Goldstein, editorial director of The Athletic.
As written content increasingly powers AI response engines, The Athletic is betting that injecting video into its live blogs will make it more appealing to fans and provide more protection. Laura Williamson, editor-in-chief of The Athletic UK, said the company only started adding video to its live blog feed (which will be in place from 2021) last month. Last month, The Athletic hired Shaneika Dabney-Henderson as its first global head of video.
“In today’s world of AI, what I have in mind is: [AI] What cannot be generated is [real-time] information. That means pushing out breaking news and chunks of information. [such as] Make what you hear and watch really lively. “We don’t want play-by-play updates because the fans are watching,” Williamson said. They can see that. What we’re really interested in is what we can offer them additionally and effectively. Or maybe just a little personality or a little fun. ”
The Athletic had a strong year in 2025 in terms of traffic growth. According to data from Samelweb, the site had 16.9 million unique visitors in January 2026, an increase of 59% from the previous year.
However, improvements in systems such as search augmented generation (RAG) mean that AI search chatbots are better able to capture real-time information published online. Connect your RAG pipeline to live feeds and news APIs to get the latest information.
It is unclear whether live broadcasts and videos are really difficult for AI bots to scrape. A recent report by TollBit found that some AI bot scrapers were even able to retrieve full versions of paywalled articles.
Burhan Hamid, co-founder of AI video advertising platform streamr.ai and former CTO of Time, was not convinced that live blogs and videos are less susceptible to AI scraping.
“It depends on your robots.txt file. [publishers] I have it. If you allow AI scraping, our crawlers will scrape your content regardless of its type. “Anything that is searchable is discoverable by agents,” he said. Of course, there are some that completely ignore robots.txt. According to a report from TollBit, 30% of total AI bot scraping in Q4 2025 was scraping that did not follow explicit robots.txt permissions.
But David Caswell, founder of StoryFlow, a consulting firm focused on AI workflows in news production, had a different perspective.
“Videos are certainly harder to scrape and more expensive to extract useful semantic information from, which is why major web scraping projects like Common Crawl don’t often include videos,” Caswell said.
Nevertheless, The Athletic is betting that video and live blogging can beat the worst of AI scraping pervading the industry, at least for now, as referral traffic for text articles continues to decline.
About 20 reporters will post videos on live blogs for the Winter Olympics, and about 20 will post for Super Bowl coverage. In total, The Athletic will have about 30 people covering the Winter Olympics and 55 covering the Super Bowl, some on-site and others from home, Goldstein and Williamson said. Each live blog has its own editor.
Williamson said The Athletic provided training to reporters who expressed interest in covering these sporting events via video. The reporters have gotten used to speaking on camera and recording on the field, Goldstein said, practicing by doing a few stand-ups (such as speaking to the camera to explain what was going on during NFL training camp last summer) and then expanding to videotaping NFL press conferences.
Williamson said the videos will also be distributed on social media platforms including Instagram, X, BlueSky and Facebook, directing viewers to The Athletic’s live blog and other on-the-ground coverage.
In the run-up to the Super Bowl, reporters have been split up to target different topics to shoot video for the blog’s live feed, Goldstein said. (During the Super Bowl game, The Athletic cannot use game highlights or shoot video in the stadium, as media companies are restricted from doing so unless they are part of the official broadcast rights holder or have an explicit licensing agreement with the NFL or its partners.)
Other publishers are also turning to live feeds to engage readers during this year’s big sporting events. Last summer, Vox Media’s sports media network SB Nation redesigned its site to deepen audience engagement. A big part of that was the introduction of a dedicated “Game Thread”, which is a version of a live blog. This weekend, SB Nation will be feeding you Super Bowl coverage of the Patriots and Seahawks.
Other sports-focused publishers, such as NBC Sports and Yahoo Sports, have offered live blogs around major sporting events for years and will host these feeds during the Super Bowl as well.
Meanwhile, The Athletic will create a daily newsletter dedicated to the Winter Olympics, which began on February 6, as well as other channels to directly engage with readers that don’t rely on search for content discovery, such as live push notifications..
The Athletic now has more than 10 million subscribers across 11 newsletters, up from 5 million in May 2025, according to a spokesperson for The Athletic. Its flagship newsletter, The Pulse, has 4.4 million subscribers. The Athletic’s Olympic coverage is sponsored by brands such as Amazon, Deloitte and Jeep, they added.
“The biggest thing is just trying to show everyone what it’s like to be here and be a part of that moment,” Goldstein said. “Not everyone wants to sit down and read the whole story. Not everyone has time. But you do have time to get smarter with a 90-second video. Or if you have a question while watching the game, the live blog can help answer it.”
