Richard Gingras has been surfacing in my human “feed” far too often these past few weeks.
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:
No free training. High-quality content cannot be scraped without permission for search, training, or grounding.
AI cannot substitute for news without fair value. AI Overviews and similar features must not cannibalize traffic using the very journalism they ingest.
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.
The success of streaming is creating both abundance and friction. Viewers have more to watch than ever before. Yet finding something they want often takes too long. As audiences face growing fragmentation, there’s a clear opportunity to make content discovery intuitive and rewarding again.
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.
For 25+ years, the open web ran on links. You typed a question into Google, got ten blue link results, and clicked on the one that resonated most with you.
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.
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.
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.
Whether it’s the rise of LLM search queries, AI overviews or the black-box operations of features like Discover, search and SEO is undergoing a fundamental shift.
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.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: search can no longer be your primary audience strategy. But the real shock is how fast it’s become nearly useless for audience growth.
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.
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.
Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of discovery. Search results are no longer a simple list of blue links. With tools like Google’s AI Mode delivering instant summaries, audiences often get what they need without clicking through to the original source. For publishers, this shift is already visible in their analytics. Mail Online reported click-through rates dropping by more than 50% when AI overviews appeared, even when the site ranked first in traditional search results.
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.
SEO is a dying language. Google Zero is upon us. Media businesses are already seeing the impact of the zero clickthrough economy, where the search and ads business provides information right on the search engine results page (SERP) rather than directing users through to other sites.
Recent research has demonstrated the extent to which Google Zero is impacting traffic to publishers’ websites. Pew Research Center found that “users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits)”.
Worse still, those users are “more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary”. It is an end to curiosity. And, crucially for news publishers, it is curtailing discovery. That is especially difficult for commodity news sites, which have made advertising served to unknown audiences their priority. Those logged-out users have little incentive to click through to receive exactly the same information, but with more ads served up to them.
It is already hitting home: over 60% of Gen Z and 50% of millennials are already choosing to use AI – on platforms like ChatGPT – instead of conventional search.
Logging in
It is, at least, validation for the news and information businesses that have prioritized creating a logged-in ecosystem.
Just as Google is driving the open web with its zero clickthrough approach, the name of the game for those businesses is keeping users within their own ecosystem. External links, attrition of interest, or even just the allure of new types of content elsewhere… these all run the risk of loosening the net and having users slip out.
But those businesses are in the minority. For example, 78% of digital revenue across DCN’s members still comes from advertising. But that revenue is now under threat, as advertisers seek to shift spend to AI-powered search results.
So, media businesses are both grappling with Google Zero and seeking to retain audiences at all times. Are there any silver bullets?
Unusually for this industry, the answer this time might just be ‘yes’. To a point, at least.
The app, a regular fixture within a media business’ arsenal, might provide the solution to those issues – as long as publishers recognize how audiences use them in 2025.
Multimedia apps
As parts of the industry seek to make the logged-in economy the standard, how far along the path to primacy are news apps?
On the face of it, the initial stats look bleak. Per the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, younger audiences are increasingly unlikely to visit news sites or apps.
Source: Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025.
These findings build upon research from the previous year’s report, which found that only 22% of news consumers in general identify news websites or apps as their main source of online news. That was down a full 10 percentage points when compared to respondents in 2018.
However, publishers have not been ignorant of that fact. Many have done their best to ameliorate that issue. They have taken note of the fact that audiences are choosing to receive news content in the form of digital video. In order to cater to that – as well as the trend towards vertical video on mobile devices – media companies, including the BBC, have chosen to include vertical video within their apps.
It is part of a wider trend towards making news apps more multimedia-oriented. The thought process is: if AI is making it harder to bring news consumers into the ecosystem, we need to cater to a wider variety of their wants once they are within. That should – in theory – prevent them from leaving.
Sarah Hartman, VP of product at The New York Times, says her team is investing in that multimedia approach: “The app also offers an optimal experience of our audio journalism. We’re increasingly leaning into multimodal UX to give our users more flexibility and control, while always meeting our high standards of craft.”
In the UK, the Observer (formerly Tortoise Media) is making a concerted effort to keep listeners to its in-app audio around once they have finished a podcast episode. Its audience growth editor for podcasts Aleena Augustine explained at the Publisher App Summit 2025 that the app has a dedicated curation team, who manually create a recommendation feed per podcast designed to lead listeners onto another piece of content, whether audio or text.
Speaking at the same event Muj Ali, group product manager of acquisition, retention and apps for the Financial Times, noted that 70% of its subscriber traffic now comes via its app.
He also stated that there is plenty of headroom to expand its content and audience strategies: “It’s the most engaged channel that we have, but also the most underutilized… but in general, it’s a place that we want to continue to grow.”
Games and growth
While news and information is the bread and butter of a media business’s activity, the need to keep audiences within the app is forcing many to branch out into other areas. Famously, the New York Times has increasingly invested in games precisely because of how “sticky” they make its app. Other titles, including the Telegraph and Guardian in the UK, have emulated that approach as well.
This shift is backed up by research from Pugpig: apps with games and multimedia more generally have a significantly higher engagement rate than those with news content alone.
That has also been demonstrated outside of the hard news environment. In the UK, Stylist found that audience members who engaged with its puzzles were 68% more likely to read an article that same week.
Additionally, publishers are trying to make the content within their apps more habit-based than incidental: according to the same 2025 Pugpig Media App Report, edition-based news apps outperform their timeline-based equivalents with regards to engagement. It speaks to an opportunity app-based publishers have to zig where the always-available AI search entities zag.
Appointment-based publishing, audio and video, and games are likely to get people to stick around once they are within the app. With AI-powered search, however, the task of getting audiences into a news publishers’ ecosystem remains a difficult one.
Hartman states that, as with all of the NYT’s products, the best use of its app is to highlight the strong journalistic work its team produces: “We’ll likely need to evolve our interfaces to meet changing user expectations around personalization, adaptability, and brevity. But we also believe that the fundamental purpose of our app, providing a direct connection to our journalism served in the best possible way, will continue to be a valuable proposition.”
For news publishers with strong brands and reputations, it might well be possible to stem the tide of Google Zero.
Audiences are becoming more aware of AI-search’s limitations, and publishers can provide context beyond a SERP snippet. Provided those media businesses have invested in making their apps sticky. For, once audiences have landed, the humble app may indeed be a solution to this new problem.
The numbers are in – and they are damning. DCN’s latest member-survey shows median year-over-year referral traffic from Google Search to premium publishers down 10% over just eight weeks. Non-news brands took the biggest hit, down 14%. News brands fell 7%. Declines outnumbered gains two-to-one, most in the -1% to -25% range.
The worst weeks were brutal: news brands plunged 16% the week of May 25th; non-news fell 17% the week of June 22nd. Mind you, these aren’t random fluctuations. They are sustained losses hitting both breaking news publishers and evergreen entertainment brands. And let’s not forget that this is the exact content Google’s AI is trained on and now replaces with its own summaries. The company that has long draped itself in the flag of the open web is now trampling it, trading the public square for a walled garden built on monopoly profits.
From search “partner” to search competitor
Over the past year starting in May 2024, Google has been rolling out AI Overviews, now AI Mode. These AI-generated answers, in which Google synthesizes publisher content into Google’s own product, sit at the very top of search results. This transforms what has long been the discovery engine for our daily lives into a place where all traffic dead ends at Google. Searchers get an answer and the click to the source vanishes. Of course, that’s the point. Google wins.
The Pew Research Center recently confirmed what DCN’s member data makes plain: when AI Overviews are present, users are significantly “less likely” to click on links to publisher websites. Instead, they stay on Google, consuming summaries pulled significantly from Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, and work of premium publishers, all of whose content the AI is paraphrasing.
This is the definition of what has long been called a “zero-click” environment. In this system, the platform harvests and delivers information without sending the reader to those who actually created it, often at significant cost and always with the intention of serving their own audiences. For premium publishers, it means fewer readers, ad impressions, and subscription conversions. For the open web, it means less discovery, diversity, and accountability in the information ecosystem.
Google’s sunny story – and the cloudy reality
On August 6th, Google published a blog post proclaiming (arguably gaslighting) that “AI in Search is driving more queries and higher-quality clicks.” The tone, utterly unsupported by data, suggests that publishers should be thrilled.
The reality drawn from DCN’s member data – which spans 19 companies, from major national newsrooms to global entertainment brands – tells quite a different story. Over eight weeks in May and June 2025, the median Google Search referral was down almost every week, with losses outpacing gains two-to-one. For non-news brands, the downward slope was steady and unbroken.
This isn’t noise. It’s a structural change in how Google distributes (or withholds) traffic. And it comes as Google sits on more than 95% of the mobile search market, with a pending remedies order from Judge Amit Mehta in the landmark U.S. v. Google Search antitrust case. Unless Judge Mehta adopts the Justice Department’s proposed publisher safeguards and immediately restricts Google’s tying of AI training of AI Overviews to search inclusion, the “recidivist monopolist” will keep publishers in handcuffs.
Why this matters for the future of journalism and entertainment
For DCN members, 78% of digital revenue still comes from advertising. That revenue depends on reach. Every point of search traffic lost to AI modules squeezes the budgets that fund investigative reporting, global coverage, and ambitious entertainment.
In terms of advertising monetization, this continues a trend DCN has been monitoring for the last decade. During this period, Google’s advertising revenues have shifted from a 50/50 split with the rest of the web to surpassing more than 90% last quarter for the first time.
And the harm isn’t limited to media companies. When Google’s AI modules surface information from unverified or lightly moderated sources like Reddit or YouTube – sometimes above trusted, accountable outlets – users get convenience at the expense of quality. It’s a degradation of the public information supply, dressed up as innovation.
A familiar pattern, with a dangerous twist
This certainly isn’t the first time platforms have siphoned value from publishers. Google’s featured snippets, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and Facebook Instant Articles all promised to improve the user experience. And all ended up centralizing control and weakening the economics of publishing across the open web.
The difference now is intent. Google’s AI results don’t just excerpt; they replace. Pew’s research shows many users stop at the AI answer. That’s direct substitution, without fair bargaining or licensing, and it maps to the declines DCN measured.
Even breaking news, which DCN members suggest is still somewhat protected from AI Overviews, isn’t entirely safe. As the AI models improve and update faster with daily training, even those moments of publisher advantage may vanish.
What needs to change
Transparency: Google must disclose auditable data on AI Overview click-through rates by query type, content category, and geography.
Real opt-out: publishers need a way to block use of their content in AI answers without sacrificing search visibility.
Fair licensing: if OpenAI, Amazon, News Corp, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and others can make licensing deals, so can Google. It’s an emerging, important market for publishers.
Regulatory oversight: treat AI Overviews and AI Mode as part of Google’s search monopoly. A monopoly self-preferencing is not innovation; it’s foreclosure.
The choice ahead
Premium journalism and entertainment don’t appear by magic. They’re the product of significant investment, skilled creators, editorial standards, and increasing risk. Google’s AI rides on that work, and now threatens to cut off the audience that sustains it.
This is not a call for special treatment. It’s a call to preserve the integrity of the open web. We must ensure that the same AI “answers” users see at the top of Google Search don’t become a free substitute for the original work they’re based on.
If we allow the search monopoly to wall off the web behind AI-generated summaries, we’ll end up with fewer sources, weaker journalism, and a less informed public. The open web is worth defending. And the data is clear: the time to act is now.
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We’re not at Google Zero quite yet. But, as we near this point where Google search results provide direct answers and reduce outbound links, publishers face a critical imperative: They must build direct connections, maintain the loyalty of existing readers, and deeply engage audiences.
Since Google introduced AI Overviews 14 months ago, the AI-generated summaries have hurt publishers’ bottom lines, scuttled search traffic, and impacted ad revenue and subscriptions. This has resulted “zero-click” searches and a sharp decline in traffic, which some have dubbed “Google Zero”. News searches resulting in no click-throughs to news websites grew from 56% to nearly 69% as of May 2025, according to report from digital market intelligence company Similarweb.
About 40% of The Atlantic’s traffic comes from search, CEO Nicholas Thompson told Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View. “We’re seeing a significant decline, maybe a 20% decline,” he said. This translates to an 8% drop in overall website visitors, impacting ad revenue, subscriptions, and brand awareness.
AI Overviews appear in 39% of Google queries, according to Website Planet. An estimated 5.6% of U.S. search traffic on desktop browsers last month went to AI-powered large language models, according to market intelligence firm Datos, The Wall Street Journal reported. And analytics company Authoritas found that a site previously ranked first in a search result lost 79% of its traffic if results were delivered below an AI overview.
Whether publishers like it or not, that traffic isn’t coming back. Google Zero looms large on the horizon. Pew Research found that for searches with AI summaries, Google users clicked on a traditional search result link in only 8% of visits, compared to 15% without AI summaries.
And plenty of publishers aren’t happy about things. A legal complaint was submitted to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority over the impact of Google AI Overviews on news publishers, arguing that Google is abusing its market dominance by using publisher content in AI-generated responses without fair compensation, while simultaneously reducing traffic to news websites. Additionally, The Independant Publishers Alliance filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission in June, alleging that Google abuses its market power in online search.
Meanwhile, as publishers adapt to this new reality, DCN spoke to some industry experts to reveal what’s working.
Direct relationships important, valuable
Some publishers aren’t waiting for Google Zero, they’re already building the direct audience relationships and cultivating reader loyalty that will matter even more when search traffic disappears.
Hearst Connecticut Media Group strategically builds direct audience relationships as part of its long-term audience strategy. Their GameTime CT high school sports vertical, which serves high school parents, athletes and coaches, drives subscriptions according to Mandy Hofmockel, managing editor of audience at Hearst Media Connecticut.
“It goes above and beyond game coverage and is a formula for success in serving local audiences,” Hofmockel says. “Our high school sports coverage is evolving to be less about the sport itself and more about athletes, their stories around the game. We are building depth, experiences and connections.”
To deepen engagement, the company launched it’s first texting campaign for UConn basketball during March Madness this year, she says. “That platform allowed that small but engaged pool of UConn fans to message us directly with questions on everything from player injuries to coach strategies, to just like where they could watch the game,” she says.
Hearst Media Connecticut is also deepening its reporting in key local areas, including weather, education and real estate, even adding a meteorologist to its team and developing weather tools and trackers. Hearst’s hyperlocal approach, covering school closures, local weather patterns, and community-specific issues, provides indispensable information creating direct traffic that survives the death of search.
Being a local publisher provides advantage. “We know what it’s like to live in, go to school in and eat across the state. That’s reflected in our coverage and the key coverage areas for the newsroom,” Hofmockel says. “Our readers don’t hesitate to share us with us what they think of our coverage because they feel that connection to us.” This means when readers need to know what’s really happening in their town or city, they come straight to Hearst instead of searching for answers.
Direct engagement, across multiple platforms
BBC Studios has “embraced all manner of platforms to reach audiences wherever they are, from a thriving BBC News WhatsApp channel to Instagram clubs for our Culture super-fans.” However, their primary focus on building stronger, direct relationships through product innovation and editorial strategy, says Ben Goldberger, GM and executive director of editorial content. “Central to this is the relaunch of our BBC.com site and app, which offers a premium, more streamlined user experience that encouraged repeat visits and deeper engagement,” Goldberger says.
The company rolled out a new pay model on BBC.com in the US, which Goldberger called an important step in strengthening the connection with their most passionate users. The launch of the new pay model will help them gain greater insight into their audiences’ preferences and behaviors, and to strengthen those connections.
“One constant has been our commitment to our owned-and-operated channels,” he says. “We have seen meaningful success driving engagement on our platforms as we reduce reliance on those of others.”
BBC Studios operates 11 regular newsletters for global audiences, spanning topics from US politics to personal health. Goldberger says the response to these has been incredibly encouraging. “Our newsletters subscribers are deeply engaged with our work, regularly visiting BBC.com from newsletter links and taking the time to send thoughtful, considered feedback,” he says. “Indeed, the outpouring of notes from readers of our In History newsletter led us to create a recurring section featuring reader memories that is among the most popular.”
BBC Studios aren’t just creating an email list, they’re creating a feedback loop where engaged newsletter readers become content contributors and reliable traffic drivers. It’s a two-way relationship that generates both audience loyalty and editorial material. BBC Studios owns every touchpoint in the reader journey, making them insulated from external platform disruptions like Google Zero.
Building stories AI can’t replicate
David Skok built The Logic, a Canadian business publication focused on technology and innovation, as a subscription-first publication from launch in 2019. “Our business model necessitated us having a direct relationship with our readers from the start,” the CEO and editor-in-chief says.
In a recent column about AI’s impact on journalism, Skok delved into the existential question facing publishers as AI upends traditional web discovery. He believes in creating stories that no AI platform can summarize accurately.
“If you’re writing stuff that is yours, exclusively yours, you cannot get anywhere else and isn’t answered in just one pithy response from a chat engine, that’s how you’re going to win,” he continues. “The thing that’s really still going to differentiate you is what stories are you assigning and what stories are your reporters pitching? Are they things that you cannot get anywhere else?”
Beyond content strategy, The Logic is intentional about their audience engagement. “I think intimate events are really working,” Skok explains, describing some of The Logic’s recent events. “We’ll go to a place like Calgary or Vancouver and have 30 people for breakfast and just talk about the issues of the day, bring in one of our columnists, and those kinds of things are extreme value for a smaller group of people. And they feel it.”
The Logic also has a Slack channel for direct engagement with reporters, and hosts virtual events based on breaking news. “We try to make sure that our readers understand that what they’re getting with The Logic subscription is way more than just access to ungated content behind a paywall,” he says.
Beyond the (zero) click
“Publishers will have to shift their expectation expectations from some of the primary referral sources we’ve relied on in the past,” Hofmockel says. “It doesn’t mean we completely give up on search and social. But we have to adjust our strategies and find additional ways to connect with our communities.”
As publishers focus on direct relationships, they continue to make sure they’re “maximized for visibility,” on Google because “it’s still an important channel for distributing our work,” Hofmockel from Hearst says. However, it is important to take a strategic, rather than dependant, approach. In other words: never be solely dependent on platforms for your core business model.
Hofmockel believes it’s an opportunity to reevaluate not just audience strategies, but publishers’ content approach. “We can build new, distinctive products (that) are rooted in data, go deep in the categories that matter… and make sure we’re giving readers reasons to come and subscribe. Building around these needs with expert reporting will make us essential with or without platforms,” she says.
Building direct relationships, on whatever platforms you own, whether it’s newsletters, events podcasts, or content verticals, publishers must be conscious and intentional about owning their audiences, according to The Logic’s Skok.
“I think that’s the most important relationship you can have, and it’s the one that will allow you to withstand this change. The thing with a subscription business, like a paywall business like we have is, it’s so much harder to build it up. It’s slower, it’s more methodical. There’s no quick hack, growth hack to make it happen. But once you’ve built it up, it’s really hard to tear it down because these readers are invested in your success.”
As AI reshapes digital discovery, publishers who cultivate direct, meaningful relationships with engaged audiences, position themselves to survive and thrive in the post-Google Zero landscape.
When you search on Google today, you’re likely to see a boxed summary at the top of the results page. This feature, called an AI Overview, aims to answer your question instantly by summarizing information pulled from multiple websites. According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, AI Overviews benefits publishers. “If you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside,” he claims. However, publishers and website owners are skeptical of this perspective. Research suggests that this skepticism is not unfounded.
In a new report, AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%, researchers Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan analyze how AI Overviews impact user behavior in Google Search. Their findings suggest that these AI-generated summaries are not increasing clicks to websites but decreasing them.
150,000 keywords trigger AI Overviews in Google Search.
150,000 keywords are similar in topic and intent but do not trigger AI Overviews.
They focus specifically on informational queries—questions like “how to start composting” or “symptoms of low iron”—since 99.2% of keywords that trigger AI Overviews fall into this category.
Using aggregated Google Search Console (GSC) data, the researchers calculate the average desktop clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking result on each keyword. They compare results from March 2024 (before AI Overviews roll out in the U.S.) to March 2025 (after rollout) to evaluate the impact.
Impact of AI Overviews: less clicks
In March 2024, the average CTR for the #1 result on AI Overview keywords is 7.3%.
In March 2025, that number falls to just 2.6%.
This represents a 34.5% decrease in clicks when an AI Overview appears at the top of the search results.
In plain terms, websites that once received steady traffic from top search rankings now see far fewer visits when AI Overviews appear.
Why are search clicks dropping?
AI Overviews operate similarly to Google’s Featured Snippets. The search results attempt to answer the user’s question directly on the results page, eliminating the need to click through to any website.
While Google includes source links in these summaries, it often shares them across multiple sites. No single publisher is likely to capture a significant share of the clicks. The result is a growing number of zero-click searches, where users get what they need without ever leaving Google.
Adding to the issue, Google’s Search Console doesn’t separate AI Overview clicks from standard organic traffic. Publishers can’t easily see whether changes in performance are related to AI Overviews or other factors. This lack of transparency makes it even harder for site owners to understand and respond to traffic declines.
Industry experts see the same trend
The study’s findings aren’t isolated. SEO professionals across the industry report similar patterns. Lily Ray of Amsive Digital warns that AI-dominated search results could “decimate” organic performance. Rand Fishkin of SparkToro has also voiced concern over Google’s increasing efforts to keep users within its ecosystem rather than sending them out to external websites. These observations align with the research: AI Overviews appear to reduce visibility and engagement for content publishers.
Looking ahead
The study by Law and Guan represents the most detailed empirical look so far at the impact of AI Overviews. It challenges Google’s claims and raises important questions about the future of search visibility for publishers.
Despite Google’s assurances, the current data shows that AI Overviews are pulling attention away from websites, not driving it toward them. This shift signals a need to rethink how we approach content and visibility in a rapidly evolving search landscape.
Gone are the days when a sports fan could locate their favorite team’s game quickly on a predictable outlet. Instead, broadcast contracts are divided among many media outlets, with sporting events appearing on dozens of broadcast, cable and regional sports networks, as well as streaming services. In fact, it’s gotten so tough that ESPN thinks that the biggest win for sports fans may just be having an easy way to figure out where an event is being offered in time to catch the opening kick-off, tip-off or puck drop.
Disney’s ESPN set out to solve the sports discovery problem with its new “Where to Watch” feature. Offered on its main app and website, the feature helps viewers instantly locate any sports event appearing on ESPN platforms and elsewhere, including cable and broadcast networks or streaming services. ESPN is aiming for this feature be comprehensive across the market, not just for ESPN and ABC properties, because the goal is to solve fan fragmentation and frustration.
Where to Watch, which debuted in August, showcases tens of thousands of events across dozens of leagues. Included are events from the NFL, NCAA football, NCAA men’s and women’s basketball, MLB, NHL, NBA, WNBA, NASCAR, UFC, F1, PGA Tour, MLS, tennis majors, Premier League, Champions League, and other live sports events that air on Disney’s ESPN platforms—with plans to grow.
We recently spoke with Casey Grabbe, senior director of ESPN Strategy, and Chris Jason, executive director of ESPN product management, on the development and objectives of this ambitious feature.
The feature aims to solve fragmentation
“Where to Watch is an easy-to-use guide for sports fans to locate any sports event on ESPN platforms and beyond. That includes broadcast, cable and regional sports networks and streaming services,” Jason explained. “From Where to Watch, fans can view all the sports events for an entire day, along with the network or service on which to find them, with quick one-click access to ESPN network streams for pay TV authenticated users and ESPN+ subscribers.”
Beyond just ESPN, fans are also linked directly to select partner networks, which currently include regional sports networks such as NESN and Monumental Sports, Jason said. Fans can search for events, filter, and customize the guide to prioritize their favorite teams and leagues.
“This makes for a fast and easy to discover what they care about most, all tied to their ESPN profile and personalization preferences,” Jason explained.
The motivation behind the Where to Watch feature was simple: reduce complexity.
Disney’s internal research found that sports fans are confused about where to find games, according to Grabbe. As sports viewing has become fragmented across many TV networks and streaming platforms, it has also become difficult and confusing for people to know where they can watch their favorite teams, players, and sports.
“We are hoping to solve that consumer pain point by creating a centralized home for sports viewing information with an intuitive interface that is easily accessible from within their daily routine of visiting ESPN.com and the ESPN App,” Grabbe explained.
How Where to Watch works
Where to Watch is designed to be a simple, scrollable, time-based guide of sports events, Jason said. It is powered by a proprietary event database, managed by the ESPN Stats and Analysis team.
The event database aggregates ESPN and partner data feeds along with originally sourced information and programming details from more than 250 media sources, including television networks and streaming platforms, Jason explained.
“We currently support coverage of tens of thousands of events across dozens of sports and leagues, and other live sporting events airing on ESPN platforms,” Jason said.
In order to watch an event, fans need only press boldly colored “watch” buttons on live game selections, which takes the viewer directly to the broadcast. That is, provided that they are a subscriber to ESPN+ or a pay-tv service. Fans can also customize the feature to highlight a specific sport or league.
Event-driven database drives discovery
Where to Watch is currently available for free to all ESPN App and ESPN.com users, which do not require a paid subscription. The feature employs an event database that was created by and is managed by the ESPN Stats and Information Group. The Stats group aggregates and analyzes data from ESPN and partner feeds. It combines that data with that of more than 250 other media sources. This includes television networks and streaming services. ESPN has a partnership arrangement in which it links users on the ESPN App directly to partner feeds to view content, in an effort to cut down on the friction of finding and assessing sports content.
Sports fans using the Where to Watch service see two primary features: A Favorites element and the Guide. If the fanhas a favorite team, sport or league they wish to watch, they can set that information into the feature and it will display upcoming games or events at the top of their screen. The viewer need only click on the event they want to be directed to. The viewer can personalize or change favorite settings at any time. Otherwise, the Guide feature will display all of the options available to watch at a given time on a given day.
Early feedback says Where to Watch is a winner
Jason notes that the Where to Watch feature was designed with the sports fan desires in mind, and that seems to have paid off so far.
“Fan feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, primarily in that this is focused on solving a real pain point for sports fans,” Grabbe said. “We see this sentiment reflected on social media, through various media outlets following launch, and ongoing interactions with sports fans. Several million fans have already used the feature, which is a really promising sign that this can become an indispensable utility going forward.”
Initial partnerships have been formed with only a few regional sports networks – NESN and Monumental Sports – to link fans directly with their programming, with plans to increase the number of these partnerships.
“We want ESPN to be a part of every sports fan’s daily routine,” Grabbe stressed. “Providing fans with this added functionality is helping to further strengthen ESPN’s position as the preeminent digital sports platform. We are always thinking about how we can put the sports fan’s needs first.” ESPN also plans to launch a new stand-alone direct-to-consumer product in 2025, and hopes to include its Where to Watch feature.
“Our near-term focus is to expand coverage across more sports events and leagues,” Jason said. “We are also working on adding additional utility within the experience, for example giving fans the ability to set reminder alerts for games they are interested in. In parallel we continue to monitor fan feedback to evaluate additional ways to improve the experience.”
These days, digital media companies are all trying to figure out how to best incorporate AI into their products, services and capabilities, via partnerships or by building their own. The goal is to gain a competitive edge as they tailor AI capabilities to their audiences, subscribers and clients’ specific needs.
By leveraging proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) digital media companies have a new tool in their toolboxes. These offerings offer differentiation and added value, enhanced audience engagement and user experience. These proprietary LLMs also set them apart from companies that are opting for licensing partnerships with other LLMs, which offer more generalized knowledge bases and draw from a wide range of sources in terms of subject matter and quality.
A growing number of digital media companies are rolling out their own LLM-based generative AI features for search and data-based purposes to enhance user experience and create fine-tuned solutions. In addition to looking at several of the offerings media companies are bringing to market, we spoke to Dow Jones, Financial Times and Outside Inc. about the generative AI tools they’ve built and explore the strategies behind them.
Media companies fuel generative AI for better solutions
Digital media companies are harnessing the power of generative AI to unlock the full potential of their own – sometimes vast amounts – of proprietary information. These new products allow them to offer valuable, personalized, and accessible content to their audiences, subscribers, customers and clients.
Take for example, Bloomberg, which released a research paper in March detailing the development of its new large-scale generative AI model called BloombergGPT. The LLM was trained on a wide range of financial data to assist Bloomberg in improving existing financial natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, news classification, and question answering, among others. In addition, the tool will help Bloomberg customers organize the vast quantities of data available on the Bloomberg Terminal in ways that suit their specific needs.
Launched in beta June 4, Fortune partnered with Accenture to create a generative AI product called Fortune Analytics. The tool delivers ChatGPT-style responses based on 20 years of financial data from the Fortune 500 and Global 500 lists, as well as related articles, and helps customers build graphic visualizations.
Generative AI helps customers speed up processes
A deeper discussion of how digital media companies are using AI provides insights to help others understand the potential to leverage the technology for their own needs. Dow Jones, for example uses Generative AI for a platform that helps customers meet compliance requirements.
Dow Jones Risk Compliance is a global provider of risk and compliance solutions across banks and corporations which helps organizations perform checks on their counterparties. They do that from the perspective of complying with anti-money laundering regulation, anti-corruption regulation, looking to also mitigate supply chain risk and reputational issues. Dow Jones Risk Compliance provides tools that allow customers to search data sets and help manage regulatory and reputational risk.
In April, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance launched an AI-powered research platform for clients that enables organizations to build an investigative due diligence report covering multiple sources in as little as five minutes. Called Dow Jones Integrity Check, the research platform is a fully automated solution that goes beyond screening to identify risks and red flags from thousands of data sources.
The planning for Dow Jones Integrity Check goes back a few years, as the company sought to provide its customers with a quicker way to do due diligence on their counterparties, Joel Lange, executive Vice President and General Manager, Risk and Research at Dow Jones explained.
Lange said that Dow Jones effectively built a platform which automatically creates a report for customers on a person or company, using technology from AI firm Xapien. It brings together Dow Jones’ data that is plugged into other data sets, corporate registrar information, and wider web content. It then leverages the platform’s Generative AI capability to produce a piece of analysis or a report.
Dow Jones Risk & Compliance customers use their technology to make critical, often complex, business decisions. Often the data collection process can be incredibly time consuming, taking days if not weeks.
The new tool “provides investigations, teams, banks and corporations with initial due diligence. Essentially it’s a starting point for them to conduct their due diligence, effectively automating a lot of that data collection process,” according to Lange.
Lange points out that the compliance field is always in need of increased efficiency. However, it carries with it great risk to reputation. Dow Jones Integrity Check was designed to reshape compliance workflows, creating an additional layer of investigation that can be deployed at scale. “What we’re doing here is enabling them to more rapidly and efficiently aggregate, consolidate, and bring information to the fore, which they can then analyze and then take that investigation further to finalize an outcome,” Lange said.
Regardless of the quality of the generated results, most experts believe that it is important to have a human in the loop in order to maintain content accuracy, mitigate bias, and enhance the credibility of the content. Lange also said that it’s critical to have “that human in the loop to evaluate the information and then to make a decision in relation to the action that the customer wants to take.”
In recent months, digital media companies have been launching their own generative AI tools that allow users to ask questions in natural language and receive accurate and relevant results.
The Associated Press created Merlin, an AI-generated search tool that makes searching the AP archive more accurate. “Merlin pinpoints key moments in our videos to exact second and can be used for older archive material that lacks modern keywords or metadata,” explained AP Editor in Chief Julie Pace at The International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April.
Outside’s Scout: AI search with useful results
Chatbots have become a popular form of search. Originally pre-programmed and only able to answer select questions included in their programming, chatbots have evolved and increased engagement by providing a conversational interface. Used for everything from organizing schedules and news updates to customer service inquiries, Generative AI-based chatbots assist users in finding information more efficiently across a wide range of industries.
Much like The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other digital media organizations that blocked OpenAI from using their content to power artificial intelligence, Outside CEO Robin Thurston explained that Outside Inc. wasn’t going to let third parties scrape their platforms to train LLM models.
Instead, they looked at leveraging their own content and data. “We had a lot of proprietary content that we felt was not easily accessible. It’s almost what I’d call the front page problem, which is you put something on the front page and then it kind of disappears into the ether,” Thurston said.
“We asked ourselves: How do we create something leveraging all this proprietary data? How do we leverage that in a way that really brings value to our user?” Thurston said. The answer was Scout, Outside Inc.’s AI search assistant. Scout is a custom-developed chatbot.
The company could see that generative AI offered a way to make that content accessible and even more useful to its readers. Outside had a lot of evergreen content that wasn’t adding value once it left the front page. Their brands inspire and inform audiences about outdoor adventures, new destinations and gear – a lot of which is evergreen and proprietary content that still had value if it could easily be surfaced by its audience. The chat interface allows their content to continue to be accessible to readers after it is no longer front and center on the website.
Scout gives users a summary answer to their question, leveraging Outside Inc’s proprietary data, and surfaces articles that it references. “It’s just a much more advanced search mechanism than our old tool was. Not only does it summarize, but it then returns the things that are most relevant,” he explained.
Additionally, Outside Inc’s old search function worked by each individual brand. Scout searches across the 20+ properties owned by the parent company which include Backpacker, Climbing, SKI Magazine, and Yoga Journal, among others. Scout brings all of the results together, from the 20+ different Outside brands, from the best camping destinations, to the best trails, outdoor activities for the family, gear, equipment and food all in one result.
One aspect that sets Outside Inc.’s model apart is their customer base, which differs from general news media customers. Outside’s customers engage in a different type of interaction, not just a quick transactional skim of a news story. “We have a bit of a different relationship in that they’re not only getting inspiration from us, which trip should I take? What gear should I buy? But then because of our portfolio, they’re kind of looking at what’s next,” Thurston said.
It was important to Thurston to use the LLM in a number of different ways, so Outside Inc launched a local newsletter initiative with the help of AI. “On Monday mornings we do a local running, cycling and outdoor newsletter that goes to people that sign up for it, and it uses that same LLM to pick what types of routes and content for that local newsletter that we’re now delivering in 64,000 ZIP codes in the U.S.”
Thurston said they had a team working on Scout and it took about six months. “Luckily, we had already built a lot of infrastructure in preparation for this in terms of how we were going to leverage our data. Even for something like traditional search, we were building a backend so that we could do that across the board. But this is obviously a much more complicated model that allows us to do it in a completely new way,” he said.
Connecting AI search to a real subscriber need
In late March, The Financial Times released its first generative AI feature for subscribers called Ask FT. Like Scout, the chat-based search tool allows users to ask any question and receive a response using FT content published over the last two decades. The feature is currently available to approximately 500 FT Professional subscribers. It is powered by the FT’s own internal search capabilities, combined with a third-party LLM.
The tool is designed to help users understand complicated issues or topics, like Ireland’s offshore energy policy, rather than just searching for specific information. Ask FT searches through Financial Times (FT) content, generates a summary and cites the sources.
“It works particularly well for people who are trying to understand quite complex issues that might have been going on over time or have lots of different elements,” explained Lindsey Jayne, the chief product officer of the Financial Times.
Jayne explained that they spend a lot of time understanding why people choose the FT and how they use it. People read the FT to understand the world around them, to have a deep background knowledge of emerging events and affairs. “With any kind of technology, it’s always important to look at how technology is evolving to see what it can do. But I think it’s really important to connect that back to a real need that your customers have, something they’re trying to get done. Otherwise it’s just tech for the sake of tech and people might play with it, but not stick with it,” she said.
Trusted sources and GenAI attribution
Solutions like those from Dow Jones, FT and Outside Inc. highlight the power of a brand with a trusted audience relationship to create deep, authentic relationships built on reliability and credibility. Trusted media brands are considered authoritative because their content is based on credible sources and facts, which ensures accuracy.
Currently, generative AI has demonstrated low accuracy and poses challenges to sourcing and attribution. Attribution is a central feature for digital media companies who roll out their own generative AI solutions. For Dow Jones compliance customers, attribution is critical to customers, to know if they’re going to make a decision based on information that is available in the media, according to Lange.
“They need to have that attributed to within the solution so that if it’s flowing into their audit trails or they have to present that in a court of law, or if they would need to present it to our internal audit, the attribution is really key. (Attribution) is going to be critical for a lot of the solutions that will come to market,” he said. “The attribution has to be there in order to rely on it for a compliance use case or really any other use case. You really need to know where that fact or that piece of information or data actually came from and be able to source it back to the underlying article.”
The Financial Times’ generative AI tool also offers attribution to FT articles in all of its answers. Ask FT pulls together lots of different source material, generates an answer, and attributes it to various FT articles. “What we ask the large language model to do is to read those segments of the articles and to turn them into a summary that explains the things you need to know and then to also cite them so that you have the opportunity to check it,” Jayne said.
They also ask the FT model to infer from people’s questions when it should be searching from. “Maybe you’re really interested in what’s happened in the last year or so, and we also get the model to reread the answer, reread all of the segments and check that, as kind of a guard against hallucination. You can never get rid of hallucination totally, but you can do lots to mitigate it.”
The Financial Times is also asking for feedback from the subscribers using the tool. “We’re literally reading all of the feedback to help understand what kinds of questions work, where it falls down, where it doesn’t, and who’s using it, why and when.”
Leaning into media strengths and adding a superpower
Generative AI seems to have created unlimited opportunities and also considerable challenges, questions and concerns. However it is clear that an asset many media companies possess is a deep reservoir of quality content and it is good for business to extract the most value from the investment in its creation. Leveraging their own content to train and program generative AI tools that serve readers seems like a very promising application.
In fact, generative AI can give trustworthy sources a bit of a super power. Jayne from the FT offered the example of scientists using the technology to read through hundreds of thousands of research papers and find patterns in a process that would otherwise take years to read in an effort to make important connections.
While scraped-content LLMs pose risks to authenticity, accuracy and attribution, proprietary learning models offer a promising alternative.
As Jayne put it, “The media has “an opportunity to harness what AI could mean for the user experience, what it could mean for journalism, in a way that’s very thoughtful, very clear and in line with our values and principles.” At the same time, she cautions that we shouldn’t be “getting overly excited because it’s not the answer to everything – even though we can’t escape the buzz at the moment.”
We are seeing many efforts bump up against the limits of what generative AI is able to do right now. However, media companies can avoid some of generative AI’s current pitfalls by employing the technology’s powerful language prediction, data processing and summarization capabilities while leaning into their own strengths of authenticity and accuracy.
