How publishers are modeling – and mitigating – a future with significantly less Google search traffic

Publishers including Condé Nast and Time are strategizing for Google referral traffic tanking. Naturally, approaches vary depending on the publisher and how Google-dependent they are. Digiday spoke to six execs at large publishers about how they’re modeling for less Google traffic.

Google traffic from organic search to over 2,500 sites was down by a third globally last year, according to Chartbeat data cited in the Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Some execs asked for anonymity when sharing their models.

Stress-testing life without Google traffic

Time built a dashboard that toggles Google referral traffic off to test what happens to engagement levels and revenue if Google referral traffic disappears, according to Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer.

“I know exactly what it looks like without Google,” he told Digiday, adding that losing Google traffic would have only a small impact because most revenue now comes from franchise sponsorships, branded and social ad products that don’t rely on Google. He did not provide exact figures.

Over the last three years, Time has pivoted to more of a B2B approach, which has helped it prepare for declines in Google referral traffic, according to Howard. The publisher removed the paywall, focused on franchises and events and prioritized longer-term sales relationships, he said. Before this strategy, 60% of Time’s traffic came from Google, per Similarweb data. That’s come down to 51%. Direct traffic makes up about 30% of Time’s overall traffic, up from 22% in 2023. Ad revenue grew 22% year over year in 2025.

“We’ve been able to build this business model that really wasn’t dependent on pages and in a way preempted this scenario from really being able to have a major impact on our business. Not to say that we’re exempt from it,” Howard said.

Time also switched to a headless CMS called Contentstack, which is API-based and makes it easier to syndicate content, according to Howard. The company has renewed its focus on syndication deals with platforms like Apple News, Yahoo and MSN, he added.

Forecasting AI Mode’s traffic hit 

A large lifestyle publisher has created a model to forecast Google referral traffic declines, focused on the expansion of AI Mode in search results.

The team capped AI Mode at about 80% of Google searches in the model, because some short queries still won’t need an AI answer, according to a head of SEO at the publisher. The publisher’s team has two versions of its model, including a potential slower rollout of AI Mode into Google’s main search platform, which forecasts AI Mode getting to 80% of searches by the end of 2027.

The model looks at how often AI Mode appears monthly in search results, and shows how that will impact the business over the next three years, title by title. It doesn’t model Google traffic disappearing entirely — just shrinking down to a single digit, or another 30-40% drop in Google referral traffic over the next few years, according to the exec.

Another factor in that forecast is user behavior. The team is looking at how quickly people are shifting toward longer, more conversational queries that trigger AI Mode, and what share of its audience is moving from Google search to AI answer engines like ChatGPT. 

For now, the publisher is buoyed by increases in Google Discover referral traffic, despite declines from search. But the longer-term solution is direct traffic, according to the exec. The publisher is focused on building brand equity, which will also help with branded searches that are more likely to drive traffic to a publisher’s site from search, they said. “We’ve seen direct grow substantially over the last year and a half,” the exec said.

Building out the brand

A publishing exec at a different large lifestyle publisher said — anecdotally — that they have seen Google traffic fall 60% in the past two years, but their business has continued to grow in that time. 

“If you plan as if Google is going to zero and it doesn’t, anything above zero is upside. If you plan for Google to be stable and it declines, then everything is catastrophic,” they said. “Nobody should look at what Google presented [at their developer conference] and not feel a sense of urgency… Google Zero highlights the cost of doing nothing is much higher than the cost of doing something.”

The exec said their focus has been on building out its brands beyond the website and diversifying its business. Instead of chasing scale, the publisher has grown custom content, built editorial products and ad targeting tools, and expanded its events businesses — essentially, focusing on revenue and engagement that are “unrelated to site impressions,” they said.

“Brands are much bigger than a website, and the businesses they are running can be much bigger than a website,” they added.

Reframing reach beyond owned platforms 

An exec at a business publisher, said forecasting the business impact of Google Zero is “a discipline exercise,” rather than a model for its future business strategy — mostly because their team hasn’t agreed on when a zero-click future might arrive and how much time they realistically have before it does.

The business publisher is forecasting how Google referral traffic will decline based on trends in the past two years, the exec said.

In the short term, the publisher is evaluating onsite inventory and pageviews and figuring out how to shift conversations with advertisers to move away from talking about impressions in terms of reach. The publisher is increasingly pitching its reach on different platforms and products, such as paid subscriptions, newsletters and video distributed on YouTube, Meta and LinkedIn platforms, the exec said. 

“We don’t have to own the platform to reach the audience,” the exec said. It’s a similar strategy to the one recently outlined by execs at People Inc and Ziff Davis.

When Digiday polled readers to see what they believed was the most effective approach to prepare for a zero-click future, the majority (30%) said off-platform plays on social.

“It’s hard to step away from the SEO game, from scale. It shaped our business and it shaped the internet. We are having lots of conversations around that, and we hope to come out with a crisp message of where we’re moving. For us… it’s a really good moment for unity, focusing all these different teams and businesses around a single north star. That part of it I welcome,” the exec said.