Getty Blames AI Answers as New Customers Dry Up

Getty Images used its August 10 earnings call to do something companies usually avoid: name the exact mechanism shrinking part of the business. Revenue came in at $229.1 million, down 2.5%, with the damage concentrated in the agency business and iStock, its self-serve stock image store. On iStock, CEO Craig Peters told analysts on the call, the company sees continuing “search engine referral traffic declines” and “the knock-on impact to our affiliate traffic sources as the search engines implement AI generated answers.”

Then the sentence that matters: “This is impacting new customer acquisition.”

That’s the plainest statement yet from a large content company of a shift every marketer with a website has watched in their own analytics. When search engines answer the question on the results page, the click never happens. For Getty, the click was the top of a funnel: searcher, affiliate or search result, iStock trial, subscription. The funnel’s first stage now belongs to the answer engines, the same shift showing up in AI citation data everywhere.

The quarter around that admission was rough in ways that go beyond AI. Getty walked away from its $3.7 billion Shutterstock merger in July after UK regulators demanded Shutterstock sell its editorial business as the price of approval. Peters put the sunk cost at “more than 18 months and significant capital, that is more than $100 million across professional fees and financing costs.” The company reported a net loss of $85.8 million, though most of the widening came from a $96.7 million tax valuation charge, not operations. It ended the quarter with $51.6 million in cash against $2.1 billion of debt, and hired Guggenheim to evaluate financing options. It also withdrew its 2026 guidance, attributing the withdrawal solely to that financing review.

Generative image tools sit inside the numbers too. Peters said the microstock category “continues to be impacted by generative AI,” concentrated among price-sensitive customers, while arguing iStock is partly insulated because 70% of its revenue comes from exclusive premium content.

What should marketers take from a stressed stock photo company? Watch where Getty is placing its bets, because both sides of the trade run through marketing budgets.

The first bet is plumbing. In July, Getty launched what it calls a Model Content Protocol server, a standard connector that lets AI applications pull licensed Getty content directly, plus natural language search across its library. Getty spent two years suing AI companies for training on its archive. Now it’s building the pipe to sell that archive into AI products at retail, one query at a time.

The second bet is stranger: Getty is openly rooting for the backlash. “We are also encouraged to see AI laws going into effect around the globe and consumer sentiment slowing AI use in ad creative,” Peters said on the call. He has a point to stand on, since audiences do rate AI-made ads lower when they can tell. But “our growth plan includes regulation and customer discomfort” is not a strategy a company chooses from strength.

Meanwhile the healthy part of Getty is the part AI can’t generate: editorial. That revenue grew 9.2% to $96.5 million, driven, CFO Jennifer Leyden said, by “strong demand for our world class coverage, including the FIFA World Cup, news events around the globe, and strong demand for our archive content.” Photographs of real events, verifiably real, are appreciating while generic imagery deflates. Getty is even cutting its own marketing spend where it no longer pays back, with Peters warning the pullback “will adversely impact some business KPIs for 2026 and into 2027.”

The verdict is the price signal. Real, exclusive, verifiable imagery is holding value. Generic stock, the kind most brands actually buy, is sliding toward the price of a prompt. If your creative budget still pays stock-library rates for generic imagery, you’re overpaying. And if your brand depends on being found through informational search, Getty’s funnel is your preview.