Media Briefing: Reliant on search, haunted by AI: publishers at a crossroads

Search is in flux. 

With AI-driven updates rolling out steadily and traffic patterns shifting, publishers are starting to talk and plan more proactively — treating the slow erosion of search referral traffic less as a distant possibility and more as an eventual reality.

The phrase “zero-click searches” is cropping up more frequently among SEO and audience heads at publishers as they wrestle with the reality that the worst for referral traffic may be yet to come.

“It’s not completely uncontroversial to say that referral traffic will decline more [as a result of Google AI overviews and AI engines], it’s a question of how much,” said Douglas McCabe, CEO of media analysis firm Enders Analysis. 

It’s been a year since Google launched AI Overviews, and while the armageddon most publishers feared for their referral traffic at the time, never quite materialized, the alternative is in some ways, worse. It’s looking more like a steady, slow creep toward death by a thousand cuts. 

McCabe believes publishers are slowly and reluctantly accepting that the incentives of the tech platforms — building people’s habitual use of answer engines, and providing the kind of utility that keeps them within the engines as long as possible — do not align with ensuring publishers get referral traffic. Website monetization itself, he believes, is under threat.

AI bots are driving dramatically less traffic to publishers than traditional Google search — 95.7% less on average, according to a February report by Tollbit, an analytics and licensing platform for publishers and AI companies. And a Semrush study published this month analyzing over 10 million keywords found that Google is showing more AI Overviews in search results. Over 13% of all search queries triggered AI Overviews in March 2025, up from 6.49% in January 2025.

Meanwhile software company Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that Google AI Overviews in search results correlated with a 34.5% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page, compared to similar keywords without an AI Overview.

“There is a new structural reality that is going to take place on the web. You’re going to get lower volumes of traffic coming from search. You’ve already experienced that with Facebook, which has taken publishers on a rollercoaster ride over the last few years, being fantastic at some points, then causing complete traffic collapses at others. And I think search is now also going to be in that kind of paradigm and publishers need to think very, very carefully. The centrality of the website to the way they think about how their brand works, may need to change.”

The publisher-platform relationship has always been somewhat delicate, but especially publishers’ relationship to Google. And Google’s need to compete with the rise of the AI platforms has created a tipping point for publishers. 

McCabe stressed that, despite the symbiotic relationship Google has always had with publishers, it’s not technically the platform’s job to ensure traffic gets to publishers. If the last few years of platform referral volatility have taught anything, it’s that the incentives of platforms don’t align with publishers’ objectives. He said this realization has been almost like a moment of “grief” for publishers.

And while the user base of AI engines is still small in comparison to those using search engines, that’s changing. OpenAI’s ChatGPT now claims more than 500 million users, while Perplexity has 30 million. 

It’s created a lot of unknowns for publishers. As one senior executive at a major global news organization recently told Digiday: “I just can’t see a world in which those AI companies are going to link out to publishers and try and push people back. It’s just not how they’re made. It’s not what they’re trying to do.”

Publishers face an ‘innovators dilemma’

Somewhat hampered from seeing the true threat to referral traffic, by Google’s unwillingness to share AI Overviews data, publishers are finding workarounds, bringing in third parties to help gain more insight.

Those that have investigated more deeply, are getting louder about the effect. It’s no longer the smaller, independent publishers alone, that are hurting. Just this week, numbers shared by Mail SEO and editorial e-commerce director Carly Steven emerged about what she called the “shocking” effect to CTRs caused by the publisher’s own tracking of Google AI Overviews with a third party. When Google AI Overviews appear for a search query the Mail’s average CTR is 56% lower, she told delegates at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Krakow. 

Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel made some telling statements in the company’s earnings call last week. He said that although it’s difficult to get hard data to show the true impact of AI Overviews, it’s clearly eroding their traffic. Currently, AI Overviews appear on roughly a third of search results related to DDM’s content, he said. But what was more interesting, is the fact that DDM is proactively reducing its reliance on Google referral traffic, he said. Currently Google accounts for a third of DDM traffic, which is down from 60% when IAC combined Dotdash and Meredith in 2021.  

Smaller content creators are following a similar path. “A lot of the independent publishers and creators that we work with are trying to focus on diversifying away from Google,” said Tom Critchlow, evp audience growth at Raptive. 

Meanwhile, Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes said that “search is going off a cliff” when it comes to assisting publishers in getting new subscribers, when speaking at the Sir Harry Summit in London earlier this month. 

The rise of generative AI platforms has created a moment of reckoning for publishers. And conversations are bubbling away behind closed doors that have a common theme: how to build products that can withstand any potential referral traffic shockers that may arise in the coming years. But doing that while they face very real short-term commercial pressures, is going to be a long hard slog. 

“It’s a classic innovators dilemma for publishers,” said Paul Hood, media consultant and former News UK exec. “They’ve got their daily numbers and quarterly targets to hit, traffic targets to hit. So they’re going to have to use the existing methods they have, and existing traffic sources, and then they’ve got to innovate alongside. So publishers, especially news publishers, are going to really struggle with the pace and cadence of their daily, weekly, monthly life as it’s pretty fast, which makes it hard to innovate on top.” — Jessica Davies

What we’ve heard

“A spoonful of sugar helps the bag of shit go down.”

— An anonymous publishing exec on the news that Google Discover is coming to desktop, as Google’s AI features like AI Overviews and AI Mode threaten click-throughs from search to publishers’ sites.

Numbers to know

200%: The increase in Facebook engagement from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025 across 50 publishers.

1 million: The number of subscribers Substack has gained since Donald Trump became president last November, bringing Substack’s total paid subscriptions to 5 million.

$7.3 billion: The podcast industry’s 2024 revenue (including ads and subscriptions), more than double previous estimates.

25%: The year-over-year revenue increase at Bustle Digital Group for the first half of 2025.

What we’ve covered

WTF are GEO and AEO?

• For publishers and writers, the rules of SEO are changing, and will soon center on how to ensure content gets surfaced in AI answer engines.
• Here’s an explainer on generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative search optimization (GSO).

Read more about how these optimization strategies fit into traditional SEO here.

Publishers are cashing in on growing events revenue

• Publishers are getting significantly more revenue from events in 2025. Seventy percent of publisher pros said in Q1 2025 that they get at least a very small portion of their revenue from events, compared with 47% in Q1 2024.
• Publishers also said they are going to focus on growing their events businesses even more, with over three-quarters saying they would focus at least a little on this area in the coming months. (Publishers have similar plans for their subscription businesses.)

Learn more from the recent Digiday+ Research survey here.

How creators are using generative AI to shape video and design

• Over 80 percent of creators use AI in some part of their workflow, according to a recent report shared exclusively with Digiday.
• AI use is most prevalent among video creators, and older creators.

Read more about how creators are using AI in their content production processes here.

Publishing execs push back on tariff fears in earnings calls

• CEOs and CFOs at BuzzFeed, Dotdash Meredith, Gannett, News Corp and The New York Times worked to ease shareholder and market concerns about this year’s economic outlook.
• Most said they were confident that their businesses could continue to grow amid the uncertain macroeconomic climate, despite mostly flat year-over-year digital ad revenue in Q1 2025 (except for The New York Times).

Read more about what execs said about the economy’s impact on their businesses here.

Creators double down on generative AI use, but advertisers aren’t convinced

• For content creators of all types, generative AI use is on the rise – across podcasts, YouTube videos and newsletters. 
• But some advertisers think AI-generated creator content is lower-quality, and have specific contract clauses with creators against AI-generated content.

Read more about how creators are using AI – and advertisers’ take on this trend – here.

What we’re reading

The Washington Post continues to struggle with leadership challenges

Jeff Bezos, Will Lewis and Matt Murray are struggling to bring together The Washington Post’s newsroom amid internal turmoil and a second Trump presidency, the New Yorker reported.

LA Times owner doubles down on presidential endorsement decision

Patrick Soon-Shiong doubled down on his decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in last year’s election, despite the fact that it cost The Los Angeles Times thousands of subscribers, MediaPost reported.

The Wall Street Journal returns to beat reporting just two months later

Just two months after Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker announced the tech team would move away from covering individual companies, the Journal is assigning reporters to those beats again, according to Status.

The Atlantic is adding subscriber-exclusive benefits to its podcasts

The Atlantic is selling subscriptions directly on Apple Podcasts, with exclusive benefits for those who sign up, Axios reported. The feed on the platform will include narrated magazine stories, ad-free episodes of some Atlantic podcasts.

New York Times publisher pens essay on the need for a strong and free press

A.G. Sulzberger published a 5,000-word essay in The New York Times on the importance of a strong and free press, emphasizing the Trump administration’s combativeness against the media.