Lifestyle publishers rewrite the SEO playbook for AI-driven search

As such, lifestyle publishers are especially at risk of losing large swaths of their audience, given their heavy reliance on evergreen service content that traditionally performed well in search. 

Heads of SEO and content strategy at four large digital lifestyle publishers told Digiday they’d seen Google Search referral traffic drop between 30% and 50% since the rollout of AI Overviews in May 2024. 

But rather than panic, they’re doubling down on the content that still performs in search — and abandoning what’s not. “We’re trying to control the parts that we can,” said an SEO manager at a lifestyle publisher who agreed to speak under the condition of anonymity. “There are no more silver bullets that are going to get you the search traffic back.”

Naturally, it won’t be so simple to unwind decades of editorial strategies shaped around writing for search engines — habits built for SEO don’t disappear overnight. “The scale of what Google can refer is still large. We still need to pay attention to optimizing performing content,” said an exec at an entertainment publisher, who asked to speak anonymously.

Nevertheless, SEO and editorial strategies are evolving to prioritize the categories, styles and content formats driving click-throughs in AI and search engines. 

Here’s how lifestyle and entertainment publishers are dealing with declining search referral traffic:

Abandoning content that answers basic questions

Lifestyle and entertainment publishers used to drive traffic to their sites by writing up articles tailored to answer simple search queries, such as “How wide is a three-seater sofa?” 

But now, answers to those types of queries are summarized right on the search results page by generative AI features (like Google’s AI Overviews) and chatbots (like ChatGPT). Publishers now prioritize writing content that answers queries that go deeper, with more personalized and unique perspectives, such as “What are the best sofas from X brand?” or “How do you reupholster X sofa?” and “How do you know if baked chicken is cooked through?” 

These publishers aren’t trying to recapture what’s being gobbled up by AI Overviews. They have to go deeper.

“Don’t go chasing after these things that are a lost cause,” said a second SEO manager, who requested anonymity. Their publication also pared back on areas of coverage that weren’t core to its recipe brand, such as kitchen designs. The SEO manager said communicating with “consistency and authority” to Google’s algorithm has helped their publication’s search referral traffic.

The publisher’s recipe site is bringing in over 100% more traffic from Google search than it did a year ago, according to the second SEO manager.

“Nothing is a silver bullet, but you start daisy-chaining all the best practices together,” they said. “The rule of thumb in SEO — and this almost sounds superstitious — but when Google comes around for their big look a couple times a year, you have your Sunday best on,” they added, referring to Google’s core updates.

Going deeper and more personal 

Giving up content production around those queries frees up editorial teams to dig deeper into what’s working, so they can then reprioritize more personal and original content. It’s a strategy that lifestyle publishers were already starting to move toward two years ago when OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched.

BuzzFeed, for example, is diversifying its keyword targeting strategy by focusing on queries execs believe can’t be quickly answered in an AI Overview. Content production revolves around “inspiration, comparison, decision-making, or entertainment,” said Grace Keller, BuzzFeed’s senior SEO strategist. “These types of queries still benefit from deeper context, personality and perspective, which is where our editorial voice shines.”

Keller also said BuzzFeed is producing more content formats that AI can’t replicate well, such as “curated lists, POV explainers, quizzes and evergreen guides with personality.” Traffic from search is only 9% of BuzzFeed’s U.S. web and app traffic, a company spokesperson said.

High-volume content production strategies are dead

The old method of publishing a ton of articles and seeing what drives the most traffic is dead, according to those interviewed for this story. Instead, content production plans have to be supported by data and rooted in originality, they said.

For one publisher, that looks like analyzing all the published content from the prior month and looking at what articles drove scale and return readership, and what generated the longest time on site or more pageviews per visit, according to the entertainment publishing exec.

“When traffic was at its peak, media companies could publish a tremendous amount of volume of content, and each one of those stories would do pretty well… Now we’re in an environment where audience levels are decreasing, and that makes us want to spend a lot more time doing analysis around what content performs really well and what content doesn’t … to make decisions on what to publish,” the exec said.

The publisher is also focused on new, original and investigative reporting. AI summaries in search can do a pretty good job of giving older information to users, so the key is breaking or being early on news coverage, according to the entertainment publishing exec. 

“We’re putting more and more resources around investigative reporting, the people who can get breaking news,” they said. “We’re just seeing a rapid decline in the areas where it’s news that’s been out in the marketplace for [a couple of] days. There’s really not a lot of engagement.”

More cross-team collaboration

Sure, publishers can turn to other channels to drive audiences to their sites. But none of those channels can compare to the sheer scale of Google — at least for now. Lifestyle publishers can’t afford to abandon the search engine entirely. 

“You can build up your direct traffic, you can build up your email, but you’re not even in the zone of the amount of traffic [Google is driving],” the second SEO manager said. Lessening their reliance on Google would mean having even less traffic, they said.

The first SEO manager said declining Google search traffic has led to more cross-team collaboration at their company, with SEO, social and data teams working together to analyze content production and performance.

The entertainment publishing exec is leading the SEO team to diversify content distribution further beyond Google, and followings on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, along with their own newsletters, they said. The goal is to monetize the audiences they have on those platforms, even if referral traffic declines, they said.