This week Barry and I had a crackin’ exchange with Luke Halls. It was great to hear about the very healthy subscription model at The Times of London, in addition to their having one of the most engaged news apps in the UK.

So let’s dive in.

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Steve: Let’s find out a bit more about The Times. For those who may not know, The Times and The Sunday Times have around 659,000 subscribers. One of the reasons I’m such a fan is that I noticed years ago how often The Times would rank particularly high in search. What became clear was that it wasn’t just a search play, it was an app play as well, because you were creating very targeted articles that gathered people in via search and then added value inside the product. Before we go into the SEO strategy and how you might be dealing with our lovely AI overlords, it’d be good to know how you got into journalism in the first place.

Luke: Yeah, of course. I think, as with most people on my team and possibly in the industry as well, my route was quite twisty, bendy, windy. I’ve always been a music guy. I’ve been playing in bands for half my lifetime. When you’re a teenager, anything editorial to do with music really captures the imagination, so I was very into titles like NME, Q, Mojo, and Guitarist magazine. That was probably my first real introduction to journalism in a meaningful way. It only really kickstarted when I was about eighteen and managed to land a week’s internship at The Telegraph in 2013. I was on the SEO team, which is funny given where I am today. During that week I learned the fundamentals: internal linking, pitching content ideas, how taxonomies work, that kind of thing. Then I went to Liverpool Hope University, where I studied English and communication studies. As part of that, I did modules on newspaper journalism and digital publishing, and on the side I was writing music and concert reviews for the student radio blog. The copy was awful, but it taught me so much about the process of journalism and what good looks like.

Steve: In SEO, everyone has a lightbulb moment when they figure out that this is for them. Did you have one of those?

Luke: I definitely did. That came after university. I’d graduated and was still writing for music websites on the side, but I also landed an internship at Wallpaper magazine, which is an art and design-focused publication. I moved in as the digital intern and got involved in everything digital: production workflow, social, homepage management, and SEO. I spent a lot of time discovering the different pockets of digital publishing. A couple of years in, when I was given a permanent position, I realised I had a much better understanding of search and what meaningful traffic looked like, especially because we were a non-paywalled brand and search was a key referrer. This was in the days of AMP, so that was all the rage then. After that I moved over to HELLO! magazine, where I worked as an SEO executive, then moved into an audience editor role, which gave me the freedom to experiment and really focus on search as a referrer. I’ve been at The Times for almost five years now, exclusively in SEO roles. I came in as an SEO journalist, then moved into a tech SEO role as an analyst, then deputy head of SEO, and as of about three weeks ago, Head of SEO.

Steve: Congratulations. Tell us a bit more about the role of SEO at The Times. What are your objectives, how has it changed, and where are you focused at the moment?

Luke: I lead a team of seven spanning editorial and technical SEO. Fundamentally, my job is to make sure we’re meeting quality audiences via search with the aim of converting them into subscribers. The SEO team exists to support the editorial output of the newsroom across all desks through a search lens. In practice, that means identifying trends, capitalising on opportunity gaps, building up the newsroom’s understanding of SEO, and meanwhile striving for really squeaky-clean technical SEO performance. Basically, staying as 360 on search as possible.

Steve: The first thing that struck me there is that SEO is very much part of the machine to drive loyalty and subscribers, right?

Luke: One hundred per cent. We use data religiously in this newsroom, and we look at it through two different lenses: audience and subscribers. A huge part of our success is thinking about how we can add our voice to a conversation in a meaningful way that people want to read and want to subscribe to read. Because we have such a strong history as the paper of record, we’re also very focused on leveraging that expertise and elevating the perception of us as a trusted brand. We’re mindful of where we can add ourselves to the conversation in a way that makes sense for the brand.

Steve: Without putting you on the spot — which I am — are there examples where you wouldn’t cover a story, or where you’d say, “We’re not going to cover that in that way. We’re going to wait, or take a different angle,” because there’s more correlation with subscription or loyalty?

Luke: My team is always very mindful of the trends we raise as potential avenues to drive search traffic. We’ve got heaps of data points that tell us where our core readership and our subscribers are showing interest, and where something might be fleeting or not that interesting. I can’t think of a perfect example off the top of my head, but essentially we place subscribers at the heart of what we do editorially and we don’t want to do anything to compromise that core readership. So we’re very mindful to target trends that cater to both sides.

Steve: Based on the audience information you have, has the introduction of AI changed the kinds of questions you’re asking? There’s obviously a lot of revision happening in news organisations with AI Mode, AI Overviews and so on.

Luke: We understand that AI summaries, particularly AI Overviews, are cornering certain areas of output, so we’re very mindful of how we package content with that in mind. We’re careful not to commission or pitch stories that we think are going to be swallowed up immediately on publication. We’re focused on identifying the gaps where we can tangibly make a difference. We know AI summaries are grabbing the attention top of fold, so we challenge ourselves to identify what the right opportunities are, what the best keywords are, and what is actually going to move the needle in a meaningful way.

Steve: I mentioned the ski holiday example because The Times came up for me as a really useful resource. That feels like one topic where you’ve always performed particularly well, but I’m sure there are others. Are you mindful in your weekly or monthly planning that you need to super-serve the topics that have already done well for you?

Luke: That’s exactly it. We continuously scrutinise our data, and understanding keyword intent is one of the main things we think about. It’s all about analysing things on a URL-by-URL level, monitoring search to see whether something has been absorbed by summarisation, and asking: if something has worked, how can we build on that and develop it as an area of expertise?

Steve: That leads into the current landscape with AI. How are you adjusting to the new search landscape?

Luke: We’re very aware of the parts of our website that are being most tangibly hit. Lifestyle content is probably the area that’s more likely to be swallowed up, and the rise of zero-click search is obviously something we’re continuing to talk about internally. So if we’ve commissioned a piece of content, we ask how best to serve it, where it’s going to drive the most traffic, or more importantly, the most meaningful traffic. We’ve always viewed Google Discover as secondary to organic search because it’s not as active or intentional as someone going out of their way to Google something.

Barry: That’s interesting because a lot of publishers end up being very Discover-first. They chase the spikes.

Luke: Yeah, and we’re quite careful with that. Discover can be useful, and we have seen encouraging growth in impressions, clicks and CTR, but because it is volatile, we don’t want it to become the core strategy. We’re quite sceptical of it in that sense. We look at whether something has a clear trend angle and whether there is obvious keyword intent, but even then, the fundamentals matter most: the headline, the lead image, and making it enticing without tipping into sensationalism.

Steve: And I suppose that comes back to being disciplined around the subscriber proposition.

Luke: Exactly. We’ve got very strict standards on headlines because we want the subscriber experience to remain front and centre.

Barry: One thing that strikes me with The Times is that it’s never felt like a brand that chases traffic for its own sake. It feels much more like you decide what is worth doing for the audience and then apply SEO to it, rather than the other way round.

Luke: I think that’s fair. We place subscribers at the heart of what we do editorially. If we are looking to commission something, it has to meet the demands of a readership that is paying for it. It has to provide value to those who are going to go out of their way to pay to read it.

Steve: That’s a really important distinction because in some organisations SEO became the tail wagging the dog.

Luke: Yes, and that’s not the position we want to be in. Search supports the journalism. It helps us reach people. But it doesn’t define the editorial mission.

Steve: How do you think about original journalism in that context? Because if AI summaries are swallowing more commodity content, then surely the moat becomes the things only you can do.

Luke: Absolutely. Readers associate us with premium original journalism. That’s where our authority is strongest. We know people come to us for trusted reporting, expert-driven analysis and distinctive editorial products. Those are the areas where we think we can continue to add real value and where audiences will still go beyond the summary because they want the depth.

Barry: Do you think that applies particularly to things like guides and recurring editorial franchises as well?

Luke: Definitely. We have areas where we know we already have authority and established demand, and the question is how we deepen that. If something works, we ask how we build on it, how we develop that expertise, and how we make it even more useful for the audience.

Steve: Let’s talk about paywalls. One thing I’ve always found interesting is that The Times has stayed very firm on the idea that the journalism is worth paying for.

Luke: It’s always been a very conscious decision that our journalism is worth paying for. We have run a couple of open-paywall weekends in the last few years to measure the interaction with that, and it was a useful reach exercise. But fundamentally we’re very self-assured in the quality of our content. Across referrers, if people find us, they find high-quality, expert-driven journalism that we believe is worth the paywall.

Barry: Do you experiment with things like gift links, like The New York Times and The Financial Times, where subscribers can gift an article for free to a limited number of readers?

Luke: That’s a very good question. I don’t have the answer to that — that would be something for our marketing team.

Steve: I think you should pick that as your idea, because I do think it helps with subscription rates. Actually, I just subscribed for £1 on The Times and I did get an alert saying I could share that to two or three people under a friends-and-family approach.

Barry: Beat me to it. Well done.

Steve: It’s an interesting point about paywalls. Some publishers have them, some don’t. In the conversation around AI-resilient content or original journalism, there’s a lot of language and a lot of exercises you can do with editorial teams who don’t have paywalls to get them to invest more time in original research. Obviously that has to be supported higher up so teams are given the freedom to experiment. But sometimes it might just come down to asking: if you had a paywall, what kind of content would you produce? Sometimes simple prompts like that can elicit great ideas. I’ve found with teams I’ve managed in the past that when traffic has been challenged, asking “What would you write if there weren’t any targets?” produces a lot of great original ideas. Sometimes being too wedded to a target can lead to playing to the algorithm instead. I don’t know if you’ve got any response to that, Luke.

Luke: That’s a really good question. I think it does come back to confidence in your journalism and understanding what your audience actually values. If you know what your readers come to you for, then it becomes easier to prioritise the ideas that will matter in a subscription context and not just because they look attractive in a dashboard.

Steve: On the subject of Discover, do you actively optimise for it or do you just recognise when something has the right shape for it?

Luke: More the latter. We don’t necessarily monitor Discover trends explicitly, but we do look at whether a story is tangibly anchored to a trend and whether there’s clear keyword intent behind it. That shapes how we package the story for the audience we want to reach. For us, success in Discover still comes down to fundamentals that haven’t changed for a long time: the headline and the lead image, presented in the most enticing way possible without being sensationalist. We’ve seen strong results from headlines that are first-person led, expert driven, or curiosity inducing without drifting into clickbait.

Steve: On your point about headlines, I’ve recently done some work advising on content management systems, and one of the recurring questions is how many headline fields you should have. Years ago you might have had one headline for the article, an SEO title or page title, and an OG title for social. Now you also have Google Discover in the equation. Some publishers have decided to go with just one headline field. What’s your view on that?

Luke: It’s very topical, because it’s something we’re discussing internally at the moment. I think The Times has maybe been a little late to the party with multiple headlines. We currently have two: the homepage headline and the article headline, which is what you see in search and across social. We’ve been scoping out the idea of SEO-only titles for organic search because we know there are situations — live blogs, for example — where the article headline may be anchored on one point while other publishers are ranking in search on slightly different topical points. We’re looking to develop more flexibility there. But more broadly, we’re very confident in our headline construction. Our production staff are wizards at their craft. They can take a keyword and turn it into something reader-friendly, accurate, interesting and eye-catching.

Steve: Do you use AI in any way, shape or form for that? I’ve seen some AI integrations in CMSs recently, and some of the headline suggestions are actually quite impressive.

Luke: We would never, strictly speaking, write an article exclusively using AI. We do have a tool in our CMS that can look at the copy and provide suggestions, but if that happens it is rigorously sense-checked and always for the human reader. We don’t want something that’s just garbled language or that removes the meaning we want the story to have. The functionality exists, but we’re very mindful about how it’s applied and we tread carefully.

Barry: They are getting better, though. I’m a bit of an AI sceptic in this regard, but I’ve seen some really interesting newsroom integrations where AI alleviates a lot of the busywork that journalists and editors have to do — things like OG headlines, alt attributes for images, even internal linking to some extent. I’m not sure how much you can say about this, but is that something happening at The Times as well?

Luke: I can’t talk too much about it, but it’s definitely something we’re thinking about. From my team’s perspective, those monotonous tasks are absolutely areas we think about. But if we do pursue anything, there always has to be a human at the end of the chain to sense-check it and make sure it’s logical, sensible and ultimately in service of the reader.

Steve: Barry, on the question of headlines, there’s been some talk in the press about Google rewriting headlines. Do you have a view on that?

Barry: Yes. There was an article in The Verge saying Google is rewriting headlines using AI. I read it, saw the screenshots, and thought: that’s basically what Google has been doing for years, just now with AI involved. I haven’t seen evidence of Google rewriting Top Stories headlines, which is the context where news publishers should really care. In the standard blue-link results, Google has always tweaked titles to some extent. In Top Stories, it generally picks from one of the existing headline variants — the visible headline, the structured data headline, sometimes the OG title or SEO title. I haven’t seen it invent a headline out of thin air. In many cases, when Google does rewrite a headline, it actually helps the website because it improves click-through rate. So rather than objecting to it, I’d say watch what Google does and learn from it.

Steve: That’s an interesting one, because we don’t want reporting like that to discourage people from investing the time in headline optimisation. Headlines really are the windows of your shop. Luke, if we finish with a look ahead, what are the key things you’re thinking about now?

Luke: Understanding what makes our subscribers tick and leveraging that more is a big one. SERPs are changing so much, and I’m keen to understand better how both Discover and organic are evolving, especially with things like Reddit and social bleeding over. I’m also excited by the idea of more cross-collaboration between different audience teams internally. YouTube is another area I’d like to spend more time learning about, because when we look at search behaviour week to week, we see so much YouTube carrying through. It’s a search engine in its own right, so it would be silly not to leverage the expertise of a team that works on search engines to benefit performance there too.

Steve: Let’s try to get the YouTube version of this podcast ranking for some classic keywords for you, Luke.

Luke: I already hope so.

Steve: Brilliant. It’s great to have you on. We’ll have to check in with you again in six to eight months’ time. Barry, I believe you have an announcement regarding an event happening towards the end of 2026.

Barry: Yes — we’ve launched the 2026 News and Editorial SEO Summit, already the sixth edition. The first batch of speakers has been announced, most of the agenda is nailed down, and I’m very excited about the line-up. We’ve expanded the event a little as well. It used to be a two-day online event; now it’s three days, each with a specific theme. Day one is SEO in the context of news. Day two is broader SEO and AI. Day three looks at audience growth beyond search and Discover — podcasts, video, newsletters, that sort of thing. Tickets are now on sale at super-early-bird pricing.

Steve: It’s a great event. It really opens this space up to a wide range of specialists, and it caters to the whole spectrum of people who are starting their journey in audience growth, because it’s not just exclusive to SEO. There’s video optimisation in there too, and it’s moved into more of a search-everywhere approach. Lastly, I have my own Search and AI Fundamentals Visibility course in London on May 19, aimed at people trying to make sense of how to move forward as a journalist or newsroom manager in this space. It very much builds on the kinds of conversations we’ve been having today. I think it’s “the wood for the trees” — this beer is beginning to take effect. But let’s leave it there. Thanks so much, Luke, for coming in, and we’ll get you on a future pod.

Luke: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, guys. Great chat. Take care.

There’s a dirty little secret that everyone knows about in the publishing industry: most news stories are ripped from other sources.

Not all of it, obviously. That would be daft. There’s still lots of original reporting, an army of fantastic columnists, plenty of impactful live coverage and loads of really distinctive local news outlets. But a huge volume of newsroom output still boils down to this: taking a story someone else has written, reworking it and then publishing it quickly in the hope that search or social or will do the rest.

That model was shaky before. Now it is actively dangerous.

Because once your journalism becomes interchangeable, you are no longer competing on value. You are competing on speed, volume, distribution luck and institutional muscle. And in a world of AI summaries, collapsing referral traffic, platform dependency and audience fatigue, that is not the place you want to be.

But if everyone is doing this and knows it’s not sustainable, why is it so hard to change?

The answer lies in communications, technology and culture.

First, the communications problem

A lot of newsroom change fails before it even starts because people are not actually talking about the same thing.

I’ll put my hand up. I’ve definitely been in a room talking about ‘content’ and ‘audience needs’ where everyone has nodded (and even fist-pumped). But when the emails start to come in, you realise you were speaking the same language but from entirely different perspectives.

It can be the same when leadership says the organisation needs to be more ‘distinctive’. Editors hear that as “do more exclusives.” Audience teams hear “find more search opportunities.” Reporters hear “do more with fewer resources.” Product teams hear nothing because nobody invited them to the meeting in the first place.

That is how you end up with a strategic ambition that sounds bold on a slide deck and then quietly turns into more of the same output with slightly different language wrapped around it.

“Be less commodified” is not a strategy. It is a diagnosis.

If you want change, you need a much clearer internal language around value. What exactly should this newsroom be uniquely good at? What should readers be unable to get elsewhere? Which stories are we covering because they matter to our audience, and which are we covering because everyone else is? What formats genuinely help people? Where do we have authority, proximity, trust or expertise?

These sound like basic questions. In practice, many organisations do not answer them with enough precision. Or they answer them once, in a strategy document that is soon forgotten on your intranet or in an AI-generated image like this:

That is the communications trap: people think they agree because they are all using the same buzzwords. Distinctive. Audience-first. Digital. Value. Utility. Trust. But unless those ideas are translated into clear editorial choices, teams default back to familiar behaviour.

And familiar behaviour in newsrooms usually means doing the same ‘ol thing.

(Side Note: The ‘Good Strategy Bad Strategy’ book by Richard Rumelt has some great pointers when it comes to actionable strategies.)

Then there’s the technology problem

Newsroom publishing systems are not neutral. They shape behaviour.

If your CMS is built for rapid article production, homepage turnover and incremental rewrites, you will produce rapid article production, homepage turnover and incremental rewrites. If your analytics setup rewards short-term traffic spikes above all else, people will chase short-term traffic spikes above all else. If your editorial tooling makes it easy to knock out ten near-identical commodified stories and hard to build a live page, a guide, a tracker, a database or a genuinely useful explainer, guess what happens?

Technology may appear to serve a strategy from the outside, but without strong product oversight, it can quickly undermine it. How many great initiatives have failed because the editorial tools are just too cumbersome? Let’s face it: poorly constructed content management systems are where great strategies die a slow and painfully silent death.

But it’s not just content management systems. A newsroom can say it wants to prioritise higher-value journalism, but if the workflows, templates and metrics are all optimised for low-differentiation content, the old model keeps winning by default.

There is also a discoverability problem here. Historically, commodified news could still “work” because you could always rely on there being a bedrock of audience from search. All you had to do is plan for informational terms like ‘What time is Traitors on tonight?’ or ‘Taylor Swift’s Net worth’ and the eyeballs would come rolling in. But that workflow encouraged sameness and now the distribution layer is getting even harsher. If platforms can summarise the basics, if AI can synthesise the surface-level answer, if readers are less inclined to click through just to read the same angle again, then low-distinctiveness content becomes easier to bypass entirely.

That does not mean every story needs to be an investigation or a six-part interactive masterpiece. It means the floor has moved. Mere adequacy is less defensible than it used to be.

And unfortunately, many newsroom tech stacks are still designed for the old economics of abundance: more pages, more output, more coverage, more volume. Not better value. Not stronger differentiation. Just more.

But the hardest part is culture

Technology can be upgraded. Workflows can be redesigned. Strategy documents can be rewritten.

Culture is harder because it lives in habits, status, fear and memory.

A lot of journalists were trained in systems where covering the big story of the day was the job. Full stop. If everyone else had a version, you needed a version too. Not having one felt negligent. That instinct is deeply embedded, and not irrational. Nobody wants to be the editor who “missed” a story, even if the story adds little value for the audience.

There is also prestige attached to certain kinds of output. Commodity stories may be strategically weak, but they often feel safe, legible and easy to justify. Everyone understands what they are for. Everyone can point to them. Everyone knows how to make them. By contrast, telling a team to focus more on utility, service, explainers, local specificity, original formats or audience needs can still feel vague or even slightly unserious in some newsroom cultures, even though these are often the areas where real value lies.

Then there is the workload question, which cannot be ignored. Many teams are exhausted. Asking them to rethink coverage, reshape formats and break ingrained habits while also hitting daily publishing demands is a massive ask. Some organisations talk about transformation while preserving the exact same expectations on output. That is not transformation. That is adding a strategy memo on top of an already overloaded machine.

And this is where honesty matters.

You cannot seriously reduce commodified news without making choices. You have to stop doing some things in order to do other things better. You have to accept that there will be stories you do not chase, formats you do not prioritise and habits you deliberately break. That is uncomfortable because it feels like giving up ground. But in reality, it’s the opposite. It’s deciding where you actually fit in so you can start accelerating.

Because that is the core issue here: commodified news is not just boring. It weakens editorial identity. It trains your newsroom to produce sameness. It conditions your audience to see you as replaceable. And it leaves you horribly exposed when the distribution environment changes, as it already has.

Of course, one could argue that you simply need to recognise news as a distinct product and original journalism as something else entirely. News, under this interpretation, is something that exists in the 24/7 ‘always on’ space while you, the journalist, should be in this other space focusing on the stuff that really matters.

I think this kind of false duality leads to problematic decision-making, like ‘Let’s just automate the news’ and even ‘How many journalists do we actually need to do this news stuff anyway?’

Because the organisations that move forward will not be the ones that simply publish faster versions of the same thing. They will be the ones that get clearer about what makes them useful, distinctive and worth seeking out.

I first worked with Duncan in 2011 when he ran the Sports and News desk at MSN UK and I ran Entertainment. Digital seemed a simpler world then - both search and social were very much ‘new kids on the block’ in the newsroom and AI was not even a glimmer in anyone’s eye. Since leaving MSN, Duncan has been across a number of international projects including EuroNews and CGTN Europe and I thought it would be great to quiz him on his current content strategy for Global South World.

Hi Duncan, let’s kick things off, how did you get into journalism?

I always wanted to be a journalist. But when I left university I was lured into working at an investment bank by money. I really hated it. But while I was there I noticed the Bloomberg terminals and so among hundreds of letters to newspapers and TV channels that all got ignored I sent one to Bloomberg who took me on in the bottom role of the newsroom.

Tell us about your current role

I run the media brands for Impactum, which includes several social-first media like The World in Maps and World Visualised but also the news publisher Global South World.

Tell us a bit about the team behind Global South World. Who are they? How do you manage the workflow of an international team?

Because of our positioning, it was really important to recruit our teams in Global Majority countries. There are some really brilliant journalists around the world, fortunately many English-speaking, and they often don’t get the same opportunities as journalists in Europe or the US. So they are highly motivated to work for an international brand. Our main team is run by Ismail Akwei in Accra, Ghana but we also have editors in Manila, Philippines and La Paz, Bolivia.

What are the main objectives of your editorial content strategy? What is your perspective on the world? What is unique about your proposition?

Our goal is to address the information inequality which has built up as the world transformed over the past decade. Working in executive roles in different media businesses during this time, I saw first hand that the disruption in the industry caused by technology developments and changes in audience behaviour absorbed the huge bulk of senior management attention. So much thought was going into business models and analysing existing audience behaviour but not much attention was directed into the transformation of global geopolitics. Cost pressures led to scaling back of foreign coverage so there wasn’t an impetus to reconsider where news was being made globally.

Our view is that countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa - nevermind India and China - are no longer second order powers and have not been for some time. They have thriving and innovative business landscapes, make huge contributions to global trade and have populations who are educated, motivated and ready to take leading roles in how the world is shaped. But all we hear about in the international media is war, natural disasters and perhaps an election now and then. So we try to tell some of the positive stories, and capture some of the social trends.

What do you think western media can learn from brands like Global South World?

Firstly, I think it’s about responding to change. The transformation that so many countries have gone through in the last 10 years is just dramatic. Certainly it’s uneven, but for so many people opportunities have opened up and aspirations have developed. Of course you cannot paint most of the world with one brush, but there certainly is an excitement and positivity which we as a media are trying to capture.

The other thing which I hope to talk about more later is the role of social media. Because the cultures are so mobile first in many of the countries we serve and because bandwidth has always been expensive, there isn’t a great deal of web browsing. All the action is on social media. This isn’t so different to sections of the population in Europe, but there aren’t many media which have really embraced it.

Who are your main competitors?

Obviously, there are other English language organisations which have similar target audiences to us. But frankly those audiences are so large and so underserved that I don’t spend to much time thinking about how we can compete with them. The competition that concerns me is the brainrot content, because our viewers are on social media. So they are seeing what is in their feed. Our challenge as informational media is to make what we do accessible enough that we can capture attention there. And it has to be said, unfortunately that we don’t get much help from the platforms which disadvantage news publishers heavily. And a special shout out to TikTok here, because it has the potential to be a huge force for good in educating the world, but does a number of significant and unnecessary things which undermine its ability to take that opportunity.

@globalsouthworldWhat are the 5 key points from President Prabowo’s UN speech, and why do they matter for global diplomacy? #GSWNews #Prabowo #Indonesia #UNGA #GlobalDiplomacy

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What are your key challenges at the moment?

When we launched we wanted to base our operations around a website. Because we were concerned that we wanted to be able to choose what our audience saw first and not have it dictated by social media algorithms. But we found ourselves very much in a world of zero Google. As a new brand we did all the technical bits right, but we found ourselves almost invisible in search. Now one reason for that is, I believe, that Google is very cautious about new news sites. As we were founded in the era of generative AI, it’s so easy to spin up a website that looks like a news site and so I understand why the bar for driving traffic has become so high. The other reason which I alluded to already is that many of our audience don’t use search. They get their information from social media. So we have moved to a social-first publishing pattern while also working with partners such as Africa.com and GlobalVoices.org as well, of course, MSN to distribute our written content more widely.

What are your key audience growth tactics?

Short, vertical video are what our audiences want. Even on our website you will find most of our video content is vertical and has always been. Breaking news still works and we have had some considerable successes around social lives.

But what is really interesting is collaborations, these are genuinely win-wins and have been enormously successful for our sister channel @TheWorldIn\Maps. As I mentioned, I don’t really see other media as rivals but potential partners. One project we have recently launched has been Global South Voices. Last year we did a lot of research to identify the most influential news creators on social media for a series of powerlists. We then tapped that work to build a list who we can regularly collaborate with. Together the network has millions of followers and reach of hundreds of millions but often the audiences were restricted to one country and what Global South World is able to do it take it international. In return we get to learn from how creators are able to engage their audiences so successfully.

What is the mix of original verses syndicated content at Global South World?

When we started off we felt it was important to cover the major news from around the world but we knew we couldn’t do that credibly ourselves and it wouldn’t have served any purpose. We do use AI to help us spotlight summaries of news from countries which rarely find themselves on the radar. But we also took a feed from Reuters, to cover off the big stories. Over time, we have established that is not what our audience are looking for, or perhaps there are other places where they can get it, so from next month we will be 100% original content about the Global South.

Are you currently using AI in your newsrooms?

Yes, in a few different ways:

1) Newsgathering - we use it to build summaries linking out to stories from news outlets in some of the many countries we cover

2) Back-end optimisation - we use Gjirafa’s Codex CMS which recommends tags and suggests headlines and social post texts based on our stories. Of course there are spelling checks too.

3) Personalised recirculation

4) Content creation. This the tricky one because we are cautious about how audiences and platforms respond, We do have a sister site, Qonversations where we do a lot of experimentation around using AI to build videos where we don’t have images or footage available. We’ve also done some work on Global South World using Avatars to present stories because we can get around issues of local accents or having to select journalists by whether they look good on camera. But these have not performed particularly well, there does seem to be an element of distrust. We use AI for translations and dubbing, which works really well, and to create articles based on our video which saves a lot of time although of course it is all managed by a journalist.

How are you responding to AI chatbot summaries?

We didn’t have much search traffic to lose. So basically we do try to maintain SEO optimisation, but we haven’t invested much energy into this. Social media is where our audiences are.

What are you most focused on in the year ahead?

We’ve been in a steady growth phase for the past two years, but with a close eye on costs. We are looking to cement revenue streams that can cover our running costs, probably mainly through licensing and some branded content production in order to be able to reinvest in growing our teams and output. We’ll continue to experiment with different uses of AI, especially around video.

Finally, what advice would you give to anyone thinking of getting into journalism!

It’s a career which has given me a lot. I think I can say I’ve never been bored at work, which I don’t take for granted. But there are sacrifices to be made, especially if you work in news around the weekends and evenings. Increasingly the role of a journalist has developed around the ability to learn and manage new tools. When I started, it was basically a word processor, yellow pages (OK online yellow pages) and a telephone. And it had been like that for decades. Now you do need to be comfortable adapting to use new tools as they are introduced. So expect to be challenged, out-of-your depth and uncomfortable. On the flip side, know that journalism still changes the world and always will.

Practically, set up a blog, podcast or social channel about something you love. You need to show you already do the job as entry level jobs hardly exist any more.

If you are a publisher and have interesting perspective on digital audience growth, let’s talk! Contact me at me@stevenwilsonbeales.com.

Publishers are worried about audience growth in 2026 for a variety of reasons. Not only are we seeing traffic declines across a range acquisition channels, AI Chatbots are pilfering our content and audience news avoidance is on the increase. Answers to these aren’t simple - with AI we’re going through the biggest learning curve since the invention of the internet and this has given rise to a misinformation shit sandwich, cluster of all clusterfucks, tsunami.

But fear not, I may have (part) of the answer.

Remember, Zero Click doesn’t mean ‘No Clicks’ it just means you need to work harder as an organisation to work out what your users really want AND how to adapt when AI chatbots appear in your space. Here are 49 examples of newsroom output that are relatively resilient to zero-click search because they offer something a summary usually cannot fully replace: immediacy, connection, authority, utility, local relevance, exclusivity, a distinctive voice, or ongoing updates.

(49 because I want to slowly hook you back into my circa 2015 world of endless Buzzfeed cat memes.)

So here are some examples, mostly UK, but international readers - y’all will get my drift.

Original reporting and exclusives

1. Westminster scoops on policy, reshuffles, rebellions, or internal party rows

2. Exclusive reporting on local councils and town hall decisions

3. FOI-led investigations into the NHS, police forces, councils, universities, or quangos

4. Investigations into public spending, outsourcing, or procurement

5. Original reporting on strikes, walkouts, and industrial disputes

6. Court reporting from major criminal or civil cases

7. On-the-ground reporting from protests, flooding, or major incidents

8. Interviews with ministers, mayors, NHS leaders, or union heads

9. Exclusives on school closures, academy trusts, or Ofsted issues

10. Enterprise reporting on housing, rents, or planning disputes

Live and developing coverage

11. Live blogs during general elections, local elections, or by-elections

12. Live coverage of the Budget, Autumn Statement, or Spring Statement

13. Rolling updates on train strikes and rail disruption

14. Live coverage of major court verdicts or sentencing hearings

15. Live blogs during storms, flooding, or severe weather warnings

16. Minute-by-minute reporting on PMQs, leadership contests, or confidence votes

17. “What we know so far” pages during terror incidents or major emergencies

18. Rolling updates on airport disruption at Heathrow, Gatwick, or Manchester

19. Live transfer deadline day coverage for football audiences

20. Developing news hubs for NHS pressures, exam results day, or energy outages

Utility and service journalism

21. “How this affects you” explainers on tax, benefits, pensions, or mortgages

22. Guides to council tax changes by local authority

23. School term date and closure trackers by region

24. Rail strike and engineering works explainers by operator

25. Postcode checkers for bin collections, school catchments, or local services

26. Interactive maps of flooding, crime, transport disruption, or election results

27. Cost-of-living calculators for energy bills, food inflation, or rent increases

28. NHS waiting list explainers by trust or specialty

29. Travel advice pages for ferry, rail, and airport disruption

30. Consumer rights guides for refunds, cancellations, and faulty goods

Local and regional output

31. Hyperlocal reporting on road closures, planning rows, and regeneration schemes

32. Coverage of local court cases readers cannot get elsewhere

33. Area-specific school admissions and catchment explainers

34. What’s open and closed during bank holidays, storms, or strikes

35. Regional weather impact pages focused on roads, schools, and trains

36. Local health service updates on GP access, A&E waits, and hospital changes

37. Area guides around major events such as marathons, festivals, or protests

38. Local election ward-level explainers and result maps

39. Coverage of crime and policing trends with local context

40. Regional business reporting on employers, redundancies, and investment

Distinctive formats and newsroom products

41. Opinion columns from recognisable voices readers actively seek out

42. Newsletters with that added personal touch (Editor’s intro, first person summary of key topics)

43. Podcast episodes with original reporting or insider interviews

44. Explainer videos on policy changes, scandals, or football finance

45. Photo-led coverage of demonstrations, royal events, or severe weather

46. Annotated timelines of scandals, inquiries, or political crises

47. Searchable databases of MPs’ interests, council spending, or school performance

48. Recurring briefings like “morning politics”, “cost of living update”, or “today in your area”

49. Reader-facing tools and trackers for energy prices, mortgage rates, or waiting times

Now in the interests of transparency, this is where this meme (which I just made 😍😍) becomes relevant.

But even as I was refining the list the thought occurred - Steve, isn’t this what newsrooms do anyway? Well, actually, not really - the % of commodified news that is still published is still very high because teams are not responding to the existential threat of AI chatbots with an existential review of their operation.

It’s not a case of simply dedicating more time to some of the ideas on this page, it’s about asking the tough questions of ‘Who are we and what are we actually doing?’

This will start, as always, with a clear editorial proposition serving a clear audience but if that all feels too abstract, try grounding it in something more substantial like a specific theme or event. For instance, the theme of ‘utility’ can be an interesting way of exploring how you’re actually adding value to the lives of your audience. Alternatively, pick a future event like the World Cup and brainstorm high value editorial you could deliver and why it will be distinct in market.

If there’s only one thing to take away here it’s that commodified news is dead, and that it’s the publishers who adapt quickly who’ll still be with us in the next two years.

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A quick reminder that I am hosting an SEO & AI Visibility course for journalists on March 31st. You can read all the deets about the session here. Get involved!
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That is where the DOM comes in.

The DOM, or Document Object Model, sounds more technical than it needs to. In simple terms, it is the structured version of a webpage that a browser creates when it loads a page. Think of it as the page’s working layout behind the scenes: the headline, standfirst, article body, links, images, captions, menus and interactive elements all organised into a structure that both browsers and search engines can interpret.

For the uninitiated, the quickest way of viewing the DOM is by using browser developer tools like this version in Chrome. It might look scary at first but, trust me, these tools contain a goldmine of information about your pages.

For SEO, the DOM matters because search engines judge your articles (and, in tandem, your brand) by what they can actually access, process and understand.

A page may look fine to a person. It may load eventually. The content may appear after a second or two. But if the important parts of that page are missing, delayed, hidden or difficult to interpret in the DOM, search engines may not get the same clear view of the content that users do. And if search engines do not get that clear view, your ability to rank suffers.

Google issued this helpful diaphragm to illustrate how the process of rendering is another step the crawler must take before it can hand over to the indexing stage. The implication here is is that any issues introduced at this stage will have a knock on effect to both indexing and ranking.

That is why the DOM is not just a developer concern. It matters to SEO teams, product teams, publishing leaders and anyone responsible for traffic and discoverability.

How does the DOM work in practice?

When a search engine visits a page, it starts by crawling the URL and collecting the underlying code. It then tries to make sense of the page structure, including any content that is generated or changed after load. On a straightforward page, that process is relatively simple. On a modern site built with JavaScript-heavy templates, dynamic modules and layered components, it becomes more complicated.

This is where confusion often creeps in. Many teams assume that if a user can eventually see the content, search engines can too. That is not always a safe assumption. Search engines have become much better at rendering modern websites, but that does not mean every implementation is equally easy to process. The more effort required to reveal the important content, the greater the risk that signals are delayed, weakened or missed.

For publishers and content-led businesses, this shows up in a few familiar ways.

One common issue is content that is technically on the page, but not clearly presented in the structure search engines rely on. A headline may be styled to look prominent, but not marked up clearly. Key sections of text may be injected late by JavaScript. Internal links may look clickable to users but not function like proper crawlable links in the code. A related-content module might be visually helpful while doing very little for discovery because its links are not exposed properly.

Another problem comes from over-designed templates. In the push to create rich, flexible page experiences, teams sometimes end up fragmenting content into so many components that the main purpose of the page becomes less obvious. A search engine should not have to work hard to identify the headline, the body copy, the supporting links and the relationship between them. The DOM should make those things easier to understand, not harder.

There is also a mobile dimension that is easy to underestimate. Many teams still review pages mainly on desktop, but search engines increasingly assess sites through a mobile lens. If the mobile version of a page hides text, strips out useful links, collapses important elements or serves a lighter experience than desktop, that can affect how well the page performs in search. A clean desktop page is not enough if the mobile DOM is weaker.

The encouraging part is that most DOM-related SEO issues are not mysterious. They are usually the result of choices that can be reviewed, tested and improved. Let’s take a look at some of these steps.

Step One: Understand the difference between ‘Source HTML’ and ‘Rendered Version’
The first step is to stop looking only at what the page looks like and start looking at what the page contains. That means checking the rendered page structure, not just the visual design or the CMS preview. Open the page in browser developer tools. Inspect the elements. Compare what is delivered initially (resource) with what appears after scripts run. Look at the heading structure. Look at the links. Look at whether the main content is present clearly in the page structure or assembled too late to be reliable.

There are also many other tools that can help there including the View Rendered source extension or even Screaming Frog which is useful for projects at scale.

Step Two: Identify what must be present for search.
On most publishing pages, this means the main headline, introductory text, core body copy, canonical information, metadata, internal links and any structured data you depend on. Those are not decorative extras. They are part of how search engines decide what a page is about and how it fits into the rest of your site. If those elements are unstable, everything built on top of them becomes less dependable.

Step Three: simplify where possible.
Not every part of a page needs to be rendered in the most dynamic way available. If important content can be delivered clearly in the initial page structure, that is often the safer option. Dynamic experiences have their place, but they should add to the page, not carry the entire burden of making it understandable.

Step Four: review internal linking with more care than many teams do.
On publishing sites, internal links are one of the clearest ways to support discovery and topic understanding. They connect articles to sections, sections to tags, tags to hubs and newer stories to evergreen ones. If those links are weak in the DOM, you are not just losing a usability feature. You are weakening your site’s search architecture.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, treat DOM quality as a cross-functional responsibility. SEO teams may spot the symptoms, but they cannot fix template logic alone. Developers may build the components, but they may not know which page elements matter most for visibility unless that is made clear. Publishing leaders may own performance targets, but those targets depend partly on technical implementation. The best results come when these groups are looking at the same problem from the same angle.

That, really, is the main point.

If your page structure makes it easy for search engines to understand what matters, your SEO work has a stronger foundation. If it does not, even excellent content can end up working harder than it should for visibility.

Some useful resources:

• How the DOM affects crawling, rendering, and indexing

• Get started with viewing and changing the DOM

• Source HTML vs. Rendered HTML

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A quick reminder that I am hosting an SEO & AI Visibility course for journalists on March 31st. You can read all the deets about the session here. Get involved!
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Here’s one story that caught my attention this week. Buffer recently analysed 7.1 million TikTok posts published through Buffer to identify posting times that tend to produce higher median views/engagement. Although they stress there’s no single “magic” time that works for everyone (because results depend on audience location and habits) their top recommended slots to try are Sunday 9 a.m. (best overall), Monday 1 p.m., and Sunday 1 p.m.; and at a day level, Saturday performs best overall, with Monday and Sunday close behind.

Across the week, the data shows a broad pattern: evenings (roughly 6 p.m.–11 p.m.) tend to peak, while afternoons (12 p.m.–5 p.m.) are often the weakest, and TikTok is unusual in that weekends can outperform weekdays. So try using these benchmarks as a starting point, then validate and tailor your schedule using TikTok Studio Analytics to find when your followers are most active and iterate from there. Easy. Sorta.

Al Jazeera leads top 50 English-language news sites in the world.

Considering it’s been such a tough year for publishers, it’s always worth taking a closer look at leaderboards like this to try and work out reasons for publisher success.

In Al Jazeera’s case you might put this down to their non-western framing of news events and the proliferation of political stories spilling out right now from the Middle East, but equally, it also about how Al Jazeera has responded with a formidable array of analysis, explainers, documentaries, and live blogs. As well as investing in social video (with the introduction of AI-generated visuals) they’ve also seen some strong Google Discover performance in the last two months with stories like this:

This particular article is interesting itself in its own way. Not only is it short, it’s another reminder that, sometimes, it’s not so much about the headline or the image (both aren’t particularly eye-catching in this example) but the importance of being timely and building up an authority on a topic. Al Jazeera may have also benefitted recently from Google opening up its Discover results to a wider range of publishers.

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A quick reminder that I am hosting an SEO & AI Visibility course for journalists on March 31st. You can read all the deets about the session here.
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More on February’s Google Discover core update

Google Discover is currently the biggest driver of search traffic to news brands so it’s no surprise then that there’s been lots of discussion since the update was announced. Barry Adams, Nicola Agius and I discussed this on the most recent episode of SEO and Beers with Barry and Steve but John Shehata has offered some early insights here.

I think the biggest takeaway for me from all the discussions out there is this: We are expecting this core update to stamp down on clickbait because that’s what Google is telling us it’s doing - but let’s just wait and see if that’s that actual case once the update has rolled out. 👀

Also, on the topic of optimising for different surfaces, Joy Johnston has written an excellent primer on exactly that here.

The Sun shines a light on video (sorry) with 1bn+ monthly views and 25 new shows

Take a look at the job boards of most UK news brands at the moment and you’re bound to see them peppered with video-related roles. This is a reflection of the huge investments being made in this area and the Sun is no exception. Their video team have grown from around 25 people to about 80 and are still hiring for roles including showbiz producer, Fabulous producer, senior sports video producer, senior producer on Royal Exclusive, and channel manager for Sun News Video.

Interesting to note that The Sun has the biggest Youtube following of any UK newspaper brand, with 6.37 million subscribers on its main channel (The Telegraph is a close second with around 6.08 million) and 7.5 million across all its accounts. You can read more here.

Whilst we’re talking about video:

• Why YouTube has become key for brand GEO strategies

• Publishers chase video podcast growth, but audio still leads

• From Archive to Asset: How to Optimise Existing Videos for Search & AI in 2026

User Needs for Sport

Dmity Shishkin and the team at Smartoct are running a free User Needs for Sport session here March 5th. As someone who has attended previous workshops, I highly recommend.

Some Pods of Note

Ryan Broderick is just insanely funny and always has some great observations about our algorithmic overlords. I found his recent interviews with US politicians particularly insightful, hilarious and anxiety-inducing all at the same time. On this episode he explores the generational gap between Gen Z and Millennials and already I feel a thousand years old.

Elsewhere Ezra Klein hosted a great interview with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark exploring the impact of AI Agents in our lives. If I were an AI (and how could you prove I’m not?) I would summarise thusly: ‘The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed’ i.e. we are accelerating at a thousand miles an hour towards an info-class war.

(Incidentally, I once had a riveting convention with a good friend about the Gibson line: ‘The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.’ I thought it was brilliant, they though it was pony. That was the end of that).

And Finally…

This news story on the Dark Sky weather app caught my attention and made me think - why don’t we have a ‘World Weather according to Donald Trump’ app? We already have partisan news, why not partisan weather?

This is why I probably need to drink less coffee.

Until next time.

Steve: Today we’re really excited because we have a very special guest on our show: Nicola Agius, Director of SEO and Discover at Reach plc. Welcome, Nicola.

Nicola: Thank you—wow, how did you learn how to pronounce my surname? No one can normally pronounce that.

Steve: I actually had to look it up. I’ve known you for a while but never really had to pronounce it. You’re also the only SEO expert I know who’s Director of SEO and specifically Discover.

Nicola: Yeah. It’s interesting—I’ve been at Reach for about two years now. When I first started, I was just SEO Director. Then a few weeks in, maybe a month, I was talking to my boss and it was like, “Oh, you’re Director of SEO and Discover.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” We have quite a big focus on Discover. For a lot of publishers, Discover is the big traffic driver. What’s the statistic now—Google sends twice as much traffic via Discover than it does Search—is that correct?

Steve: Yeah, it’s been quoted recently. It’s a huge driver, particularly to news publishers.

Nicola: I remember at a meetup a couple of years ago, a lot of publishers were saying, “We treat it as bonus traffic.” And I remember thinking, “Really? Just bonus?” I wonder now, two years on, when there’s been such a shift between search and discover, if people still treat it as bonus.

Barry: They’re not, but they should. But we can dig into that.

Steve: We’re doing a slightly different format today. We’ll cover three or four stories SEOs have been talking about recently, then do a deep dive into Discover—especially because we’ve had the specific Discover core update rolling out.

Responding to Traffic decline narratives…

Steve: One story we want to respond to is a piece published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the start of the year, looking at technology trends. They worked with Chartbeat and produced a chart showing an apparent decrease in overall traffic for both Discover and Organic Search.

SThat chart has been quoted a lot at conferences as “the truth,” giving the impression there’s no future in search. Then Press Gazette followed up asking publishing leaders about it, and some feedback sounded like they might consider not investing in SEO this year. So we want to respond to that. Barry, do you want to kick off?

Barry: I have very strong opinions. The Chartbeat data is deeply flawed and doesn’t reflect the reality of traffic trends we see in the UK and Europe. It may be heavily US-focused and skewed by a few very large publishers.

Those decreases may not necessarily be “because of AI,” but also because of things like site reputation abuse, algorithm updates, and so on. In the Press Gazette piece, there were counterpoints from publishers saying they’re not seeing those kinds of declines across the board—some decreases, but fairly stable.

Certain tactics that work well in Discover and News have continued to work. AI isn’t coming to steal all our traffic, especially for news. There was also a competing study by Graphite using Similarweb data showing a decrease in Google traffic to the wider web, but the decrease was about 2.5%.

People quoting the Chartbeat piece as gospel are tapping into a panic mindset that doesn’t reflect reality, and it pushes publishers to pivot away from optimising for search. That’s catastrophic.
Google is still the biggest driver of traffic to publishing sites. AI tools haven’t made a significant dent in Google’s dominance as a traffic source. If a publisher invests less in Google or abandons it, they’re committing suicide—competitors will eat their slice of the pie.

Yes, publishers should diversify—multi-channel, multi-format—but not at the expense of the biggest channel. Look at your own data: where is traffic actually coming from, who are you competing with, and how do you stay effective?

Steve: Nicola—what’s your take at Reach? As SEOs, we’re used to messy waves and spikes, especially around core updates, but the narrative from that chart is “everything’s in decline.”

Nicola: I hate SEO forecasting because it’s so out of our hands. A good place to start is looking at what the tech giants are doing. I’ve seen big SEO jobs going up—Anthropic advertising for an SEO lead, for example. The biggest companies are investing in SEO.

Also, Chartbeat has accuracy issues splitting between search and discover. A lot of research comes out with doom-and-gloom stories. I’d take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Steve: It’s annoying when those charts get presented early at conferences and people don’t dig into details.

Nicola: If my competitors want to stop investing in SEO… maybe they should. Take your eye off the ball. I don’t mind!

Google Publisher Controls for AI Overviews

Steve: Next story: the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK “coming for” Google. Context: in October 2025, CMA designated Google with strategic market status in search services, allowing targeted rules. Part of that is pushing Google to introduce publisher controls for visibility of content in AI Overviews—more choice and transparency. There are also elements around fair rankings, choice screens (making it easier to switch default search on Android), and data portability.

Google responded quickly saying it will introduce a tool to allow publishers to opt out of AI Overviews. Details are limited. At an event with FT Strategies in partnership with Google, a Google speaker suggested it would be more than a simple on/off switch. They also said “we hear you” on more data in Search Console… and that was it.

Nicola—what’s your view on publishers getting more control over how their content is used in AI Overviews?

Nicola: If you opt out, what are the consequences? Less visibility in Discover and Search? And the way people search is changing—especially young people. They trust AI-generated answers. So maybe it’s not that we want less visibility; maybe we want to be compensated. If you’re going to “rent” our content, pay rent.

Barry: Two aspects. First: Google already considered granular publisher controls for AI and decided not to implement them—there was a leaked slide a while back showing options, and they picked one of the worst for publisher control. CMA forced their hand.

Second: it skirts the real issue. AI systems were trained on the greatest scale of copyright infringement in the history of mankind, and websites aren’t compensated. Citations in AI answers send negligible traffic compared to classic search.

Also: shortly after this, Microsoft launched an AI citations report in Bing Webmaster Tools that shows publishers when they get cited in AI-generated answers and for which prompts. So the tech exists. Google can do it—they choose not to. Like how Search Console still doesn’t provide certain filters publishers have asked for for years.

Rand Fishkin on AI tracking unreliability

Steve: Third story: an article Rand Fishkin published in January about AI tracking reliability. SparkToro used around 600 volunteers, about 12 prompts each—roughly 3,000 prompts—testing how stable AI results are. The list returned changed a lot: very low chance of getting the same list twice, ordering changes, length changes—so lots of randomness. The takeaway: be careful using AI tracking tools like you’d use search rankings in SEMrush or Google Search Console. Consider other metrics like overall “visibility” percentage rather than fixed ranks.

Nicola, are you using any tools at Reach, and what’s your take?

Nicola: Similarweb has some tracking, but we’re not going in hard. What’s the opportunity for publishers? Getting cited in ChatGPT or Gemini is unlikely to drive traffic. That doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity, but publishers need to think outside the box. I’ve been to AEO/AI talks that were more aimed at brands—they’re obsessed with AI visibility. The speakers always say the key is getting visibility on publishers. That’s where the opportunity is, and it’s a conversation we’re starting to have… but I can’t say too much.

Steve: So this is almost like branded content, perhaps.

Nicola: Yeah.

Barry: Citations are the new links. But AI tracking is a whole other shit show. These trackers burn energy generating prompts just to create dashboards for execs. The answers are unpredictable and inconsistent. Publishers should stay away from optimising “to get cited” because it doesn’t send traffic. Be the highest quality, most authoritative publisher you can be and you’ll get cited anyway.

Barry: Also: bad data is worse than no data. AI trackers give you bad data—illusion of certainty, not actionable. It’s noise.

Steve: But the dashboards look so pretty!

Barry: They look fantastic. Utterly meaningless, but pretty graphs.

Nicola: Toward the end of last year, a big AI tracking tool held a glitzy London event… it was a shit show. The “AEO tips” were cringe and inaccurate. I went to see if we should invest—after that, definitely not.

Deep dive — Google Discover

Steve: Nicola, let’s deep dive into Google Discover. How do you tackle it at Reach? And for those listening—how do you start investing in Discover? Can a small startup site get into Discover quickly?

Nicola: I almost smirked—normally I’d say no. But I’ve been seeing spam sites get in: private blog networks buying expired local business domains, deleting content, and posting the same recycled articles about speed limits, pensions, etc. I caught up with Google last week about this Discover core update. It’s designed specifically to try and fix the spam issue. The Discover feed is supposed to show content based on your search history, location, interests—Google has a lot of info—and it’s personalized. Everyone’s feed is different.

Nicola: We use tools to monitor what’s broadly in the feed: MyFeed has Discover monitoring. We’ve started using John Shehata’s NewsDash / Discover Pulse. There’s also Discover Snoop, which I haven’t used but publishers rave about.

Steve: What intelligence can you get from Search Console? Is it limited?

Nicola: Search Console is best for what’s working for you. But newsrooms always want competitor context—what others are seeing. Third-party tools help you see the wider market. Sometimes a topic drops. You need to know: did we do something, or did Google demote that category across Discover? If Google demotes film content, for example, there’s not much you can do except adjust your Discover-focused output and watch for it to return.

Steve: Discover optimisation is frustrating because it changes all the time. It’s spiky, unlike building organic search foundations. Some publishers put lots of eggs in the Discover basket.

Nicola: We do regular reporting. For us, it’s a strategy because it’s such a huge traffic driver. The key is monitoring patterns: topics, buzzwords, categories. For example, food content: we saw a drop, but market-wide there wasn’t a drop—the type of food content Google favored changed (more supermarket/product news vs “secret ingredient” style).

Steve: How do editorial teams respond? In the old model you could target a topic for months with breaking and evergreen support, but in Discover it feels almost daily.

Nicola: It’s volatile. This time last year, national news publishers dominated Discover. After the June core update, there was a big shift: regionals and niche sites got more visibility, so nationals got relatively less. No one would have predicted that. Then around November, X/Twitter became very visible in Discover; by December/January in the UK it was the most visible domain overtaking YouTube—then in February Google pressed another button and it dropped massively. That’s why forecasting is hard.

Steve: So: keep looking at the data. With the recent core update, have you seen changes? It’s been a couple of weeks since rollout began.

Nicola: There’s a lot of volatility. Google said it’s rolling out to US sites first. I asked Google last week if they were sure, because we’re seeing volatility. They said rollout is phased (not 0 to 100). They also confirmed the UK and India are next—so that’s probably what we’re seeing.

Barry: I’ve already been approached by an Indian publisher suffering from this update, plus the December core update.

Steve: Looking ahead, as Google rolls Gemini onto more surfaces, do you think Discover becomes more personalised?

Nicola: Preferred sources. Google wants the feed as personalised as possible to drive engagement. Encouraging people to make your title a preferred source is important—we explore ways to do that.

Barry: Uptake is tiny. Publishers integrate it and get a fraction-of-a-percent use. It feels more like placation than meaningful optimisation.

Nicola: When you do set preferred sources, it can increase visibility, but the UI is too complicated. It should be streamlined.

Steve: For publishers—when should you act during a core update?

Nicola: We give guidance during rollouts, but for conclusions you wait until it’s finished and then about two weeks after for things to settle. We’ve seen dips swing back. If you act too soon, you make decisions on incomplete data.

Barry: Nicola, Reach has 70 sites—so you can spread risk and tactics. If you have one site and you build your editorial strategy around Discover, the risk is too high. Discover encourages bad habits: clickbait, thin content, rehashing the same story 17 times. If you lose 70–90% of Discover traffic, meaningful recovery can take 18–24 months. For one site, that’s existential. So treat Discover as bonus traffic in the sense that you must be able to survive without it—even if you optimize for it.

Steve: It’s another example of publishers being led by an algorithm. We saw this with Facebook in 2017, then the shift back to search, then AI overviews, and now Discover. You can end up with whole teams chasing whatever pattern is currently rewarded, like “shops closing on your high street,” until you stop and think: what are we doing?

Nicola: Bonus doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work for it. Bonus is nice to have.

Barry: Agreed—optimise to an extent, but don’t base the entire editorial strategy on it. The slippery slope is real.

Nicola: Also worth saying: Discover is an extension of Search—get Search right if you want to get Discover right.

Barry: I would’ve agreed up until February 5th when Google announced a Discover-only core update. That suggests Discover is becoming its own system. Same foundations (crawl/index/quality), but separate “levers” on top—like what Google calls “twiddlers”—and now a set for Discover.

Steve: Did you say “twiddler”?

Barry: The technical term is “twiddlers.” I didn’t make it up.

Wrap-up

Steve: Let’s wrap up. Nicola, it’s been really useful going deep on Discover and newsroom dynamics. We should get you back in a few months and see how things settle. Last thing—Barry, you have a paywall masterclass coming up.

Barry: Yes—on March 4th I’m doing a masterclass with Jesse and Shelby from What The F*ck Is SEO and Harry Clarkson-Bennet from The Telegraph on paywalls: technical setup, commercial strategy, editorial strategy, plus Q&A.

Steve: I’ve also got an SEO and AI visibility masterclass day event via Journalism.co.uk. We’ll cover a lot of what we discussed today.

Nicola: No announcements—but if you see Reach sites in your Discover feed, definitely click on it. It’s good for the environment.

Barry: Absolutely—I’ll definitely click on the weekly website.

Steve: Okay everyone—good to see you again. Take care. Bye.

Nicola: Take care. Ciao.

Barry: See you at the next one.

Google Discover Update Flutter?
It’s barely been a week since Google released a Discover core update specifically targeting (initially) US local news and eliminating more spam. Curiously, many SEOs outside of the US have reported fluctuations in their Discover performance since the core update was rolled out. This is not unusual as there’s often a gap between what Google announces and what actually happens in search. Worth keeping an eye on.

And on the Google front. I attended the News in the Digital Age conference on Wednesday, hosted by FT Strategies and Google. Sulina Connal (Google’s Managing Director of News & Books Partnerships) didn’t give much way about their immediate plans but she did allude to the new set of tools publishers will be getting to control how their pages appear in AI Overviews. Sounds like the tool will be a bit more complicated than a simple ON/OFF switch. As for getting more performance data from Google (in GSC) her response was: ‘We hear you’. And that was the end of that.

Kudos to Alan Smith (Head of Visual and Data Journalism, FT) who managed to captivate an audience when his slot ran 20 minutes into lunch break - that’s no small feat. Also, following a fireside chat and demo with Steven Johnson (Co-Founder of NotebookLM) I suddenly realised I need to be using this tool much more than I do as I wasn’t fully aware of all the functionality before. Hmm, giving yourself more homework, Steve.

Bing Webmaster tools Gets an Update
A company that has been listening to webmasters and SEO soothsayers is Bing who have delighted the community with a new addition to Bing Webmaster - the AI Performance tab. I was pretty surprised to see the sheer amount of citations for one of my websites in this tool. Why can’t we get this kind of data in Google Search Console?

Although it lacks a lot of detail it’s still useful to see which pages are being cited as these can often be pages that businesses forgot about years ago. So, great to have a free tool that can show where your brand appears across Microsoft Copilot and AI-generated answers in Bing. Still no click data from AI surfaces though - now that would be special!

Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace
Continuing the general Microsoft BIG UP (I must declare I did work for them for a period of time) is the announcement of the expansion of the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace. This marketplace is designed to give publishers a new revenue stream, provides AI systems with scaled access to premium content, and deliver better responses for consumers. More of this please.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT. I am pleased to share with you a new SEO & AI Visibility course I will running on March 31st 2026 in London for Journalism UK. I’ll cover:

• **The new visibility landscape:**Unpack how Google, Discover, and AI-driven platforms decide what news gets seen—and what gets buried.

• **SEO essentials for journalists:**Learn practical, newsroom-friendly techniques to boost your stories’ reach without compromising editorial integrity.

• **Structuring for success:**Discover how to craft headlines, choose images, and format articles so they perform across search, news feeds, and AI overviews.

• **Real-time optimisation:**Find out how to make breaking news, live blogs, and evergreen features more discoverable—right when it matters most.

• **Tools & analytics:**Get to grips with Search Console and other tools to track your performance and spot new opportunities.

• **Editorial strategy for the AI era:**Explore how to adapt your newsroom’s workflows and planning to thrive in a world of zero-click results and AI-powered discovery.

Sign up to the course here.

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Mueller criticises Bot-specific markdown
One of the consequences of the general confusion over AI search visibility is the idea that you can use markdown to do the main donkey work to boost your AI visibility. Something that the King Kong of search, John Muller, has recently promptly quashed.

A Mathematical Approach to Understanding AI Search
I’m a being fan of Joshua Budman’s Substack who attempts to tackle some of the key questions around AI visibility using his particular logical approach. There’s a lot of AI Visibility myth-busting here alongside heaps of ‘correlation is not causation.’

How The Guardian is Responding to AI
A great interview here with Caspar Llewellyn Smith, The Guardian’s new Chief AI Officer who interestingly gave us The Observer Music Monthly which was always a feature in our student household on a Sunday morning after spending the whole night listening to Aphex Twin.

The Athletic’s Content Strategy to Counter AI Scraping
“The one thing that AI isn’t as good at is the live experience. And so we can be that expert for you in the moment. Humans will always be faster.” That’s Sarah Goldstein, Editorial Director at The Athletic. Thus follows an interesting overview of The Athletic’s strategy to counter AI sucking all their content up. Just make sure when you invest in live blogs that you also hire a good consultant to make sure your blogs get the visibility in search they deserve - often tricker than it sounds.

And on the topic of sport…

Smartoco Release A Sport-Specific User Needs Model.
When Dmitry Shiskin started to talk about his user needs model at the BBC over ten years ago - he facilitated a whole new content strategy conversation around producing targeted content over ‘spray and pray’. Well, just in time for the Winter Olympics Smartoco have upped their game with the release of Sport-specific user needs. If you work in sports journalism this is pretty essential reading and I would encourage you to create your own versions if you feel the model doesn’t fit your company culture/language/approach.

Beef up Your SEO/Strategy Game
Just as Dmitry often shares his best reads that have helped him in his career (so follow him), Pedro Dias has shared som great advice and recommendations here for levelling up your SEO and general life game. Hmm, methinks I should do the same in a future post.

And lastly, a few of you know what I do a spot of electronic music, and I’m pleased to announce the release of my new track **Chrétien de Troyes’ out on Friday 13th. This must surely win an award for ‘Most Pretentious Title Track Ever’ but what is bloke interested in Arthurian Romance poems to do?

Enjoy the rest of your week.

My experience thus far has been a little mixed. On the one hand I’m definitely engaged and the daily newsletter alerts prompting me to commit to my daily streak haven’t annoyed me yet - so, full marks Mr. D for tone and customer engagement. But on the other hand, over 3 weeks I haven’t actually learned that much Italian? Now, that could be a big negative but I’ve done enough repeatable exercises that, I feel quite confident actually speaking it.

So, maybe, less is more when it comes to learning a language - we’ll see when we head out to San Siro!

So, Steve, what’s with the Duolingo/Newsroom love affair?
Well, if you work in publishing, you’ve probably felt the tension: readers say they want quality journalism, but their habits strongly suggest they are more inclined to spend time on apps that make returning feel effortless (and addictive). Few companies have mastered that habit loop like Duolingo—and its growth gives us a useful reality check on what “engagement” can really look like when product, tone, and incentives are all aligned.

By late 2025, Duolingo reported 50.5 million daily active users and 135.3 million monthly active users (Q3 2025), alongside 11.5 million paid subscribers. That’s not just scale; it’s frequency. There’s no denying it - 50.5 million daily active users is BONKERS.

And the momentum isn’t a one-quarter wonder, either. In its 2024 annual filing, Duolingo reported 116.7 million MAUs and 40.5 million DAUs in Q4 2024 (three months ended Dec 31, 2024), up sharply year-on-year, with 9.5 million paid subscribers at period end. In other words: it has built a routine product that tens of millions choose to open every day.

So what can newsrooms borrow from its success, without trashing quality journalism altogether?

1) Design for “small wins,” not heroic sessions

Duolingo doesn’t ask for an hour. It asks for a lesson. Then another. Then—oops—you’ve done ten minutes.

Newsrooms often design like every visit should be a banquet: big investigations, long reads, feature packages. Keep those but add more “small wins” that still respect the craft:

• A two-minute “what changed since yesterday” update on a beat
  

• A “one chart, one takeaway” daily post
  

• A short explainer that closes a single knowledge gap

In short, make it easy to start and satisfying to finish. Completion is motivational fuel. Edition-based digital publishing was soooo 2020, we’re now talking micro-editions, baby.

2) Streaks are really about identity and continuity

The infamous Duolingo streak isn’t just gamification; it’s a promise: “I’m the kind of person who shows up.” Duolingo’s filings even call out efforts to make the product “more social and engaging” as part of growth in active users.

Newsrooms can create continuity via:

• Reading streaks tied to topics (e.g., “Local news streak,” “Climate streak”)
  

• “Follow” author/story features that turn a beat into a relationship
  

• Save-and-return affordances: “Continue where you left off” for ongoing stories

The point isn’t about gaining endless gamification points. It’s about helping the reader build a repeatable habit and a sense of “this place is mine.”

3) Personalisation that feels like service, not surveillance

Duolingo personalises the journey: you’re placed, guided, nudged, and shown progress. The newsroom equivalent might look like:

• Let readers pick 3–5 interests at onboarding (“UK politics,” “Premier League,” “Housing,” “AI at work”)
  

• Build “Your Week in…” digests from those choices
  

• Offer “light / standard / deep” modes for the same story (summary → context → full piece)

The lesson here is personalisation works best when it’s transparent (“you chose these”) and reversible (“change topics anytime”).

4) A brand voice people want to hang out with

Duolingo’s tone—especially on social—has become part of its product. The company even notes it adjusted “unhinged” social posting in response to community feedback, then saw impressions rise again after increasing it. That’s a sophisticated point: tone of voice is a retention lever, but it must be managed like any other—tested and adjusted on feedback.

For publishers, “friendly” doesn’t mean flippant. It means:

• Clear, human headlines (less institutional throat-clearing)
  

• Occasional wit where appropriate
  

• More “here’s what you need” and less “as readers will be aware”

Informative and friendly is the key here.

5) Measure what Duolingo measures

Duolingo reports DAUs, MAUs, and paid subscribers because those reflect habit and value exchange. Newsrooms often focus on page views that don’t map to loyalty.

A Duolingo-inspired dashboard for publishing might prioritise:

• Days-per-month active (are people returning?)
  

• “Followed topic” engagement (are relationships forming?)
  

• Completion rate (are stories built to be finished?)
  

• Subscription starts per engaged cohort (not overall traffic)

The bottom line

Duolingo’s popularity isn’t magic. It’s the compound effect of low-friction starts, visible progress, friendly tone and a product that respects the power of daily routine. Journalism can’t—and shouldn’t—copy the dopamine tricks wholesale. But it can learn from the discipline: design for repeat visits, make progress legible, and treat engagement as a long-term relationship, not a one-night casual user stand.

In making this list I haven’t been able to shake that voice inside which says ‘Steve, there is absolutely NO WAY newsrooms are going to sign up to a Duolingo-like model.’ I think that’s because the tone of voice for this brand is just so prevalent. The real question being asked here is: can a news brand for adults ever be irreverent, friendly and - damn it - even fun?

“But Steve, just look at newsrooms on the socials!” I hear you cry. But that’s not really the answer. So many news brands on social seem to be personable and friendly, but when you hit their website or app, it’s back to the NO FUN HERE brigade and serious faces. As a punter, I’ve always found that slightly jarring.

I think the truth here is that everyone will say no to a ‘Duolingo for News’ until they see a successful prototype. Axios was short and snappy, The Know was fun and informative. UsVsTh3m was on the right track. I think we can do even more. Time to get the Python manual out.

Grazie per Aver Letto!

PS: If you are an italian speaker, I was recently interviewed about Zero click search right here.

Let’s get to it.

Actually before we start I want to send my heartfelt support to the staff that were recently laid off at The Washington Post. This has sent quite a shock through the media industry and the rationale is covered in detail on the excellent Media Confidential podcast by Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber. The WP is an excellent publication and I was always impressed by their in-depth sports coverage.

Just in case you weren’t aware, Google is rolling out a Discover core update, the first one of its kind which has been officially announced. Limited to the US for now, it aims to prioritise locally relevant content based on a user’s country while reducing sensational and clickbait content. This will be really interesting to see, because - well, (1) with Google there’s always a gap between what’s announced and what actually happens in the SERPS and (2) newsrooms around the world have been optimising like crazy to create ‘curiosity gap’ content that OFTEN verges on the sensational only because Google rewarded them with visibility in the first place. Expect audience growth specialists to be watching this like hawks but, like I’ve always said - treat Discover with caution, it’s a tactic, not a long-term strategy.

Elsewhere, I really loved this great video by Marie Haynes showing how engagement signals (via Glue/Navboost) are so important for rankings. That might sound pretty dry but Marie is an excellent communicator and I found myself ‘glued’ as she took me through Google legal trial documentation to unearth info on Rank Brain, Rank Embed (BERT) and vector search. She has already written about this in more depth here. After watching the vid, I feel more clued up on the link between engagement and ranking, why and how often Chrome user data is used, and why ‘chunking’ your content may work now for AI, but in the long-term you should be focusing on super-serving your audience with helpful content.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean in chunks.

It could mean quirky things like this sentence

that is not a chuck, in any shape

or form

.

In other news, specifically GB News, Press Gazette have released another chart looking at the 50 biggest news sites in December. Perhaps, we shouldn’t really be surprised about the rise of Substack (I mean, everyone has one now, right?) but the performance of GB News has been nothing short of a digital success story - even though it pains me somewhat to admit it as a left-leaning poet personality type who wouldn’t have fared well in Stalin’s Russia.

(Sorry, my son is doing A Level History exams atm, so we’re reliving Stalin’s Forced Collectivism circa 1928. In short, poets ALWAYS get a raw deal.)

Back to GB News. I remember studying SEM Rush one day trying to figure out why GB News was becoming so popular in search - and I think it’s fair to say it’s due to a number of contributing factors in a post-Brexit Britain outside of people just punching queries into search. Still, the SEO play at GB News has been strong - widening its hard news coverage to target strategic topics it wants to own. The headlines and content are ripe for Discover as well, so it will be interesting to see how it adapts when the Core update rolls out across Blighty.

Kudos goes to Harry Clarkson-Bennett for his latest series looking at Information Retreval. Again, this probably sounds as dull as dishwater for the uninitiated but, fear not, Harry is fond of cracking the odd joke or two and his elucidation of the differences between training data and RAG for AI models is nothing short of ‘on fleek.’ Essential reading.

It seems that the word innovation is becoming synonymous with the Bauer Group and it was fascinating to hear from Stuart Forrest at Flashed and Flames in London about the various (AI) tools that have been rolled out to content teams to help workflows. I particularly liked the tool that helps identify which pages should be updated based on performance. Content management systems often struggle with this kind of intelligence, forcing writers to maintain spreadsheets where they have to copy and paste articles, then follow up a month later (if they remember). It’s all very arduous and frankly boring, so as someone who’s worked in Product developing in-house content management systems, I’m all up for this kind of wizardry.

(Psst: Speaking of CMS, I wrote a little piece for Glide this week about the dominance of AI Visibility in our content discussions: Opinion: All this talk of AI visibility is killing your news business)

I guess the recent Ahrefs report announcing that AI Overviews are reducing clicks by 58% was another kick in the teeth. This is why it’s crucial that teams are aware when an AI overview appears in the SERP and how they can adjust accordingly. This is also why it was important to hear from a selection of top UK audience growth specialists about the impact of AI in search. It turns out Zero Click doesn’t mean ‘no clicks at all’ and publishers shouldn’t be demoting SEO in their list of 2026 priorities. Over to the Mail’s Carly Steven:

”“Search isn’t dead. It is fragmenting; queries can start beyond a traditional search engine, and platforms increasingly influence each other. This demands different thinking on optimisation and more nuanced KPIs. Google’s systems are increasingly focused on rewarding genuine quality content… I think this has to be the main focus – create content that truly satisfies users, and the algorithms generally follow.”

And if you wanted to consider some metrics that might help you with that process, you could read this.

PS: if you liked the pomp and ceremony of this update you may also like to catch up with all things audience growth on the Beers & SEO with Barry and Steve podcast.

As you may know, AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries displayed directly in Google’s search results, synthesising information from multiple web pages to provide users a quick answer without clicking through to the source. While useful for users, this feature has dramatically reduced referral traffic to publishers because users often get answers without ever visiting a publisher’s site.

Why This Matters: The Publisher Traffic Dilemma

For years, publishers have warned that AI features like Overviews undermine traditional web traffic. Because AI Overviews appear above organic results and address user queries directly, traditional click-through rates have plummeted — with independent research showing significant drops in traffic in categories including (and not limited to) health, how-to guides, recipes, and educational content.

It’s therefore no surprise that without clicks to their sites, publishers lose out on advertising revenue, subscriber conversions, and brand engagement — all of which are core to their business models. From a search-marketing perspective, this trend also complicates the task of optimising content for visibility when Google’s AI serves answers before users ever scroll to organic listings.

What the Proposed Opt-Out Means

Under proposed rules being consulted on by the Competition and Markets Authority, Google would be required to offer publishers the ability to block their content from being used in AI Overviews and other AI features, while still allowing that content to appear in standard search results.

Google itself has said it’s exploring such controls after regulatory pressure. However, the company has signalled that any opt-out mechanism must not “break Search” or fragment user experience. As Ron Eden, Google’s principal for product management, said in a statement: “Any new controls need to avoid breaking search in a way that leads to a fragmented or confusing experience for people. As AI increasingly becomes a core part of how people find information, any new controls also need to be simple and scalable for website owners.”

Key Questions and Challenges Ahead

While opt-out controls are a promising development, there are still important questions and uncertainties to address:

What Will the Tools Actually Look Like?

Google’s statements emphasise caution — controls must keep search user experience intact. This raises questions about how granular the opt-out will be (site-wide vs. page-by-page) and how publishers will manage exceptions or toggles for different content types.

Opt Out is, quite frankly, a Ball-ache

The model proposed by Google means that all publishers will have opted into potential AI Overview inclusion unless they manually choose to opt out. Unless I am mistaken, that’s an instant ‘megatonne’ of additional work publishers now have to manage. This method is also somewhat disingenuous for publishers as it paints the erroneous impression that if you DON’T opt out, then you must be happy with the inclusion. This has NEVER been the case ever since publishers realised that AI Overviews negatively impacted clicks. It’s another example where a simple binary tool offered ‘freely and in good faith’ to publishers might have other consequences further down the line. Elric’s Stormbringer comes to mind.

Could AI Summary Usage Decline as a Result?

If many publishers opt out, you might think Google would need to rethink how AI Overviews are generated or risk reducing the quality of responses for certain queries. The sad fact here is that even if, by some miraculous fellowship-of-the-ring coming together, every single publisher did pull out - it’s only human nature that someone along the line will eventually crack. It’s a loaded game that favours the weakest link.

Will This Influence Broader Regulation?

Regulatory moves in the UK could inspire similar actions in the EU and United States. Already, antitrust and digital market laws are pushing tech platforms toward greater content control for publishers, suggesting that this is part of a larger trend rather than an isolated change.

Conclusion: A Turning Point for Publisher Rights in AI Search or Something Altogether More Confusing?

Google’s willingness to explore opt-out options for AI Overviews might appear like a meaningful step toward balancing the interests of AI innovation with the economic realities of content publishing. However, we should not lose focus of the bigger story here. This action by Google was not taken because it woke up one day and felt particularly friendly towards publishers.. It was a swift response to the much wider demands of the CMA.

As Stuart Forest has eloquently noted, we shouldn’t let a shiny new tool obfuscate what publishers have been asking for years from Google - namely, greater data transparency and greater granular control over how our content appears on a Google surface.

Overall, this is another interesting development for audience growth specialists as new functionality like this will not only affect optimisation strategies - it also highlights the growing regulatory influence over how generative AI intersects with search.

The CMS proposals are now out for consultation until 25 February after which a final decision will be taken. If you’re a publisher, get involved.

Right now, many publishers are asking a critical question: “Should we pivot more of our budget into PPC given how search results are changing?”

And it’s a reasonable question. Search engine results pages are increasingly crowded with paid, sponsored, and AI-generated features, sometimes pushing traditional organic listings further down the screen. Industry discussions on LinkedIn and at conferences are ablaze with the news that search behaviour is in flux and the rules of discovery are being rewritten.

But before you decide to reallocate 80–100% of your marketing budget into paid search, let’s look at why organic search — and the strategic optimisation that underpins it — still offers the strongest return for most publishers.

The Shifting Search Landscape

Over the last year, Google and others have continued to increase the presence of paid and sponsored positions in search results. These include more paid headlines above the traditional blue links and AI-driven answer boxes replacing or reducing organic clicks.

The implication for publishers is that visibility above the fold is getting more competitive BUT this shift doesn’t mean organic is dead — it means organic has evolved.

(For a wonderfully well-written appraisal of everything that 2025 threw at us in search, you can read Lily Ray’s article here.)

Organic Search Still Delivers the Majority of Clicks and Value

The most recent traffic studies consistently show that organic search still drives the majority of clicks on most queries, even with more sponsored content in SERPs.

Despite the encroachment of paid and AI features organic search still accounts for 90% of all traffic from search, PPC only 10%

In addition, users continue to trust and click on organic listings more often than ads when relevance and rankings are strong.

For publishers that’s a powerful argument for keeping SEO at the centre of your growth strategy.

Why Organic Is a Better Long-Term Investment for Most Publishers

1. Organic Benefits Compound Over Time

SEO isn’t a sprint — it’s an investment in evergreen visibility. A well-ranked article continues to attract searchers long after it’s published. PPC, by contrast, delivers immediate visibility that stops as soon as spend stops. It still surprises me that, although the compound nature of SEO has been widely known for years, it’s still relatively unknown in some digital teams. If that’s the case in your organisation, then Eli Schwartz has a great explainer here.

2. Organic Builds Authority and Trust
Readers regard organic results as more credible than ads. That’s particularly important for news publishers where trust and quality are fundamental brand values under constant scrutiny. Investing in SEO strengthens your domain authority and signals expertise to both users and algorithms.

3. Organic Is Cost-Efficient in the Long Run
Yes, PPC can deliver short bursts of traffic, but at increasing CPCs — especially for competitive or newsworthy topics. Organic optimisation, once in place, doesn’t incur a per-click cost and scales more economically as you grow.

When PPC Should Still Play a Role

In no way do I mean to suggest that PPC doesn’t have a valid role in your publishing digital strategy. Strategic deployment of paid search can be highly effective when:

• You want immediate data when launching new products or content verticals — PPC can help you get early visibility while organic traction builds.
  

• Testing headlines and topic angles — PPC data often reveals what resonates before you invest in full editorial.
  

• Supporting Brand Partnerships and Advertiser Campaigns - When publishers run branded content or sponsored features for advertisers, PPC can enhance campaign performance by driving guaranteed traffic volumes, supporting multi-channel visibility, helping an advertiser hit impression or session targets. For many commercial teams, PPC is a value-add upsell that strengthens advertiser relationships.
  

• Greater Control Over Targeting - Organic search depends on how algorithms interpret your content. Paid search gives you control over keyword targeting, audiences, devices, scheduling, budgets, ad copy and landing pages This level of control is particularly valuable when launching experimental content or testing new revenue models.
  

• Supporting publisher subscription strategies— through PPC, publishers can learn how to best position their subscription pages by testing the language used and the actual value proposition. As we’ve said before on the Beers & SEO with Barry and Steve Podcast, you’ve be surprised at how many publishers DON’T use techniques like this to listen to their audience and adjust their marketing accordingly.

In all these situations, PPC can act as a very powerful feedback tool and tactical amplifier.

How to Balance Your Investment in 2026

For most publishers in the UK and beyond, a strong allocation model today might look like this:

• 70–90% investment in organic SEO: Technical optimisation, content strategy, editorial training, user intent mapping, structured data audit etc.
  

• 10–30% in PPC and paid search: Strategic campaigns tied to launches, specific commercial goals, or testing.
  

Of course, every business is different - for instance in some industries like travel or automobile it might still be necessary to bid for top PPC placements even if you have already secured the top organic spot. Another example might be podcasts where, although Spotify and Apple dominate organic, you may still want to drive listeners to your own platform to listen to the podcast where you can then upsell the benefits of subscription.

(Although that kind of approach would completely depend on the actual cost of the campaign!)

But a typical balance like this would mean that you’re building long-term discovery while still having the agility to test and experiment where it matters most.

The Bottom Line

Yes, the SERPs are changing — more sponsored positions, more AI features, and more complexity. But organic search remains the backbone of sustainable visibility and audience growth for publishers. Paid search has its role, especially as a tactical tool, but investing heavily in PPC at the expense of SEO is rarely the most efficient path for publishers.

In an era of zero-click, publishers who combine strong SEO fundamentals with smart PPC tactics will outperform those chasing shortcuts.

Until next time.

And..If you’d like a tailored analysis of how this applies to your brand — from topical authority to technical SEO opportunities — I’d be glad to help you map out a strategy that aligns with both your editorial mission and commercial goals.

Recently, the constant battle with my teenagers about spending less time on their devices has really made me reflect on my own ability to focus on everyday activities. We are constantly surrounded by distractions vying for our attention. And now, with the rise of AI, it seems that finding time to self-reflect and generate original thought is at a real premium.

I wonder sometimes if we’ll all eventually agree to outsource the whole tricky business of thinking altogether. After all, convenience over substance has had a long and healthy history in our brief residence on this planet.

As a teenager I was quite dismissive of what we would now call wellbeing or self-help resources. But after studying philosophy at Uni, I became more curious about how the mind works and what it really means to be super-focused.

Needless to say, focusing is actually extremely difficult, not only because of all the distractions but also because we’re always lying to ourselves about the actual nature of things. As we enter the end of January I wonder how many gym memberships will be cancelled as we tell ourselves ‘it wasn’t really for us’ because of other more pressing commitments.

This is just one example of how the mind will trick us into taking the easy way out, suggesting that our current lazy passing impulse is not actually an impulse at all but something that has a credible history. This eventually solidifies into statements like: ‘I was never really meant to be a (insert dream ambition) singer, painter, speaker or chef.’

Being focused is not just about being able to concentrate on a task, it means, for me at least, being really intentional about your actions and being goal-orientated - and that ultimate goal being to lead a happy and fulfilled life.

I might not be an expert in the topic of focusing, but I am an expert in my own experience of focusing - so here are some things that have helped me along the way in both my personal and professional life.

1. Read ‘Getting things Done’ - David Allen

Like all great book recommendations, this was a book personally recommended to me by a great manager. It’s over 300 pages long but its message is quite simple - make a list. Well, lots of lists actually - just go through the process of noting everything down and then do the fun and exciting thing of attacking each point and crossing it off your list. It’s a simple exercise that teaches you - if it isn’t written down, it won’t be processed.

Do you have a sense sometimes that you are drifting and not actually doing the things you really want to do? That is because, my friend, you do not have a list.

2. Have Goals

If you don’t have short and long-term goals, how can you tell that you’re moving in the direction you want? Take time to write these down and, more importantly, the steps that you need to take to get you there. THEN find other people who have similar goals and learn from them.

3. Do Nothing

It’s really important to give your brain a rest by doing a form of exercise where you’re not thinking or worrying about things. This could be a simple meditation like lying down and focusing on just your breathing, or it could be going out and running a half-marathon. I’ve found the activity doesn’t matter as long as you can ‘slow down to the speed of thought’ as a good manager once said and recognise that…

4. ‘You are not your mind’

This is a quote from Eckhart Tolle’s book ‘The Power of Now’ which is an interesting mix of psychology and Buddhism with some useful tips on how to meditate. It really helped me to recognise that the mind is like a machine which is always moving - thinking about the past and worrying about the future. Being able to focus on something really requires you to understand that distractions are caused not only in the outside world, but also in the interior. Another way of putting it would be to ask yourself how ‘present’ you are when addressing a challenge or working with other people. If you are only half-engaged, you might only see half the problem.

My first job was being a music journalist, running around London interviewing various artists. Often when it came to typing up the interview, I would notice that I was often missing the juicy follow-up questions in my interview because I was too distracted by the worry that I might not be able to ask my next question.

I think a good interview, as well as a good life ethic, is all about being prepared BUT you also need to be attentive enough to shift gears in response to an interesting change. Be present - which is often easier said than done!

5. Check in with yourself, regularly

From all the points above, this is probably the hardest - the idea being that you become so familiar with the steps above that you are able to self-reflect at key points throughout the day. My advice here is to invite yourself to your own meeting at the end of each week so you can reflect on how things have gone. Then progress to meeting yourself at the end of each day.

6. Keep Talking

Something I keep telling my kids is that you can’t work out problems all by yourself - we are social animals and our ideas need to be tested under social conditions. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve written something on paper that sounds great but the words fall empty and meaningless as soon as a discuss it with someone who is raising an eyebrow. You need courage in your convictions, and that muscle can only be exercised with other people.

And lastly, a little bonus.

7. Your best idea is always hidden behind your first

When I wrote this I immediately started to question it, because sometimes your first idea IS your best idea and it’s important to recognise that and NOT go hell for leather exploring all other ramifications.

BUT in the majority of cases it’s only by building up your first idea that you actually see the better idea that is connected to it. To use a musical analogy, I can write some great harmonies, but I can only do that once I’ve written the melody. In fact, I can’t see ANY harmonies until I’ve settled on the melody and excluded all other possibilities.

It’s a funny business thinking but I hope I’ve helped in some small way to help you think about your own thoughts, thoughtfully.

I talk more about the importance of focus on the SEO Mindset podcast.

Queue the worst photo pose I have ever seen…

Still, we were able to produce some fun and informative #content which we are hoping to roll out on a monthly basis. If you have suggestions for future shows just let us know!

Here are some highlights from our discussion…

Why it’s still worth investing in SEO

Steve: What we’re gonna discuss today is basically AI survival strategies for publishers. This is very much inspired by Barry’s own post on his Substack called SEO for Google News. If you aren’t aware about it, we’ll put the links in the pod and also the YouTube, etc. So we’re gonna flesh the podcast out based on his article. I think one of the crucial points in your article Barry is traffic is still there in search. Search lives on. So do you want to respond to that?

Barry: Yeah, I found it interesting. There was a few pieces I read today about that Reuters report and also reporting how news leaders are considering spending less effort on classic search—what they called old school SEO. And then I looked at the graph also in the same report about where the traffic actually comes from. We Discover sending what—45, 48% of traffic to publishers—and search a second source of 30, 35% of traffic. And then social media and all the other channels a distant third.

And then I thought, why would you want to spend less effort on arguably the second largest, and for some publishers the largest source of visits to your website. Just because it’s declining doesn’t mean you should spend less effort on it. In fact, it’s probably the exact opposite of what you should do. Yes, it’s harder, let’s be honest. The amount of clicks that Google is sending to the wider web and to news especially is decreasing.

But if you spend less effort on it, you try less hard, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As in, you spend less effort, you get less traffic, and you think, yeah, it’s not worth it—spend less effort, traffic—until you reach total Google zero. I think this should be a signal to news leaders that they need to work harder at SEO.

And I also think, speaking from my experience working with many publishers, and you can probably share some of your own experiences there, Steve, that a lot of publishers have taken their SEO a bit for granted. They’ve been doing the same things over and over again and expecting to see growth off the back of that. They haven’t really been innovating. They’ve just been doing the same SEO tactics, the same SEO approaches.

They also have probably been ignoring the technical debts on their own website. I see this very, very commonly that websites might look very good superficially, but the moment you start digging under the surface, especially on a technical SEO level, you find absolutely gaping holes and huge problems that prevent Google and other systems from crawling and indexing the content efficiently.

And those have never been addressed because the publisher thinks, well, it’s working—we get traffic—why should we fix that? And then to draw the conclusion that search traffic is declining so we should spend less effort on search without actually taking a good hard look at your own tactics and strategies and efforts to date is the height of folly. I think it is self-defeating. It is, I dare say, stupid.

I think publishers need to take a bit of ownership of what they’ve been doing and what they’ve not been doing and have a bit more of a long-term perspective. And I understand this can be challenging for news publishers because news moves very quickly. You have to make rapid decisions on editorial agendas, on story selection, all those things. But you don’t want to make knee-jerk decisions about the long-term survival of your own company.

I think you still need to look at the potential that exists within search and Discover and all the other channels and then evaluate where you actually get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of actual visitor numbers, actual audience growth and actual long-term revenue.

Steve: Yeah, completely. Some of the bad practice has probably come about because search in some businesses has just been taken for granted, as you say. A bedrock of search traffic has come in, which is probably low quality traffic. It’s been there and it’s just been assumed that that will always be the case. We just need to interrogate what is that audience coming in and is it of value to us?

There’s lots of opportunities still to optimise for that traffic. But I assume a lot of confusion has come about with the number of AI visibility tools that hit the market in the second half of last year and all their marketing and promotion has muddied the actuality of the fact that there’s still traffic coming in via Google and it vastly overpowers the kind of referral traffic that we get from AI answer engines, which we discussed on the previous podcast.

Responding to the December Core Update

Steve: Ok onto the December core update, we saw visibility dips for some of the news publishers out there. I always respond to publishers by suggesting that it’s not de facto that your site is going to have less visibility going forward—it can swing back. We need to accommodate for the ebb and flows of Google. But even so, there’s always work that we can do in the background with technical SEO etc. Barry, you got some thoughts on that?

Barry: Yeah, the update was fairly brutal, wasn’t it, for many publishers? I think if you came out of that relatively unscathed, you should count your blessings. I’m not entirely clear what the underpinning sources and mechanisms are of the downgrade, because some of the brands that were downgraded, like The Guardian for example, you don’t really expect them to be hit that badly by any core update.

But I think it’s one of those core updates where Google just fiddles with certain buttons, certain volume signals, certain levers that they can pull and push in the background to try and create a certain response. And the effect it has on publishers is almost collateral damage.

I did see some publishers penalised, especially publishers that target the English language market but are not based themselves in the UK or in the US, who were hit very badly. And I think that was maybe the goal that Google was trying to achieve because those publishers have been mentioned many times on LinkedIn and other social channels in the last few months, maybe even years, about how they’re using clickbait and spam tactics to try and manipulate their presence in Discover and in Google search and trying to maximize their visibility without necessarily underpinning that with journalistic quality. So I suspect that this update was trying to target that and I think it was pretty successful at it.

But there’s been collateral damage—publishers who were caught in those same crossfires that don’t necessarily deserve it, who haven’t really been using those tactics, but for some reason, their signals align with those more spam targeting websites were using.

Steve: Okay, so people are still trying to dig into the weeds for that, to get the answers for that core update. We’ll find out more as the month progresses. One other point from your article, which we’ve touched upon a little bit here, is AI is an accelerant, not a solution. Brands just need to work harde on their USP.

It’s always interesting looking at some of the optimisation tactics that seem to be recommended out there. One that I continuously see is the use of listicles by brands. I’ve got nothing against listicles—everyone likes a great listicle—but it strikes me as somewhat disingenuous when a publisher will put their own brand at the top of that list. It’s all done in order to trick the AI algorithm to see your listicle as an authority signal and whoever’s at the top must be the best. I know there’s lots of publishers doing it out there. So I don’t see that as a long-term strategy for publishers - it’s just one example where publishers are being recommended certain tactics that doesn’t seem right for a long-term strategy of encouraging audience loyalty to your brand.

Barry: I think publishers have been chasing after these quick win tactics for as long as the web has been around. And there is a deep irony in there that publishers are using all these tricks to basically manipulate Google into showing them and generating traffic for them. And then they get all outrageous and self aggrandising when Google punishes them and other publishers for using those tricks.

Publishers are their own worst enemies, they really are. I love news, I love journalism, I love the value that it brings, but the digital strategies employed by many publishers deeply frustrates me at times. They see this hunger for clicks as their main driving goal, and it encourages bad habits. We see this in search, we see this in Discover, we see this now with these listicles.

On a side note, I find it also highly amusing how easy it is to manipulate these AI overviews into showing the weirdest answers just by publishing a few listicles or even just one article. I don’t know why anybody would trust anything these AI answers actually tell them because most of it is just so obviously easily manipulable. I think there’s going to be a whole industry built on the manipulation of AI overviews and I think it’s going to backfire on Google.

Back to publishers: I think publishers need to take a harder look at themselves. They have been chasing after the cheap clicks for so long and those habits are so deeply ingrained that they don’t know how to stop and they’re always finding new ways to chase after them. With listicles, with AI-generated journalism, with clickbait headlines, with misleading featured images—anything they can use to get those clicks.

And also using technology like Google AMP web stories, still popular in many countries because of the preferential presence it used to have in the Discover feed without really editing anything new, without really creating proper journalism. And then they get all outraged when Google slams the door shut in their face and penalizes them for doing that. They shouldn’t be complaining.

I think the publishers that are succeeding are less concerned with those tactics and more concerned with being themselves and presenting their news in their way to their audience, with viewpoints that aligns with the values that they hold as a brand. I think publishers just need to be a bit more honest with themselves and a little bit less eager to point the finger at everybody else when quite often they have no one else to blame but themselves.

Listen on Spotify:

And Apple Podcasts:

1. Publishers want to be able to talk about editorial standards, their values, mission statements etc but…
   

2. ..it’s no point talking about these if audiences aren’t engaging with you across social, search or AI etc
   

3. …and often that can’t be achieved unless the publisher ‘plays to the algorithm,’ often producing low-value content for the clicks…which defeats point 1.
   

In the past, ‘playing to the algorithm’ has often been justified by suggesting that low-value content pays the bills, and allows the journalists the opportunity to focus on quality coverage e.g. local stories, opinion pieces and investigations.

But, in actuality, what has happened is that, as the value of ad display continues to decrease, the low-value content no longer ‘pays the bills’ and journalists are stuck having to produce even MORE low value content like a hamster on a wheel.

I can’t blame any publisher for doing this, I’ve been there myself launching new digital products and looking at the analytics every minute/hour in search of spikes. In many ways it’s what you HAVE to do to understand what your audience really wants.

For instance, when we launched PopBuzz we thought were creating a music-orientated product but soon discovered that what the audience really wanted was a pop culture product focused on issues and lifestyle. We certainly wouldn’t have discovered any of that if we hadn’t worked with the algorithm to figure out what chimed with the audience.

But there is always the danger that, at some point along the way, we get more addicted to the spikes rather than trying to forge a deeper connection with the audience.

And now, we are in an even more challenging environment, one where human-created content on the interweb is on the decrease, one where you can stumble across questions like this on Reddit:

How can a publisher possibly compete with AI slop like this? Especially as platforms like Google find it increasingly hard to identify what it thinks is a legitimate news website?

Well, I think publishers can try quite a few tactics which I’ll call The Peep Show Method.

(Non-UK readers stay with me. Peep Show is a 90s comedy featuring a dysfunctional friendship between two guys, one serious (Mark), the other (Jeremy) the complete opposite. Basically, Id and Super ego - dig?)

I might be stretching the point here but by following the character traits of these two characters, publishers can take a two-pronged approach to building trust with audiences.

Let’s take the serious (Mark) side. Publishers can:

• Reach team agreement on a mission statement that displays the values that are most important to the org and that show you have the audience’s back. Publish said statement on a corporate website.
  

• Film transparency - think prepared, well lit and somewhat scripted newsroom conversations or like that last five minutes you get with the camera team at the end of every big BBC David Attenborough show.
  

• Consistent coverage - sometimes letting people know you have their back is just by being there at every breaking news moment.
  

• Likewise, newsletters and notifications pinged in the knowledge of what the audience wants and when it wants it.
  

• Demonstrate understanding of an audience via well timed and targeted articles e.g. Best Family Ski Resorts that’s published in September for your relevant (and affluent) audience.
  

• Everything we are taught as journalists about shining a light and holding power to account.
  

• Admitting mistakes.
  

• More video content featuring presenters and journalists
  

• Formal-ish tone

On the other hand, a more playful (Jeremy) side might focus on:

• Showing transparency is a less formal way - news can often be creative, chaotic spaces so reveal more of that. Photos of the team at work taken with the mobile phone rather than a professional camera (I’m thinking Uusi Juttu here).
  

• Question if you really need that super-produced studio for your podcasts. Think less polished, more ‘punk.’ (Although, NEVER poor audio of course. There’s never an excuse for a bad mic).
  

• More ‘Wow’ moments that delight. These could be:
  

  • Gamification/UX of the news consumption process. Unlocking achievements or occasional Easter Eggs.
    

  • Who is interviewed, what is investigated. Not only do you want audiences to go ‘Wow, I never knew that!’ you want them to go ‘Wow, I never knew The Times/Guardian/Mirror did that!’
    

  • Quizzes that offer a comical take on the news - anyone remember Martin Belam’s UsVsTh3m and their games?
    

  • Newsletters with personality. Yes, you can have your Editor’s Forward, but can it crack a good joke?
    

  • Data Visuals which are both informative and playful e.g. Vox, Tortoise, Guardian Crunch.
    

  • Interactivity, encouraging audiences to play with your data.
    

• More (vertical) video content featuring anyone from the team who is comfortable on camera.
  

• MORE WIT LESS WORDS. Short, distinct and snappy - help audiences feel they are in on the joke even if that joke is about latest index funds and dividend stocks.
  

• Personalised moments - surely we can do better than the birthday email from brands we thought we’d unsubscribed from years ago? Maybe something like this which I received from The Times in December offering me a free book as a thank you for my subscription loyalty (don’t worry, I’ve used the code).

There are many more examples I could include but the point is publishers need to be BOTH Mark and Jeremy. Building trust is not just about posting a mission statement (although that is important) - it should permeate every action that the publisher takes AND, where possible, underline the value of journalism to the audience in MULTIPLE TONES.

That second bit is a bit more tricky - because you never want to be like Peep Show’s Mark breathing down your neck about the importance of journalism as you tuck into your news article (BUT you’d be surprised how many publishers DO NOT make it easy to find out more about how the editorial sausage is made and why it is important.)

Sometimes you can demonstrate value simply by demonstrating that you care.

This is why I think more publishers will team up on more collaborated investigations in 2026 - think Europe Uncovered 2025 which partnered The Guardian, Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel, ZDF, Der Standard and De Tijd. Projects like these work not only because of the collaborative firepower - they also demonstrate the value of journalism implicitly through the insights they generate.

Lastly, I’d like to see more examples where we can see the editorial coverage challenged by those that disagree with it. This is why Community Managers will become more important so we can hear from a variety of voices and understand their objections.

As I keep telling my bored teenagers, in life, as with political discussion, it’s critical that we meet others that can challenge our opinions - it’s how we grow and develop as humans. Surely, with AI reinforcing the bubbles we all want to conveniently live in, publishers have a real opportunity here to shake us up?

Which is why we need to be more positive about AI in general, to help newsrooms focus on the stories that really matter, fuel their delivery and help cut through the AI generated noise out there. I think Newsquest are doing some interesting things in this space with AI reporters.

We stand at a pivotal moment - we can either be buried by AI OR enable it to help us educate audiences about what we do, why we do it, and how it adds value to their lives.

And on that front, I am entirely optimistic - unlike Peep Show which was always tinged with, like all great UK comedy, a healthy dose of existential despair.

I’d encourage anyone in the news industry to read the report directly but here’s what the report tells us about newsroom content strategies for 2026.

1. Double down on content AI can’t easily replace

It may not be surprising that a major theme in the report is that publishers are really trying to focus on distinctive, human, and relationship-driven journalism, while moving away from content that AI and platforms can easily commoditise

Publishers themselves are clear that survival depends on distinctiveness, even at the cost of some reach. The strongest areas of strategic focus are:

• Original investigations and on-the-ground reporting

• Contextual analysis, explanation, and framing

• Human stories and narrative journalism

• Fact-checking and verification

• Opinion and commentary with a clear voice

These formats are harder for AI answer engines to summarise into bullet points and are more likely to build trust and loyalty. I’ve written further on how publishers can navigate zero click here.

2. Deprioritise commoditised formats

Executives expect significant decline in value for content that AI chatbots and aggregators can generate or summarise more efficiently than publishers:

• Service journalism (how-tos, tips, utility content)

• Evergreen content (travel guides, TV listings, product reviews)

• General, undifferentiated news coverage

Much of this content is already being absorbed into AI search overviews, reducing referral traffic.

3. Shift from “articles” to multi-format, liquid content

The report shows a clear pivot beyond text:

• Video is the top investment priority (especially short-form and vertical video).

• Audio (podcasts and new formats) is also a major growth area.

• Text remains important, but no longer the default growth engine.

Publishers are encouraged to design stories as “liquid content”—modular, adaptable, and easy to repackage across platforms, feeds, and AI interfaces.

4. Put a human face on journalism

The rise of creators is forcing publishers to rethink tone and presentation:

• Journalists are being encouraged to behave more like creators

• More emphasis on personality, voice, authenticity, and behind-the-scenes storytelling

• Greater visibility for individual journalists across video, social, newsletters, and events

This reflects a broader shift from institutional authority to relationship-based trust. I would also add that the report did highlight that some publishers were anxious about losing some of their top talent to the creator economy. I don’t think I’ve read that in previous reports.

5. Build community, not just traffic

With search and social referrals declining sharply, content strategy is increasingly tied to habit and loyalty, not clicks:

• Live journalism and events

• Newsletters and podcasts

• Community spaces and direct audience relationships

The goal is repeat engagement rather than one-off visits from platforms.

6. Design for AI discovery, but don’t abandon SEO efforts

Publishers expect continued traffic losses from traditional search and are beginning to adapt content for:

• AI chatbots and answer engines

• Citation, attribution, and visibility inside AI interfaces (AEO/GEO)

This doesn’t mean producing more generic content—but structuring high-value journalism so it remains discoverable and attributable in AI environments. I was particularly pleased that the report highlighted the point that Google continues to be a major driver of traffic to publishers, vastly more so than AI answer engine referrals.

I’ve written previously about how newsrooms can optimise for AEO/GEO - although I should admit that this area is moving so fast I might have update this list very soon.

To round off

It’s very apparent from this report that publishers are responding the declines in traffic from both search and social and the advent of AI by focusing more on originality, humanity, format diversity, and direct audience relationships. The winning strategies are not about out-producing AI, but about being unmistakably human and meaningfully distinctive.