Watch Now: AI Survival Strategies For Publishers

The second 'Beers with Barry and Steve' podcast is live! How could you resist?

If you thought the end of December was all about media predictions, then you didn’t factor in the first weeks of January! Fear not, because for our second podcast Barry and I have focused on a single theme - inspired by a recent article he wrote here.

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.

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