Ranking is out, visibility is in as publishers chip away at AI search optimization

Anyone unconvinced the blue-links era is fading need only have listened to publishers at Digiday’s Publishing Summit Europe town hall last week in Lisbon to hear the true state of things. 

Meanwhile, recent analysis from PubMatic, which monitored traffic trends across 10,000 publisher sites, found that smart publishers are using AI-led discovery to drive fresh audience growth.

“There’s no publisher out there that can tell you they didn’t see some semblance of a dip in traffic, [thanks to zero-click searches]” Minute Media’s president and chief revenue officer, Rich Routman, recently told Digiday. He doesn’t view it as something disappearing, however, rather as an opportunity to evolve and adapt. 

“Where did these people go? They still exist, so where are they now? And where can we find them and interact with them?” stressed Routman. “How do we adapt our content, our technology, our approach to audiences so we can still meet them where they are? So if it’s AI and working with the different agents, or it’s CTV or social – these are all things we’re looking at too,” he added.  

That perspective is increasingly common among publishers, who’ve hardened to the reality of the shifting landscape and are now focused on testing, refining and figuring out what really works in this new era. AI optimization is just one tactic; blocking LLMs entirely is another, and diversifying traffic sources is another.

Here is a look at some of the AI optimization tactics publishers are deploying.

The rise of AI citation tracking 

In the AI era, Google Analytics, Chartbeat and Comscore measuring pageviews aren’t enough — publishers need a new metrics stack that tracks how they are cited in AI engines and ties it all to clicks and revenue. For now, that simply means using double the number of tools they previously did. 

Minute Media-owned Sports Illustrated has expanded its analytics to track citations and grounding events (when an AI engine uses a publisher’s content to “ground” or verify an answer) to allow it visibility into when and – hopefully soon – how its content appears in AI outputs, according to Noy Atias Freedman, svp of strategic alliances at Minute Media.

“We’re now working with everything from GA4 and Chartbeat to Tollbit and other emerging tools that visualize LLM and agentic traffic,” said Atias Freedman. “Until recently, that kind of data was mostly accessible only to dev-ops teams, but we’re making it digestible and actionable for our content, optimization, business and product teams as well.”

Measuring AI prompt-dirven referral traffic is a tactic Forbes has also adopted to better understand what people are searching for in AI engines, so it can build audience cohorts. The publisher is currently doing this with ChatGPT referral data, Forbes chief innocation officer Nina Gould told delegates at Digiday publishing Summit Europe in Lisbon last week.

Atias Freedman said extensive work is underway to help inform editorial teams on ways to provide signals for AI engines, when they’re creating articles, as well as search engines. “Internally, we’ve further enhanced collaborations between key teams to read these new signals, understanding what AI visibility looks like, how to optimize for it, and how it ties back to engagement and revenue,” she added.

Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated is rebuilding parts of its site to be machine-readable with structured data, schema and Q&A formatting, making it lighter on unnecessary scripts and integrations to provide an answer to agents, per Atias Freedman. 

The publisher is also improving its metadata, linking and archive accessibility to make legacy and evergreen content more discoverable in AI engines. One way of doing that is by integrating more recirculation features for both human readers and AI agents, she added. 

“We’re starting to see higher attribution when we optimize for AI,” said Atias Freedman. She said traffic from the leading AI platforms is trending up, but click-throughs are still inconsistent. That tallies with what other publishers are seeing. However, that’s the next nut to crack, she stressed. “The visibility piece is happening now; monetization will follow,” she added.

Off-site media brand presence is more critical with AI citations

Traditionally, Google’s ranking algorithms favored recently published or recently updated pages when queries were time sensitive. Older, archived content often got buried unless it earned linkbacks, remained highly authoritative or was reoptimized over time.

But AI engines are mining far deeper into publisher archives to give more well-rounded, complete answers, meaning that something that was written about your brand 10 years ago and has been long forgotten, can resurface in an AI citation, stressed marketing consultant Jes Sholz, who as former group chief marketing officer for Ringier Group, oversaw the AI optimization strategy for the media group’s portfolio, which includes popular European tabloids like Blick. 

That kind of brand management — long familiar to e-commerce and B2B companies — is now landing squarely in media, noted Sholz. For publishers, it’s less about product reviews and more about how off-site signals like Google Maps listings, office reviews or app store ratings feed into brand perception. Because Google links these assets so tightly, a quick brand search can surface comments or ratings that skew negative or overly positive. And with AI overviews pulling those signals directly into summaries, publishers like Ringier are realizing that reputation management now extends far beyond their own content – it includes every digital trace attached to their brand.

“Now if someone’s Googling your specific brand, and the AI overview, or the AI mode is coming up with: they’ve got 3.5 stars – now it’s about brand management,” said Sholz. “It’s really something that you didn’t care about before, because if people were using your app, they were generally loyalists. Those were the ones that were seeing those reviews in that contained environment. Now that is showing front and center.”

It’s a whole new world of brand management for media companies in the AI era — and just one example of the many new challenges publishers must tackle if they want to be accurately cited and surfaced by LLMs in the future. “Very very rarely would we ever have had to think about brand management in this way as a media company before,” said Sholz.