Jonathan Roberts spent years studying dark matter and the origins of the universe. Now, he's tackling another intractable problem: How to keep artificial-intelligence tools from cannibalizing the publishing industry.

Publishers have faced declining traffic for years, but AI-powered search engines and chatbots are accelerating the demise of a business long reliant on clicks and ad revenue. As chief innovation officer at Barry Diller's magazine publishing company People Inc., Roberts is charged with reimagining the media business for an AI era.

While leading business strategy for People-owned titles including Better Homes & Gardens and Southern Living, he has become a prominent voice in an industry struggling to protect itself from crawlers that suck up content without compensation, while retaining audiences. Reddit, Politico and others have weighed whether to continue working with Google because traffic has declined so steeply.

"The media industry is a growth driver for the AI economy, and those that tear it down -- those that are stealing IP -- are hurting growth," he said.

Roberts, 45, brings the same enthusiasm to discussing how AI is reshaping publishing as he does to favorite topics like black holes, Dungeons & Dragons and cartography. (Author George R.R. Martin's team tapped him to create maps of the fictional world featured in "Game of Thrones.")

"I have a habit of running towards difficult things," said Roberts.

Like many publishers, traffic for the stable of publications he oversees has declined as AI search results have become ubiquitous. People Inc.'s traffic from Google decreased 40% in the second quarter from a year earlier and now represents only 21% of its total search traffic, a fraction compared to the past, the company said during its recent second-quarter earnings call. Google has said its AI search features "send billions of clicks to the web every week," and are meeting users' evolving needs.

Roberts and other executives at Diller's company are preparing for a world in which traffic slows further, while seeking new revenue streams. He has worked with Microsoft and Cloudflare on initiatives including content licensing and bot blocking, respectively.

He is also prototyping systems that make it easier for approved bots to access content and exploring the potential to license to AI companies "behind-the-scenes" data, such as fact-checked information from reporters' notes that didn't make it into an article.

Roberts occasionally serves as an industry lobbyist, telling more than 60 congressional staffers last month that bad AI actors from China are taking content without permission, harming publishers' ability to generate revenue. Without a healthy news business, he said, the internet would be left with bad information -- or with none at all.

"When he talks, everyone stops and listens because he's going to bestow some concept that will change the way they think," said Rich Caccappolo, vice chairman of media for the Daily Mail General Trust.

The youngest of four boys, Roberts grew up in the Scottish countryside, exploring the Bronze Age fort behind his farmhouse and a nearby castle. He started creating maps, bringing to life imaginary worlds from his fantasy games.

He studied physics and philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he met his wife, devoured Einstein's original papers and investigated parallel universes. After graduating in 2003, Roberts pursued a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of Southampton and studied dark matter at CERN, the Swiss nuclear research center.

While in grad school, Roberts built a website called Fantastic Maps, teaching himself how to optimize the site so it would show up high in Google search results. It was an early foray into a subject that would become core to his career in publishing.

It also brought a new commercial opportunity: Martin's team in 2012 asked him to create 12 maps that would be sold as a companion set to "A Song of Ice and Fire," the fantasy novel series on which the TV show "Game of Thrones" is based.

The following year, he left academia and met an engineer who introduced him to executives at About.com, which Diller acquired. Roberts joined as a consultant to help make sense of the company's data.

Months later at a Manhattan dinner with Neil Vogel, then-CEO of About.com, Roberts explained the theory of relativity over many bottles of wine. Vogel, who now runs People Inc., didn't remember much of what he'd learned the next day, but he knew one thing: "We have to hire this guy."

Roberts put his academic background to work, steeping himself in traffic patterns and how search engines and users prioritized different types of content. He advised executives on the creation of stand-alone brands such as home decor site The Spruce to take advantage of changes to Google's algorithms over time. He continues to help the company navigate changes in search functions, preparing for a future with far less traffic from Google.

He provided input as Microsoft developed its marketplace for AI content licensing earlier this year. Roberts weighed in on economic models and features that might be useful for publishers -- such as one that provides insights into what users of AI tools are asking. That information could help People determine what content large language models might be willing to pay for, ultimately shaping coverage decisions, he said.

Tim Frank, who leads AI monetization at Microsoft, said Roberts "single-handedly accelerated years' worth of learnings."