The implicit deal publishers had with search – make good content, earn rankings, convert traffic – no longer holds. The publishers in the best position today recognized early that this wasn’t a temporary dip and started planning for referrals to keep declining.

Search was always a rented audience

Search was always someone else’s distribution channel. Google’s incentives lined up with publishers for a 15-year stretch, and most of the industry built acquisition strategies on that alignment. The alignment is over.

It’s a familiar pattern. Social played out the same way. Facebook referral traffic peaked around 2016 and has fallen unevenly since. Any publisher whose acquisition engine depended on organic social reach has already been through a version of what’s happening with search now.

Owned channels are what’s left. The publishers who built them early are ahead and everyone else is catching up.

From traffic intelligence to relationship intelligence

According to Parse.ly data, across the publisher network it works with (more than 400 sites with 15B+ pageviews a month) the pattern is consistent. The publishers whose audience base has held up are the ones that started investing in direct and newsletter channels years before the search decline forced the issue. The ones that didn’t are trying to build that muscle now, during the decline, which is a much harder job.

Most publisher analytics, including ours, grew up in an era when the publisher’s job was to understand what search traffic did once it arrived. Which articles held attention. Which converted. Which didn’t. That’s content intelligence, and it was the right problem to solve when traffic was abundant and external.

The new problem is different. How does a reader move from a first visit to a repeat visit to a loyal relationship? What content earns the second visit? Which acquisition sources produce readers who stay? When should the newsletter signup appear, and to whom?

That’s a different type of analysis – one that we call relationship intelligence.

Three diagnostic questions

The starting point is a traffic-mix audit. This is not to confirm assumptions, but to see where things actively stand. Most publishers are surprised by what they find. Three questions cut to the picture quickly:

1. What percentage of your traffic is direct or newsletter-driven today, compared to 12 and 24 months ago? If that figure is flat or shrinking while search declines, owned audience isn’t developing fast enough to offset the loss.
2. Which pieces of content drive newsletter signups or repeat direct visits, as opposed to the ones that get the highest raw pageviews? These are often different articles, and the conversion-first bias tends to be under-examined in editorial reviews.
3. Where did your most loyal subscribers originally come from, and what was the first piece of yours they engaged with? The acquisition path that produces a long-term subscriber is probably the most underused signal in publisher analytics.

What owned relationships produce

Direct traffic converts to paid subscriptions at a higher rate than search-referred traffic. A reader typing in your URL or clicking through from your newsletter already has a relationship with your site. A search visitor often doesn’t.

Newsletters are the most concrete example. Publishers sent 28 billion emails in 2025 to over 255 million readers, with average open rates above 41%. There’s no intermediary algorithm between the publisher and the inbox, which is the whole point. The Financial Times now gets more than 70% of its subscriber traffic through its mobile app. That traffic doesn’t move if Google changes a ranking signal next quarter.

What’s missing: the audience connection

What’s missing in most publisher analytics today isn’t more pageview data – it’s relationship intelligence. The acquisition path that produces a long-term subscriber. The content that earns a second visit. The newsletter signup that started a ten-year reader relationship.

A reader who found you through a newsletter, opens your app a few times a week, and subscribed because they trust your coverage on a specific beat is not a reader Google or an AI assistant can reassign. That’s a different audience than the one search was providing for most of the last decade. It’s a much more valuable audience. And relationship intelligence is how you build it.

About the author

Bob Ralian is Head of Unified Analytics at Automattic, including Parse.ly, the content analytics platform for enterprise publishers. His team works with publishers to make sense of their audience data, what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do about it.

The post How publishers rebuild audience ties as search falls appeared first on Digital Content Next.

As a result, notes AdExchanger editor Anthony Vargas, “Publishers, typically a tight-lipped crowd, have been surprisingly candid about losing 20%, 30% and in some cases even as much as 90% of their traffic and revenue over the past year.”

A survey of media leaders featured in the Reuters Institute’s latest annual predictions report revealed that publishers anticipate a further decline in traffic from search engines of more than 40% over the next three years. “Not quite ‘Google Zero’, contends author Nic Newman, “but a substantial impact none the less.”

In response, companies need to focus on how to address this challenge. And how to do so quickly, as traditional sources of referral traffic continue to hemorrhage. 

Five core factors to address Google Zero

Here are the five core factors that publishers should incorporate into their strategy and workflows.

1. Grasp the size of the problem

The term Google Zero stems from a question posed by The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel who asked what would happen to businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero?

Changes to social media and search algorithms have reduced referral traffic for some publishers. In the AI era, these dynamics are becoming even more pronounced. The impact of AI-snippets at the top of Google search results means that when users ask a question, they find answers at the top of the page and many don’t click through for more detail or scroll down for more options. 

Data from the Pew Research demonstrates the impact of this: when an AI summary appears, users click traditional search results only 8% of the time, compared to 15% without one. 

Meanwhile, for publishers pinning their hopes on Google Discover, it’s worth remembering that most of the growth in this space comes from breaking news, content which is often excluded from Google AI summaries. 

“Google Discover traffic is mostly a mirage,” contends the media analyst Simon Owens, recommending that media companies “avoid optimizing their content operations around it.” “Publishers never owned those audiences and therefore should never have counted on them,” he added.

Lastly, the situation is further exacerbated by content in replacing carefully crafted headlines from publishers with those generated by AI. Initially confined to content in Discover, this is now happening in Search too. As Sean Hollister, senior editor at The Verge, put it, “This is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles.” 

All of this is to say that if you’re still heavily reliant on Google as an engine for traffic, it’s time to think again. 

2. Understand that this is part of a wider shift in user behavior

Much of the coverage to date has focused on the supply side, centering on publishers and platform dynamics. Far less attention has been paid to the demand side and evolving user needs.

Traditional search feels increasingly outdated. In its place, users are turning not just to AI-generated summaries within Google, but to AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity as they begin their information journey.

A recent study from Eight Oh Two Marketing, surveying 500 active AI users, found that 37% of those sampled now begin their search with these types of AI tools rather than traditional search engines. “Consumers are not choosing AI because it is trendy. They are choosing it [AI] because search has become too noisy, too effortful, and too slow.” 

At the same time, 85% of respondents said they still double-check AI-generated answers using traditional search, using these platforms for verification and deeper exploration.

Publishers need to recognize the implications of these behaviors. Those absent from the first phase, AI-driven discovery, may never be found in the second. Equally, those only visible in the verification phase are absent from the critical entry point of this new information funnel. If they’re not present in both of these environments, then they risk being overlooked and left behind. 

3. Recognize that visibility is increasingly binary

AI environments are far more winner-takes-most than traditional search. Previously, a publisher that ranked fifth on a search query would still earn traffic, as might those even lower. AI-mediated discovery cites a couple sources and if you’re not on the shortlist, you’re unlikely to be discovered.

For media companies, understanding how AI-generated answers are created is critical for ensuring that your content is featured in the places and spaces that LLM’s crawl. The foundations of good SEO, such as authority, clarity, credibility, still matter. Build on your SEO foundation; you don’t need to fully reinvent the wheel. 

Research on AI citation patterns shows that AI systems – like search engines before them – tend to favor sources with strong off-page authority. So, media companies will want to ensure that their content demonstrates the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) principles. 

That means having a presence on high-authority external platforms, citations in credible databases, earned media in leading publications, as well as content across the information ecosystem. This includes your own website, to thought leadership demonstrated by execs on LinkedIn and in publications like Forbes, through to engagement on Reddit forums, and material produced for other platforms such as company podcasts, YouTube videos, and so on.

A recent SEMrush analysis of 325,000 prompts across AI platforms found LinkedIn ranking second only to Reddit as a source for AI chatbot responses, particularly for professional queries. 

4. Build content that AI can’t replicate

Not all content is equally vulnerable to AI summarization. Sites that prioritize original storytelling, exclusive imagery, and strong visuals, can still thrive. 

According to The Digital Bloom, People.com saw a 27.52% year-over-year traffic increase through September 2025 by adopting this approach. Similarly, Substack witnessed a 40% year-over-year growth in July 2025. “This growth reflects users seeking authentic voices and first-hand perspectives,” they wrote. These are “content types that Google’s Liz Reid [VP, Search] specifically identified as gaining traffic in the AI era,” they added, referencing a discussion on wider online behavioral shifts that she had with The Wall Street Journal last year.

Conversely, if your content can be summarized in three bullet points by an AI, it is a commodity. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of evergreen content has been cannibalized and its traffic for many publishers has tanked. 

In response, many media companies need to simply produce less content and ensure that what they are doing is better. Content needs to be more meaningful. More impactful. More distinctive. Can it help to drive a conversion – in the form of a registration, a newsletter signup, or a subscription – so that audiences come to you first, and not their AI platform of choice? (And if not, should you be doing it at all?)

Similarly, media companies need to continue to invest in products that reduce dependency on external discovery channels. The New York Times is perhaps the best known proponents of this. Nearly half of Times digital subscribers now pay for more than one Times product, attracted by a mix of games, cooking, audio, news, opinion, product reviews and sport. Each of these are elements that can help to create habits and drive engagement that is independent of search.

5. Rethink what success looks like

The narrative is not so much that “AI is killing search,” but that AI should force us to rethink what search looks like. Search is no longer just a driver of traffic, it’s a multi-faceted arena covering discovery (AI chat), synthesis (AI chat and snippets), and verification (actually going to your content to dig deeper). 

As a result, publishers have to look more broadly at metrics they measure and value. In the AI-era, software company ClickRank, for example, points to areas such as citation frequency, brand mention rate, share of voice within AI answers, AI-driven referral traffic and sentiment of brand references.

And all of this sits alongside core metrics such as subscriber lifetime value, churn rates, and time on site. Chartbeat’s data shows us that “your most valuable traffic source might already be on your site,” reminding us that while addressing shift in search matters, engagement with existing visitors remains a key area of focus. 

As part of this conversation, at an industry level, we also need to move beyond discussing a reduction in referrals to better understand its impact on revenue. We know that clicks are down, but we know much less about what that means for subscriptions and ad yields. Hopefully publishers are already joining up these dots internally, but a wider industry conversation about this would also be beneficial. 

The bottom line

Worries about Google Zero are well founded, although its impact is uneven. Publishers that are most exposed to this shift are typically those with the heaviest dependence on evergreen, easily summarized content and platform-dependent traffic. Meanwhile, those that are best positioned to navigate these changes, are those who produce content that needs to be seen onsite or in-app, and who already have strong direct and habitual relationships with audiences. Off-platform discovery is part of their playbook, but they are not reliant on it.

There’s no point asking whether AI-powered search will disrupt the traditional referral model. We know the answer. Subsequently, Google Zero encourages us to think about distribution and engagement strategies at a time when search traffic is less predictable and the economics are increasingly hard to quantify.

As Press Gazette describes it, search is not dead, it is fragmenting. What the most successful publishers understand is that Google Zero doesn’t require a single response. It requires a range of them. That includes potential partnerships with tech companies and AI providers, optimizing distinctive content for generative engine optimization (GEO), as well as doubling down on user experience within your properties.  

These media companies recognize that we have moved beyond clicks to a more fragmented and distributed media ecosystem, one where value is defined not just by traffic, but by presence, influence, and direct relationships with audiences.

The post The publisher’s playbook for the Google Zero era appeared first on Digital Content Next.

But, across conversations with media leaders at Axios, Hearst Newspapers, Consumer Reports and Forbes, the prevailing approach is measured rather than panicked. What’s happening is less about SEO replacement than an evolution of existing best practices. SEO still delivers traffic, but with an added GEO layer.

While this last year has introduced a new set of acronyms like AEO, GEO, and AIO (see glossary), search teams are pushing past the alphabet soup and finding that the fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed as much as the hype may suggest. AI answer engines still rely on traditional search databases, making authority and clarity advantages for publishers.

“SEO equals GEO. GEO transcends SEO,” says Gideon Grudo, executive managing editor at Consumer Reports, who oversees the SEO and GEO/AIO team. “All the work that we’ve been doing, that we will be doing for search, we will continue to do, because it will benefit us in the answer engines. Study after study, data point after data point continues to prove that if you’re ranking well in search, you are ranking well in the answer engines.”

“There’s news every day about what matters, and what doesn’t matter, and what might be important, and what’s important in this year, and in the next five years,” says Grudo. “And, there are mainstay SEO search foundational realities that have not changed an inch.”

Re-structuring content for machine-readability

Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios, frames it in structural terms. In the traditional search model, a user query goes to a search engine, which returns results. Now, he says user prompts go to AI, which queries search, summarizes results, and surfaces an answer. The abstraction layer, which sits on top of the visual internet and allows us to talk to it, is new. The underlying mechanics are not.

“Traditional SEO still matters,” he says. “If you have a page that’s not discoverable in search, it’s usually for one of three reasons: a technical problem, the page isn’t relevant, or you don’t have any links and you’re not a credible website.”

For publishers, the practical implication is that content needs to be more rigorously structured. Bridget Williams, chief product and strategy officer at Hearst Newspapers, is tracking which content is being scraped, what is most frequently retrieved by AI systems using RAG, and how that retrieval correlates with actual clicks.

“These topics, these URLs are scraped the most by OpenAI. These topics are getting surfaced the most. And then these topics are getting the most people clicking through. What does that all mean?” she asks. “It’s very nascent for us.”

Binti Pawa, VP of audience growth and development at Forbes, says AI optimization means making sure that both search engines and AI engines can retrieve Forbes’ content. She notes that the best practices for traditional SEO and for answer engine optimization overlap. “Your content should be well-organized and clear. Content should be for people and not AI agents or bots. That’s not going to change with any of the strategies.”

Pawa believes that SEO and answer engine optimization are complementary, not competing, and that ignoring either one means leaving visibility on the table. “It’s becoming more important to think about your brand and your brand mentions and the citations, which will return a link, which will return a referral, and track it back to your site,” she says.  

Original reporting is a competitive advantage

Structural SEO work only goes so far without editorial to back it up. As information becomes increasingly commoditized by AI, the most successful publishers are doubling down on original reporting and subject-matter expertise, content that is harder for AI to replicate.

Ben Berkowitz, head of news at Axios, says the Axios strategy is to double down on exclusive reporting and analysis from subject-matter experts. “AI prizes original information, so the depth and quality of reporting really is the optimization.”

One of the strategies that can be effective in the AI era is to publish original content and research, Crestodina says. He has noticed that in the traffic from AI sources to websites, the URLs that get the most traffic are the ones that have data points, statistics, or research studies, he explains.

“Most people don’t fully trust AI, for good reasons. And when they look for something backed by data, they’re likely to want to click through and see it,” he says. “They might want to cite the original source. So, when a prompt indicates the visitor wants hard numbers, and the AI response summarizes those numbers, the reader will click through. Because they want to see: is this legit?”

Expanding beyond clicks to visibility and reputation

Publishers say that standard SEO metrics are still tracked, but they are no longer telling the whole story. For media executives, the focus has shifted to holistic KPIs like brand visibility, citation tracking and conversion metrics.

Where traditional SEO focused on what lived on a publisher’s own site, GEO and AIO requires thinking about the brand’s presence across the entire web: third-party mentions, Reddit comments, social signals, and anywhere else a large language model might go looking for evidence of credibility.

“It’s not just what’s on your site, it’s what exists on all these other platforms. So, we’re starting to think about all these other platforms as well,” Grudo says. “That means I want to think about how we exist outside of our site, and what that means.”

Grudo says his team is also looking at where traffic originates. While bot traffic might be minimal right now, as it continues to grow, will it become important, he wonders. “What is intention like from traffic from bots? What’s crawl like from bots? Is that important? How do we keep an eye on that to determine optimization for it?”

SEO teams are now working more closely with social and audience teams. AI models draw on signals from across the web, including platforms like Reddit and YouTube, to assess a brand’s authority and determine how to describe it to users.

Williams notes that Hearst Newspapers subscription base gives it an advantage, with those direct relationships providing a stable foundation. “We are focusing more and more on direct relationships,” she says. “We have this amazing subscription base of people that really care about local news and we are very differentiated in the market.”

According to Pawa, standard SEO KPIs continue to be important to Forbes. But, Forbes has learned it ranks among the top cited sources within certain AI search environments, intelligence that is now feeding into how the team thinks about audience engagement. “Our KPIs are evolving with that,” she says, adding, “Our strategy is shifting to quality and how do we engage loyal users? Do we know enough about our users? How do we engage better with them to actually move them down the funnel?”

In a recent Digiday article, Karl Wells, The Washington Post’s chief revenue officer, said that users coming from AI platforms show 4-5 times higher subscription conversion rates than those from traditional search and tend to spend more time on site.

Wells’ insight may reflect something broader about how AI is changing discovery. Preliminary research from Stanford and Cornell researchers tentatively suggests that LLM adoption may complement rather than replace traditional search, as using AIs lead to a sustained increase in the number of unique websites people visit. The study found users increasingly integrate LLMs and search engines into multi-step, exploratory workflows for tasks, who visit significantly more distinct domains than those using search alone. While preliminary and awaiting peer review, the study hints LLMs disperse attention across a wider, more diverse range of websites.

Same SEO work, new AI search vocabulary

Publishers navigating this transition most effectively aren’t the ones who pivoted quickest to GEO frameworks or overhauled their content operations quickest. They are the ones treating the new environment as an extension of existing discipline: maintaining a strong SEO foundation, structuring content more rigorously, building original reporting that AI cannot easily replicate, and paying closer attention to how their brands are understood and cited across the web.

Berkowitz says, “It’s funny how many times the industry has pivoted content formats to chase whatever algorithm was most rewarding that year. And always, every time, it comes back to ‘just do good original reporting and write it well.’ The publishers that are doing the best these days are the ones embracing Journalism-with-a-capital-J. Nothing’s going to eat your lunch if you have the information and insight no one else has!”

Grudo believes there’s an overemphasis on GEO as a replacement for SEO. “The data keeps showing that that’s a great mistake,” he says. “We keep seeing the LLM companies themselves say that they are mining search databases for responding to queries. They don’t have their own, so they’re relying on what Google and Bing and Yahoo have.”

For other publishers, Pawa cautions that there is a lot of AI advice out there with little to no proof. She suggests they rely on their own data and let best practices guide their strategies.

Practical priorities for AI-driven discovery

Across discussions with executives actively shaping SEO and audience strategy, several consistent priorities are coming into focus:

• Structure content for machine readability
• Clear organization and strong SEO fundamentals still determine whether content is retrieved and surfaced by AI systems.
• Track retrieval and citations, not just clicks
• Teams are beginning to measure what content is scraped, retrieved, and cited by AI, and how that connects to traffic and conversion.
• Treat SEO and AI optimization as complementary
• Answer engines still rely on traditional search infrastructure, so strong search performance carries over into AI visibility.
• Invest in original reporting and data
• Exclusive content, research, and proprietary insights are more likely to be surfaced and drive engagement.
• Build authority beyond your own site
• Brand signals across platforms like social, forums, and third-party mentions influence how AI systems assess and describe credibility.

The post How media leaders are rethinking SEO in the age of AI appeared first on Digital Content Next.

A new form of search visibility is emerging, and it isn’t measured in rankings. 

As generative AI assistants increasingly answer questions directly, the brands that appear inside those responses are shaping consumer decisions before a click ever happens. Instead of navigating lists of links, users increasingly receive synthesized answers that combine comparison, explanation, and recommendation in a single response.  

In this environment, visibility no longer depends on ranking position alone. Inclusion within the AI-generated answer determines which brands consumers encounter. New research from Similarweb’s 2026 AI Brand Visibility Index shows how this shift is already reshaping competition across six industries: beauty, consumer electronics, fashion, finance, travel — and news. 

Across industries, three patterns consistently shape which brands appear inside AI-generated answers: 

1. Visibility concentrates among a small group of brands. 
   A limited number of companies dominate AI mentions and frequently become default reference points within their category. 

2. Momentum varies across brands. 
   Some brands rapidly increase their presence in AI responses, while others plateau or decline despite strong consumer recognition. 

3. Authority often outweighs demand. 
   Specialist and education-led brands frequently achieve higher AI visibility than their branded search demand suggests. 

AI reshapes early discovery in the purchase journey 

The research also highlights a shift in how consumers move through the purchase journey. AI increasingly dominates the upper stage of discovery, when consumers seek inspiration and explore options. As purchase intent strengthens, many users return to traditional search engines to navigate to specific sites and complete transactions. 

This behavior increases the importance of early visibility. Brands that do not appear in the initial AI conversation risk exclusion from later stages of the purchase journey. 

Visits to AI platforms continue to grow, yet referrals from these platforms show a disconnect. AI assistants evolve into all-in-one environments that keep users inside the platform. In this minimal-click environment, AI visibility becomes a critical metric for brands and publishers. 

News visibility reflects authority and partnerships 

For publishers, the news category reveals two forces shaping visibility inside AI responses: topical authority and platform access. 

Specialist and reference-driven publishers often achieve strong AI visibility even when overall brand demand remains lower. Publications such as ScienceDirect, PC Gamer, and Taste of Home rank highly because their content answers specific, structured questions across scientific, technical, and lifestyle topics. 

Commercial partnerships also appear among many highly visible news brands. The top ten news sites in the index include Reuters, The Guardian, AP News, CBS News, The Washington Post, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Variety, and The New York Post. Many of these publishers maintain commercial relationships with AI platforms, while CBS News and Variety do not. 

Together, these signals suggest that both topical authority and platform access influence which publishers appear inside AI-generated answers. 

From search optimization to answer optimization 

The shift toward AI-driven discovery introduces a new focus on optimization for AI responses. Core principles from traditional search optimization remain relevant. Brands benefit from strong onsite content, trusted external references, and sound technical infrastructure. 

AI systems identify signals of authority across multiple sources. Visibility increases when brands appear across trusted sources that answer specific user questions. 

This dynamic reinforces the authority signal identified earlier in the research. Brands with strong category expertise and durable digital presence often achieve higher AI visibility than search demand alone would predict. The research also identifies overachieving brands that outperform expectations relative to branded search demand, demonstrating how specialist expertise and structured informational content can compete with scale. 

AI visibility becomes a critical marketing metric 

AI visibility now plays a growing role in digital discovery. As AI assistants deliver answers directly within their interfaces, inclusion inside those responses increasingly determines which brands consumers encounter. This shift increases the importance of tracking AI visibility alongside traditional search metrics. Competitive benchmarking, authority signals, and structured informational content now play a larger role in determining digital presence. 

As generative AI continues to reshape discovery, inclusion within AI-generated answers will increasingly signal digital influence. Thus, the brands and publishers that appear in those answers will shape the choices consumers make. 

The post Inclusion in AI answers is becoming a discovery advantage appeared first on Digital Content Next.

As many readers will know, Gingras spent nearly two decades as Google’s head of news and still appears to hold an internal quasi-advisory role. Gingras now also serves as Chair of Village Media, a company Google routinely holds up as its model “publisher success story” before parliaments and regulators.

Just last week, I happened to see Gingras across the room at the International Center For Journalists (ICFJ) annual awards dinner. Not insignificantly, Google, and Gingras personally, have generously supported them with tens of thousands of dollars. So I was grateful to see him there; journalism certainly appreciates the financial support.

Later that same night, I listened to a new episode of the Future Media podcast, in which Gingras shared his assessment that serious news has “no value to consumers,” and that “the economic value of a news query” is so negligible that, if rounded, “would be zero.” It was jarring to say the least.

Few people have had more influence over the digital distribution of news and premium content than Richard Gingras. Yet here he was, Google’s longtime news advisor, perpetuating the false narrative that serious journalism has almost no value simply because Google’s preferred metric – its pay-per-click search text advertising monopoly – generates the least revenue from a news query.

An actual journalist holds big tech accountable

Two weeks ago, a different sort of Gingras interview appeared. In the Coda Story, fearless, independent interviewer, Natalia Antelava did something that almost no journalist does when facing a senior big tech executive: she directly challenged him on his role in helping create the mess.

She also pressed him as he repeatedly slipped into a collective “we” when describing Google’s relationship to the news business. The subtext was unmistakable: Google sees itself as the arbiter of news value, even as its public talking points and industry actions deny that value even exists.

Rewriting failure as generosity

When she asked Gingras what he considered his biggest mistake in his nearly two decades with Google, his answer was telling: “I would say the biggest mistake, honestly, was in our work with the industry, the Google News Initiative. We spent over a billion dollars over eight years, a billion and a half dollars trying to drive innovation.”

This is where I am obliged to note Google’s revenues over the last 10 years approximate to $2 TRILLION. So Gingras, Google’s chief evangelist to the news industry, would like us to know his biggest mistake in his 18 years at Google was sharing less than one tenth of one percentage of Google’s revenues with the news industry.

It’s astonishing how casually he rewrites failure as generosity.

The real “mistake” wasn’t spending too much on the Google News Initiative; it was believing that sprinkling what equates to less than 0.1% of Google’s revenues at the industry could offset the damage Google inflicted on the economics of media. Google’s chief evangelist for their news efforts believes serious news has no economic value and his biggest mistake was sharing a pittance of their revenues with the very companies it used to help maintain its adjudicated illegal monopolies in search, ad exchanges and publisher ad servers.

Yet, in their spare time, these same publishers provide one of the few remaining checks on power: scrutinizing leaders, governments, institutions, and abusive companies. But in Google’s calculus, “economic value” is whatever its ad system can monetize, and the civic value of news simply doesn’t register.

But here’s the irony: AI companies are now proving, more clearly than ever, that news and premium content are among the most valuable resources in the world. Not just culturally. Not just civically. Economically.

AI exposes what Google denies about news

Across the AI ecosystem, the most advanced large language models were trained disproportionately on the very materials Silicon Valley once dismissed as “legacy media”: reported information, fact-checked analysis, archives, scientific journals, books, documentaries, and professionally produced entertainment content. Their capabilities come from absorbing narrative, structure, relevance, serendipity, ground truth and cultural cornerstones created by expert journalists, television and film professionals.

This professionally crafted work is not interchangeable with memes, scraped Wikipedia summaries, or social media and user posts.

The value of news, entertainment and vetted information

Laundering professional content through Reddit or Common Crawl (the profile of which is a must-read in The Atlantic) doesn’t strip its economic value; it merely reveals that protections have not yet been duly enforced. High-quality training data is scarce, slow to produce, and expensive. It requires human expertise, legal standards, editorial judgment, and public trust in the sources, whether individuals or the brands that employ them. These are the exact qualities that distinguish premium publishers.

And this isn’t theory.

The law is catching up

A growing list of court cases and disclosures shows the same reality: AI companies rely on publishers’ journalism while avoiding paying for it. In Thomson Reuters v. Ross, a federal court confirmed that training AI requires licensing copyrighted content, recognizing a real market for high-quality data. In the Kadrey v. Meta case, unsealed documents showed Meta employees downloading pirated books and skirting licensing. And in U.S. v. Google, we learned that Meta pays Google for an API into its daily scraping to ground its own AI.

Yes, that means that Meta is apparently paying Google for access to publishers’ work.

Penske Media’s recent lawsuit argues that Google’s AI Overviews scrape and replace news directly in search results; a practice publishers cannot realistically opt out of because Google controls search through an illegal monopoly. When Google ingests news, sports and entertainment and places AI summaries above it, that is not “zero value.” It is extracted value.

Extracted value is an extinction level event

If we find ourselves in a world where AI replaces the need to click through to trusted journalism and premium content by using that same content to train its responses without compensation, the entire economic infrastructure – advertising, subscriptions, licensing – collapses. You cannot build sustainable media when distribution intermediaries extract the full economic value upstream.

DCN’s position is clear: premium content is the most valuable resource on the open web. Not only because of the cost of creating it, but because of the trust signals behind it. It is the core asset that fuels AI’s predictive capabilities and factual grounding on the most recent events. And publishers cannot and should not continue to allow it to be scraped, ingested, repurposed, and monetized without specific and freely given consent – not the kind coerced by a company already found to hold an illegal monopoly.

The future of AI relies on premium content

The future of AI should and will not be defined by who has the best model or the cheapest compute. It will hinge upon access to the highest-quality data, and whether that data is lawful, licensed, accurate, original, and kept current.

Publishers sit on the motherlode. This should be their moment. Unlike synthetic content and scraped user forums, premium content has enduring value because humans create it with standards.

This is why DCN has warned policymakers and the copyright office that improperly scraped training data threatens the economic foundation of news and entertainment. That’s why licensing must be the rule, not the exception.

The industry must align around three principles:

1. No free training. High-quality content cannot be scraped without permission for search, training, or grounding.
2. AI cannot substitute for news without fair value. AI Overviews and similar features must not cannibalize traffic using the very journalism they ingest.
3. Licensing markets must continue to be built. Early negotiating will set the pricing floor; platforms that acknowledge fair value should be the greatest allies.

Gingras may claim that news has no value. But Silicon Valley’s behavior proves the opposite. In the AI era, premium content isn’t just valuable; it’s the most valuable input in the entire system.

Publishers must stop giving it away.

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According to Gracenote’s 2025 State of Play report, audiences still love streaming, but the thrill of seemingly infinite choices has become an endless maze. The challenge isn’t that viewers don’t want to watch; it’s that they can’t easily find what they want. Streaming is maturing, and the next phase of growth depends on improving how people discover and engage with content. 

The paradox of streaming abundance  

The data shows a streaming market still expanding. The number of free ad-supported streaming (FAST) channels continues to climb, and global streaming services keep expanding their catalogs. As the supply of entertainment keeps rising, viewers bounce among apps and subscriptions in search of something to watch. 

Nearly half of all streaming viewers say it’s getting harder to find what they want. They spend an average of 14 minutes searching before pressing play, with younger audiences spending even more time. Nearly 50% state they would consider canceling a service because they can’t find something to watch. 

The challenge is especially evident in live sports. To watch every NFL game, fans need access to several different services. That complexity turns loyal fans into frustrated detectives. Streaming freed audiences from linear schedules, but freedom without guidance risks undermining engagement.  

Audiences aren’t turning away from streaming; they are asking for better experiences. Many viewers want a service that tells them where to find a specific program, even if it’s on another platform. Others want recommendations shaped by their own preferences such as release year, mood, or country of origin. And 84% say layout, images, and program descriptions define the value of a service 

Streaming is no longer just about access to endless content. It’s about how people feel when they engage with a service. The viewer experience has become the product, and personalization now sits at the center of every strategy. 

AI and the future of streaming discovery

Gracenote’s report identifies a powerful accelerant. Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) can transform how audiences search, browse, and decide what to watch.  

Traditional search depends on keywords. Type “Seattle TV shows” and you get a static list. LLM-driven discovery understands nuance: “What’s a good comfort show set in Seattle?” or “Where can I watch the Dodgers game tonight?” 

AI models trained on harmonized entertainment data can connect viewers with accurate, real-time results. They can unify metadata across multiple catalogs and rank results by popularity, critical acclaim, or mood. 

For media content companies, these capabilities mean stronger engagement. Better discovery leads to less searching, fewer abandoned sessions, and lower churn. AI-enhanced interfaces can reintroduce a sense of curation, the element many viewers miss from traditional TV, while still offering the flexibility of streaming. 

Common standards for streaming navigation

The real opportunity isn’t to compete for every minute of attention, but to help audiences navigate abundance. Unified discovery doesn’t require every service to merge libraries; it requires smarter metadata, richer taxonomies, and collaboration on common standards. 

Companies that take this approach can turn fragmentation into differentiation. They can become a trusted guide, not just another destination. By understanding how mood, time of day, or current events influence viewing decisions, they can deliver more relevant recommendations and seamless journeys. Currently, when looking for something to watch, only 28% of streaming viewers report choosing content based on a service recommendation (30% in the U.S.). 

Viewers don’t resent moving between services; they resent confusion. Helping them find something to watch, even if it’s hosted elsewhere, builds loyalty through transparency. This is about expanding the value exchange between viewers and brands. Companies that empower discovery, even beyond their own platforms, strengthen trust and remind audiences that the success of streaming depends on serving people first. 

Search for streaming success  

For media executives, Gracenote’s data affirms what many already sense. Engagement isn’t just about how much people watch; it’s about how confidently they navigate the streaming environment. When viewers spend 14 minutes searching, that’s 14 minutes of potential disengagement. When they give up entirely, that’s a lost connection and possibly a lost subscriber. 

Fragmentation won’t reverse itself. If anything, it will deepen as new services, FAST channels, and specialized platforms emerge. The solution isn’t to rebuild the old cable bundle. It’s to create bridges of intelligent, data-driven, audience-centered pathways that make the ecosystem easier to explore. AI can help.  

Success comes down to intention: seeing curation not as nostalgia, but as streaming’s natural next chapter. Engagement thrives when innovation is paired with clarity and when abundance feels accessible rather than overwhelming. Elevating content discovery will define the future, not by expanding catalogs, but by guiding viewers through them. This is a moment to transform data into discovery, and discovery into delight. 

Opening image source: Netflix TechBlog 

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Not anymore. Generative AI is shifting user behavior, from querying and clicking to asking and consuming inside tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Google’s AI Overviews rewrite results into ready-made answers, turning what used to be a page of links into a single, synthesized suggestion. In its place, we’re entering a recommendation web—a world where every surviving link must have strong context and credibility.

In the wake of AI overviews, search isn’t dying, but the link economy is. 

At Raptive, we see this shift firsthand across 6,000+ publisher partners generating billions of monthly sessions. The data reveals a re-ordering of trust. The winners will be those who modernize for this “answer-first” landscape without abandoning the fundamentals.

Search is no longer a traffic channel; it’s a reputation test. 

Here’s what we’re learning about staying visible and resilient in this new era of search, and what digital media leaders should prioritize. 

1. Traffic patterns are fragmenting

Searches are growing, but click-through rates are declining. Similarweb data shows that zero-click searches have climbed from 56% to 69% year-over-year as Google’s AI Overviews increasingly answer questions directly on the page. Search behavior is being redistributed and discovery is flowing across new channels: AI assistants, social algorithms, recommendation engines, and Google Discover. 

Executive takeaway: Continue investing in high-quality, differentiated content that strengthens brand reputation. Move away from lightweight informational content that can be commoditized by AI. In a world of algorithmic discovery, originality and authority are the only currencies that hold value.

2. Quality and authorship signals are non-negotiable

Google’s June 2025 Core Update reaffirmed that expertise and trust win. In our analysis, sites with clear bylines, full author names, and robust About pages outperformed those without. Those signals are key ranking factors tied to credibility.

Executive takeaway: Audit your trust signals. Every article should clearly identify who wrote it, when it was last updated, and why readers should trust it. Invest in author pages, structured data, and visible expertise across verticals. “Real names, real voices” is the new SEO.

3. Consistent content activity drives resilience

In a study across independent creators, we found that sites publishing one new post and updating at least five existing ones monthly were far more likely to gain traffic after the June update. We saw the same correlation among larger publishers: steady, consistent activity signals both relevance and reliability.

Executive takeaway: Operationalize content cadence. Build processes for regular updates to evergreen content, and treat publishing frequency as a core SEO health metric, not just an editorial one.

4. Engagement metrics are rising in importance

Across our network, URLs that gained traffic after Google’s June update had 3x more comments and 3x more engagement than those that declined. AI and Google’s algorithms alike are rewarding proof of reader value.

Executive takeaway: Design for engagement and invite readers to interact. Encourage user reviews, comments, and feedback loops. Treat engagement as a credibility metric.

5. Discoverability is shifting toward recommendations

As AI search becomes more personalized, Google Discover is growing as a key traffic source. Discover rewards relevance and freshness, often outperforming traditional search in volume and conversion.

Executive takeaway: Optimize for recommendation ecosystems. Publish consistently, pair content with strong visuals, and prioritize depth and originality. These factors correlate directly with Discover visibility.

Why “modern SEO” still wins

Despite the hype around “GEO” (Generative Engine Optimization), “AEO” (Answer Engine Optimization), and a growing alphabet soup of new acronyms, the fundamentals of optimization haven’t changed. Today’s AI search is just a bunch of classical searches in a trench coat. Modern SEO—writing for readers, demonstrating expertise, and maintaining technical excellence—is what allows your content to surface in both traditional and AI-driven results.

And while the conversation around AI traffic grows louder, it’s important to remember that AI surfaces account for just 0.02% of total traffic today. In fact, our research found that pages ranking in Google’s top three positions are twice as likely to appear in AI Overviews as those outside the top three. 

Good SEO is good GEO.

And good GEO begins with genuine expertise. 

What to prioritize next

For digital media executives guiding strategy in 2025 and beyond:

• Diversify traffic sources: Balance your reliance on Google with growth in newsletters, Discover, and direct audiences.
• Double down on quality and cadence: Content activity and freshness are measurable, defensible advantages.
• Audit trust and transparency: Author identity, About pages, and schema markup now influence both human perception and algorithmic ranking.
• Invest in engaged communities: Reader interaction and loyalty protect against volatility in algorithms and AI tools.
• Stay pragmatic: Don’t chase new acronyms or “AI hacks.” Track changes, test cautiously, and keep your team focused on fundamentals.

The bottom line

The future belongs to those worth recommending. 

People still want what they’ve always wanted: answers they can trust, ideas that make sense, and trustworthy sources. That’s where publishers matter most—not as content factories, but as champions of quality and original content that real people can count on. 

At Raptive, our mission is to ensure that independent voices remain discoverable, trusted, and economically viable in an AI-mediated web. Because the end of links doesn’t have to mean the end of independence—it can mark the beginning of a new era of credibility.

That’s not just good SEO; it’s good business. And, more than that, it’s good humanity.

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Publishers have built SEO strategies, audience acquisition teams and substantial revenue streams to capture consumers with search intent. Now, they are faced with referral traffic dropping anything from 5% to more than 25%. Despite Google’s proclamations that AI in search is driving more queries and higher-quality clicks, the reality is that premium publishers are feeling the pain.

With so much uncertainty in how consumers are interacting with AI when it comes to search, it’s hard to formulate strategies to adapt. SEO and audience experts at the Daily Mail and Bauer Media Group spoke to DCN to outline how they’re approaching search changes, and why publishers need to refocus on the fundamentals.

Search is not dead

A number of issues get conflated when talking about AI and search. The biggest culprit of immediate traffic drop-offs is Google AI Overviews, which have been rolling out over the past 18 months. These appear at the top of a search, summarizing key information from a range of sources.

But overall, search is not dying. Consumers aren’t moving away from Google and using other services to find information. Thus far, even the rise in ChatGPT seems to be additive to traditional search. But as publishers know, consumer behavior is far from static. And given the growth in use of these tools, this is bound to change and publishers need to make moves now to keep pace. 

Bauer Media Group owns more than 600 magazines, 400 digital titles and 50 radio and TV stations across the UK and Europe. Global Audience Director Stuart Forrest sees the most immediate threat not from using LLMs as search engines, but from how Google is reshaping the search experience. “Are there challenges to search traffic from Google? Absolutely,” he said. “But is there a meaningful challenge to Google’s dominance? I don’t see the evidence for that.”

Publishers have long operated on a clear value exchange: search engines index their content, and in return, they receive referral traffic that funds journalism. Carly Steven, Director of SEO & Editorial E-commerce at news publisher the Daily Mail believes that the premise of AI overviews fundamentally disrupts that balance. “They still use our content—but we don’t get the clicks,” she said.

This lack of visibility and control leaves publishers unable to shape strategies or measure impact. “We don’t know where our content is being used or how it’s contributing to AI responses,” Forrester noted. “And that prevents a fair value exchange.”

Barry Adams is an SEO and Audience Growth Consultant working specially with news publishers. He has decades of experience and insight from working with global media companies. Adams pointed out that while AI has accelerated these declines, the shift started earlier—with news avoidance, user fatigue, and diversified consumption habits. “AI just pushed it further.”

The stakes go beyond revenue. Steven underscored the existential risk: “If we can’t sustain the journalism that trains these models, the whole system collapses. AI is only as good as the content it consumes.”

The impact of AI on SEO (so far)

Despite near-universal agreement on these challenges, the impact on publishers is varied – for now, at least. Steven pointed out that it’s tough for the Daily Mail to measure the true impact because Google hasn’t yet separated out that data.  “We aren’t able to distinguish between clicks that have come from AI overviews, and clicks that have come from normal search; it’s all bundled in together,” she explained. 

However, they can see the impact on click-through rates when an AI overview is present. Steven told Press Gazette that when an AI overview appears in Google, the Daily Mail’s average clickthrough rate was 56.1% lower on desktop, and 48.2% lower on mobile.

Steven was keen to point out that the big double-digit drops that  publishers are reporting in click-throughs is not the same as traffic. “For a news site like The Daily Mail, the keywords that we care about change every minute and hour; the news changes so quickly. So even if we can see that when there’s an AI overview present, the click rate drops, that doesn’t mean the traffic aligns with that,” she said.

The Daily Mail also has over 60% of search traffic as “branded” search, where people are searching specifically with the term ‘Daily Mail’. Half of their total traffic is also direct to their website. “That’s very high, and makes us much more resilient [to these changes]” Steven shared.

At the moment, AI overviews rarely appear against breaking news stories. Adams noted that publishers focused on breaking news do appear to be more resilient to AI-driven declines. This is also echoed by DCN member surveys which show non-news brands taking bigger traffic hits than news brands.

But those who also have background stories, explainers or coverage of topics like fashion trends and car reviews are feeling the pain. “There’s a genuine grievance there that Google is ‘stealing’ their traffic because that sort of journalism is still adding value,” Adams said.

These concerns also apply to evergreen content –  articles and explainers which can be updated or don’t go out of date. Steven said that the Daily Mail hasn’t ever relied on evergreen content for traffic, and that she sees this as being more vulnerable to AI summarization. This puts publishers in a tough position as many have invested in evergreen content precisely to establish authority within Google search.

Bauer is also seeing traffic changes, which Forrest says are having a nuanced impact on their brands. The company publishes global entertainment and lifestyle titles like Grazia and Empire, but also has a large portfolio of specialist titles covering hobbies and interests from golf and angling to motorcycling.

They also publish a number of TV listing titles, from TV choice and Total TV guide in the UK (which sell 4 million print copies a week between them) to TV Movie in Germany. Forrest says the industry has a tendency to underestimate consumer inertia. “The reality is that an awful lot of people still go online and look at EPGs (Electronic Programme Guides) from both us and competitors every day to decide what to watch on TV,” he pointed out.

“That mass market consumer inertia, once you get outside quite a limited cohort of early adopters of change, I don’t see as having a meaningful impact [for these types of query].”

Bauer’s automotive titles have been impacted more with some queries, especially around car specification data. But Forrest emphasized that their work isn’t focusing on providing answers to consumer queries. Rather, they aim to build on unique insights from experts in those areas, adding value to that data.

Forrest sums up the current landscape as an attention challenge, and effective monetization of that attention. “We still see plenty of examples of growth in our business, and plenty of examples of recovery in our business,” he highlighted. “When you look at what’s driving that, it’s coming back to high quality journalism from people who know what they’re talking about. It’s really not any more complex than that.”

Strategies to adapt

With tangible changes happening and solutions to the value exchange some way off, both publishers emphasized the need to diversify reliance on Google search for revenue. Forrest said this was doable, but not if traffic drops off a cliff overnight. 

“We want to protect Google traffic as much as possible, continue to evolve our approach, and then continue to diversify into other channels,” he explained. 

Bauer’s teams are also focusing on turning those search-acquired audiences into more valuable consumers by encouraging newsletter sign-ups and investing in social and brand awareness. They are seeing some success with audience and revenue growth on Apple News, and have even commissioned some premium content specifically for that channel. Forrest pointed out that none of this was revelatory, but needs to be a priority. 

“You clearly can’t rely on Google as being your primary traffic source,” the Daily Mail’s Steven echoed, pointing out that algorithm changes over the years have already proved its unreliability as a channel. “If it’s one way for your audience to reach you, that’s fine, but you wouldn’t want to have all your eggs in that basket now.”

Adams was even more explicit in emphasizing that a mindset shift needs to happen. “If you’re an SEO-mature organization… you’re not going to grow more traffic,” he said. “We’ve reached peak traffic. If you maintain traffic, you’re winning. 

Investment in social and brand

Curiously, given publishers’ long and stormy history with social platforms, both publishers have a renewed focus on their platform presence. Google’s indexing of Instagram posts has helped. In his experience, Forrest says that if someone is searching for a topic, recognizing a brand in search (whether that be their site or an indexed social post) can be helpful. “Brand recognition and ranking position are major drives of click-through rate,” he noted.

This is a key difference in the approach to social now. It’s no longer seen as a huge driver of traffic back to websites. But what Forrest describes as “good, old-fashioned investment in brand awareness and reputation” can pay off in other areas.

Steven explained that the threat of traffic drops has provoked evaluation of social strategies, and well-established playbooks are suddenly trendy again. “It has forced us to think really hard about who we are as brands, and where our audiences are, and being where they are, whether that’s on TikTok, or Reddit, or Instagram,” she said.

However the Daily Mail’s priority is to grow its fledgling subscription business. Their Mail+ partial paywall launched in the UK in January 2024, and into the US and Canada earlier this year. Steven described the subscription targets as “punchy,” saying that they are targeting “1 brand, 1 million;” aiming to reach 1 million digital subscribers by October 2028. As of July, they had 325,000 digital subscribers globally, including 50,000 in the US.

Adams recommends going back to basics; talking to customers and finding out why they come to you and what they want from you. Then, focus on tying them into your own ecosystem. “If you have a paywall, make sure it’s as smooth and efficient as possible,” he advised. “Make sure you have a dedicated app that’s very easy to install and great to use. Have newsletters that people can subscribe to and show them what they want to read.”

“If you are a content-focused publisher, news or otherwise, you need to find a way to prove added value that the AI bots can’t replicate. I think a lot of publishers are worried about that, because they can’t.”

Outlook and advice for AI-era SEO 

Expectations for the future were mixed between the three experts. The need for a rethink and recalibration of expectations for publishers was a common thread. “We’ve always thought of the platforms as being audience drivers and traffic drivers,” the Daily Mail’s Steven said. “If there’s an acceptance that it’s more about visibility and brand awareness than about driving traffic, then we can calibrate our expectations around that.”

Adams believes that publishers should step away from generic, easily replicable content. “We have to have something worth paying for,” he outlined. “And that means you need to have an identity as a news publisher. You need to have a good grasp of what your readers want from you and make sure you deliver in that space.”

Licensing was highlighted as an option for some publishers, as many have done deals with AI companies. But there are only so many of those deals to go around, and not everyone is in a position to do those. This is unlikely to be a long-term viable strategy, especially for smaller organizations and start-ups.

There was also acknowledgement that the short-term is going to be rocky. “This is a weeding out,” Adams explained bluntly. “We will lose publishers, there will be casualties, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.

“Online publishing has been too much of a free-for-all and a race to the bottom by chasing after clicks and throwing ads on everything… There will be a new normal…with stronger news brands who have a clearer idea of what they offer, with loyal audiences bound to them.”

Steven, however, was more concerned about what will happen to the diversity of information in the ecosystem in this scenario. “I worry that if that value exchange question isn’t addressed and resolved, we will end up in a much worse place with less diversity of voices, but because [AI overviews] are so easy and convenient, it’s just accepted,” she said.

Despite a 20+ year career in SEO, Steven said that she’s never witnessed a period as disruptive as this. The shake-up is unquestionably under way. Whether the publishing ecosystem is better or worse off afterwards remains to be seen.

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Google’s turning into a closed loop. Over half of all searches now end with zero clicks, and when AI-generated summaries appear, organic links lose a third of their clicks on the spot. If your site traffic is down, it’s not your SEO team’s fault — it’s because search as we’ve known it is dead.

“Your headline is your homepage.” In other words, your content has to earn attention without the click. You can’t rely on users landing on your site anymore, because most of them never will.

So where does that leave media brands? Smack in the middle of a reset. Here’s what the smartest operators are doing now to adapt and why the rest risk falling further behind.

1. Stop chasing traffic. Start earning intent.

Sure, you can still try to play the volume game. Crank out more articles. Cast a wider net. Cross your fingers. But the volume game won’t work like it used to.

The collapse of passive search traffic is shrinking your top of funnel. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Much of that traffic was never your real audience. It was noise. Window shoppers. Bots. AI-generated detours.

Now’s the time to trade quantity for quality. Every impression, every email capture, every form fill has to work harder. That means media professionals need to focus on:

• Sharper conversion paths
• Smarter segmentation
• Personalized nurture tracks that actually lead somewhere

When the funnel’s narrower, your optimization game has to be stronger. Period.

2. Clean up your data because the bots are winning

Let’s talk email. You may think your open and click rates look solid. But there’s a good chance those numbers are lying to you.

According to our research, up to 80% of email clicks across the industry are generated by security bots, not people.¹ That’s not just a rounding error. That’s full-on performance distortion at scale.

And it’s getting worse. These new “data center” bots mimic human behavior well enough to slip through basic detection. If you’re not using advanced bot filtering, you’re likely reporting inflated engagement, overvaluing underperforming content, and misleading your advertisers.

The takeaway: If you’re not scrubbing your metrics, you’re not measuring engagement. You’re measuring noise.

3. Your first-party data is your only real moat

Let’s stop romanticizing platform reach. You don’t own your audience on LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube. You rent it. And the rent keeps going up.

The only data that can’t be taken away, throttled, or repriced is the data you collect yourself. That means:

• Known user identities
• Email addresses
• Preference data
• Behavioral signals
• Demographics tied to intent

This isn’t just marketing hygiene — it’s strategic infrastructure. Without it, you’re building on sand.

4. If you can’t see the growth, you’re looking in the wrong place

Here’s the part most brands miss: the best audience growth isn’t visible in your dashboard. It’s happening in dark social such as Slack groups, Discord threads, iMessage chains, and private communities.

You won’t see referral traffic from these places. You can’t boost a post into them. The only way in is to be so useful someone decides to share your content voluntarily.

And no, that doesn’t mean slapping another CTA at the end of your article. It means surfacing real insights. Speak human. Create content that solves a problem or starts a conversation.

In dark social, trust is the algorithm. If your brand doesn’t have it, you won’t grow.

5. The economics matter more than the volume.

Executives who can’t answer two questions are flying blind:

• “What does it cost to acquire a user?”
• “What’s that user worth over time?”

User acquisition costs vary wildly by channel. So does LTV. The most sophisticated operators treat audience like a supply chain:

• Tracking acquisition by source
• Measuring velocity and retention
• Monitoring value creation over time

It’s not just a marketing metric. It’s a P&L strategy. And this strategy should shape every audience investment you make.

6. Audience operations is your most strategic hire

It’s not campaign management. It’s orchestration.

The best audience teams sit at the intersection of data, content, marketing, tech, and revenue. They’re translators. Strategists. Connectors.

And yes — they’re expensive. But they’re also your best shot at future-proofing your business.

If you don’t understand the role, you’ll under-resource it. If you undervalue it, you’ll fall behind.

Final Thought

The audience playbook has been rewritten. Again.

Search is evaporating. Bots are faking engagement. Social algorithms are tightening their grip. And the platforms aren’t coming to save you.

But if you know your audience — truly know them — you’re not just surviving this shift. You’re building something no algorithm can take away.

So ask yourself: Are you still chasing traffic? Or are you building something that lasts?

About the author

Tony Napoleone is VP of Client Experience at Omeda, where he helps media brands turn audience data into revenue. With deep expertise in audience development, marketing tech, and lifecycle strategy, he leads high-touch client partnerships that drive growth, engagement, and innovation.

1 Omeda Email Engagement Report Q1 2025.

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For digital media executives, the implications are serious. Fewer visits mean fewer opportunities to monetize, weaker brand authority and a growing disconnect between audiences and the trusted outlets that produce the content. Readers develop loyalty to the aggregator, not the publisher. The challenge now is to reclaim direct relationships and remind audiences why visiting a publisher’s own site matters.

Strengthening the core

The first priority is to reinforce the value of a publisher’s own destination. Strong editorial identity and a clear brand voice give readers a reason to come back. Investigative reporting, live coverage and deeply reported opinion pieces resist machine-generated simplification and highlight a publisher’s expertise. Investing in these formats makes the brand indispensable and difficult for AI to replicate.

Loyalty programs can also deepen ties. Offering exclusive access, community recognition or tangible perks encourages habitual engagement without relying on restrictive paywalls. The goal is voluntary, not coerced, return visits. Readers should want to come back because the experience is worth it., rather than being pressured through paywalls, aggressive pop-ups, or other forms of friction that limit genuine choice.

Expanding discovery and engagement

Relying on search alone is no longer viable. Audience acquisition needs to extend across a wider ecosystem: partnerships with other respected outlets, distributed content on reliable platforms, curated newsletter growth and smart syndication. Each step reduces dependence on any single traffic source and introduces the brand to new readers. Some publishers have shown how effective this can be, with audience acquisition programs generating hundreds of millions of additional monthly page views across participating outlets, helping to fill gaps left by declining search traffic.

Discovery must also go beyond distribution. Publishers can build intentional paths into their ecosystems by embracing products like curated apps, podcasts, and social channels that are designed to funnel audiences back to their owned platforms. The goal is to make discovery a two-way street: audiences find the publisher, but the publisher also actively guides them toward deeper engagement.

Once visitors arrive, their time must count. Interactive storytelling, immersive explainers and vertical video feeds keep users exploring. Research shows vertical video can generate more than triple the time spent compared with high-impact display ads. Formats that encourage longer sessions strengthen the relationship and increase the value of every visit.

Using AI as an ally

Avoiding AI altogether is not the answer. Publishers can harness machine learning to improve personalization and relevance. AI-powered recommendation engines surface content tailored to individual preferences, reinforcing the brand’s value through context and depth. The key is to integrate AI as a tool for engagement while maintaining control of the narrative.

AI can also automate low-value newsroom tasks such as headline testing, tagging, or formatting, freeing journalists to focus on reporting that machines cannot replicate. At the same time, it strengthens the use of first-party data, helping publishers uncover patterns that drive more relevant content and advertising while respecting privacy. Used in this way, AI becomes less a threat and more a tool to deepen engagement, improve efficiency, and support the distinctive editorial voice that sets publishers apart.

Search and AI: navigating the road ahead

The next five years will determine which digital media companies maintain authority and revenue. Those that cultivate direct relationships, amplify unique editorial strengths and create richer on-site experiences will weather the volatility of platform-driven traffic. Those that don’t risk fading behind a layer of algorithms.

What is unfolding is not just a shift in referral traffic but a structural reordering of how information is discovered, trusted, and monetized. Search is no longer the dependable gateway it once was, and AI is accelerating the pace of change. Publishers that thrive will be those who see discovery as an ecosystem rather than a single channel, who treat loyalty as a relationship rather than a transaction, and who use technology to enhance — not replace — their editorial identity.

The future of publishing will not be decided by algorithms alone. It will be shaped by the ability of publishers to assert their value, claim their place in the open internet, and remind audiences that real journalism and original voices are worth seeking out.

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