Media Briefing: As traffic declines, publishers see gains in commerce conversions and CTR

Even as traffic slips, some publishers are discovering a bright spot in their commerce businesses: smaller audiences are converting better.

Publishers like Apartment Therapy and Forbes have seen traffic decline year-over-year, but at the same time are seeing commerce revenue and conversions tick up. Future and Trusted Media Brands have also seen a similar pattern, though they declined to share specific figures.

Apartment Therapy has experienced a 20% year over year traffic decline, according to Riva Syrop, the company’s president. But commerce revenue was up 10% year over year last month, and conversions are up 34%, Syrop said, though she declined to reveal specific revenue numbers. The click-through rate (CTR) to products on Amazon from Apartment Therapy’s sites has doubled year over year as well, she added.

“Even though we’re working with a slightly smaller audience, the audience that we’re speaking to has more trust in what we’re bringing forward,” Syrop said.

In Q1 2026, Forbes’ site traffic was down 37% year over year, Emily Jackson, svp of revenue and consumer growth at Forbes, previously told Digiday. However, revenue for Forbes Vetted, the publisher’s product review site and affiliate business, was up 2% year over year in Q1. Forbes Vetted’s conversion rate was up 100% year over year, Jackson added, though she wouldn’t reveal from what baseline. 

Eric Gillin, chief brand officer at Trusted Media Brands, said the publisher’s affiliate revenue, conversions and CTR has “held up well,” without sharing specific figures.

“Our team has focused diligently on optimizing landing page experiences to maintain intent despite seeing reduced organic search traffic and not ranking as highly as before,” he said. The business has moved from “lower-margin affiliate deals driven largely by organic strength in search to higher-margin direct and performance deals that take advantage of our broad brand strengths across web, social and email,” he added.

In practice, this means that even if fewer users arrive via search, those who do are more likely to engage, click through, or convert — helping to offset traffic losses with higher yield per visit.

Jason Orme, managing director of lifestyle at Future, said the homes category has seen year-over-year growth in commerce revenue, without sharing figures. 

Even within the same publisher, incentives around AI visibility diverge. Newsrooms reliant on scale-driven advertising tend to favor blocking or limiting AI crawlers where possible, since summaries-style discovery can reduce direct traffic and weaken ad revenue. By contrast, commerce and affiliate teams are often more open to AI visibility, as it can surface high-intent users who are more likely to click through and convert, even in lower volumes. 

Compared to the same period last year, commerce continues to be a stable — and even growing — part of a number of publishers’ businesses. Forbes is launching a wine-focused content vertical, commerce site and membership program this summer. The Guardian expanded its affiliate commerce business in the U.S. with the launch of its affiliate commerce website, The Filter, last October. (The Guardian declined a request to participate in this story.)

AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews answer queries with summaries rather than links to other sites, which has the potential to hurt publishers’ affiliate commerce revenue as users have less reason to click through to their product reviews and recommendations. And Google’s AI Overviews now appear on 14% of shopping queries, up 5.6-times from 2.1% in November 2025, according to a Visibility Labs analysis published in March. 

During an editorial roundtable discussion at last month’s Digiday Publishing Summit, several publishers talked about improvements in their commerce businesses.

“We’ve seen a decrease in search but an increase in revenue — partly because of product improvements, partly partnership choices [with retailers],” said one publishing exec during the summit’s closed-door town hall session.

But not all publishers are on the up and up. 

A recent Digiday+ Research study found that affiliate commerce was in second-to-last place as a revenue stream publishers intend to build over the coming six months. Business Insider announced last year it would shut down most of its commerce business due to its reliance on search traffic. Future’s overall affiliate commerce business was down 6% year over year in 2025, according to its most recent earnings report.

One publishing exec at DPS said changes to its traffic mix have likely led to a decline in their shopping content’s affiliate commerce CTR. A growing share of its traffic is coming from Google Discover rather than search, likely bringing in a less purchase intent audience, the exec believed. That’s despite the publisher making improvements to commerce pages, such as reducing ads to just one on the page, as well as seeing an increase in overall traffic.

“People [coming from search] are more purchase intent because they’re actually typing in things that they’re looking for, versus Discover is more opportunistic. It’s based on signals of what users are looking for and what they care about, but it’s not as high-intent,” said the same exec.

They also said locking in direct deals with retailers has helped to get improved commission rates, sponsorships and flat fees, which has helped to bolster the publisher’s commerce business. 

Another publishing exec chimed in at the town hall: “The same content on Discover versus search, the CTRs… are significantly lower.”

Recent product improvements publishers have focused on expand commerce content in categories where they have strong search authority. That’s been key to Apartment Therapy’s commerce strategy, Syrop said.

Apartment Therapy rolled out dynamic pricing for Amazon products across its four sites a month ago. The feature shows when there’s a discount or price change on an Amazon product — a tweak that doubled Amazon CTR, Syrop said. Apartment Therapy has also prioritized updating older commerce pages to ensure products mentioned are in stock. 

Future has made more of its content shoppable, as well as leaned into “longer-tail, high-intent content where we know conversion is stronger,” Orme said. “There’s a big difference between someone searching ‘air fryer’ versus ‘best non-toxic air fryer’ — the latter is much more specific and much closer to a purchase decision.”

Meanwhile, Forbes’ affiliate strategy has focused on investing more in coverage areas like product recommendations from CEOs, and creating a dedicated audience and loyalty team to work with Forbes’ customer data platform to target and segment audiences and serve them content they are more likely to engage with, Jackson said.

Forbes’ move into selling wine, and creating content and memberships around the category, is an example of publishers not just influencing a purchase, but controlling more of the purchase journey by emphasizing their editorial authority.

“We’re seeing a broader shift where publishers are not just driving traffic, but owning more of the commerce experience,” said Bailee Switzer, director of affiliate at ad agency Tinuiti. “No matter where traffic is coming from, the goal is to create content that helps users convert faster and with ease.”

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