Sam Altman let the GenAI genie out of the bottle in November 2022 and kickstarted an era of rapid and far-reaching change. Many of us expect this to be the most significant technology shift for the publishing industry since the invention of the printing press. The genie shows no signs of heading back into the bottle, so I suggest we accept this and work out how to get happy about it. In this article, I offer three suggestions that might help: celebrate the demise of search traffic, put the human back at the centre of everything, and enjoy the ride!
Dance on the grave of search traffic
Publishers have made a lot of money through appearing high up in search results, but it was never a good long-term strategy and learning to live without it will help us build better and more sustainable businesses.
There’s much talk and concern about the prospect of Google Zero (the day that nobody clicks through from a search results page anymore) – personally, I say, bring it on! Sure, I miss the good old days when you could publish some articles then sit back and watch the readers flood in from Google, merrily generating CPM advertising revenue. And yes, I have been the one to complain about Google having a de facto monopoly on the means of content distribution. But, on reflection, that situation only arose because we let it – we got lazy and dependent. Google became the crack cocaine of the publishing industry, and we started dancing to the tune of its algorithms. This was an easy win with good short-term returns, but highly addictive and ultimately not good for us. Then CPM rates began to decline, clickthrough rates headed south, you started having to put in a lot more for the same result and suddenly the dance moves don’t look so cool any more. Basically, it’s 5am and the party’s lost its sparkle, so let’s move on with what remains of our dignity still intact.
‘Search traffic’, the clue is in the name. It speaks to anonymous numbers with little discernible connection to real human beings. I’m not suggesting we completely block Google (not yet anyway!), rather that we focus on connecting with our core audiences by any means possible, deepening our understanding of them and producing content that has real meaning and value for them. If we then happen to pick up some extra readers from Google, great – they are probably more likely to be ones who will stick around. To be fair to Google, this is what they’ve been advising us to do all along, even if that was like handing a toddler a big bag of sweeties and advising him not to eat them.
If you accept that visibility on a search engine or LLM is increasingly unlikely to result in a clickthrough to your website, then SEO / GEO becomes a more nuanced art. You choose to feed them content that you want people to know about – perhaps content that establishes your credentials or promotes your events, subscriptions and other services, but you don’t necessarily want to give them everything anymore. A great trick shared by my publishing colleague and previous author here, Tom Lake of Infopro Digital, is not to let Google through to index your high-value subscription content, but give them a visible / indexable summary in front of the paywall instead. The summary describes the content without giving away too much of the information (and you can use AI to generate it. Why not, it’s great at summarising). We’re certainly planning to try this out – so maybe it is time to reconsider Googlebot’s access-all-areas pass for your content?
The flipside to this – especially for B2B publishers like us – is that AI tools make it a lot easier to be pro-active about finding real people who are likely to be interested in the content we produce. We don’t have to just sit back and hope to be found, we can and should go looking for new people and use new tools to research them and produce highly relevant outreach to engage them and help them discover what we do.
Be more human centric
In a world where less than half the traffic on the internet is human, and 90% of the bots and agents declare neither their identity nor their purpose, it’s easy to lose track of who the real people are. This will get even harder the more people start using their own agents to gather information for them and consume their information in their own interfaces. If we don’t keep on top of this, we risk becoming information sources several steps removed from our readers and losing our ability to understand what’s important to them.
To me, this connection is the key to thriving in the new world. The internet and social media broke old school publishers’ monopoly on content distribution. They enabled anyone who could produce content to become a publisher. The industry responded by focusing on the strength of its brands and their credibility, trust, authority etc. Now the bar has got significantly lower. You don’t need to know how to write an article, hold a camera or build a website. Your AI agent can do all of that for you while you make the coffee.
The internet is awash with AI slop, and many people put more trust in sources that they have an emotional connection to or that tell them what they want to hear, than in established and credible brands. Credibility and authority are losing their power. Not sounding so cheerful now, eh? Well, the good news is that overcoming this challenge will make us stronger and better, and the technology that put us here will also help us succeed.
To retain our importance and visibility, we need to build stronger emotional connections with our readers, so that our take on the world is important to them and one they want to hear. One key way to do this is to listen to them, understand what’s important to them, and demonstrate that understanding in the content we deliver to them. This is equally true across editorial, marketing and sales. Ironically, AI tools can help us achieve this in a way that wasn’t possible before.
Events also become an increasingly important part of the picture, whether online or in person. Do them well and you create opportunities to deepen relationships with your readers and create lasting impressions that stand out from the crowd and connect your online presence to the real world.
Putting the person in personalisation
Personalisation is often confused with segmentation, and even when done well, can be a blunt instrument. The starting point is understanding what someone is likely to be interested in. This has often been based on a ‘pic n mix’ of content taxonomies or maybe semantic analysis of past content consumption. Nowadays, for example, you can add in their free text description of their interests, recent questions asked on your site, their job role, company, recent news about that company. Distil this down and you can develop a much richer picture of what is relevant to them, to inform the content and messaging you put in front of them. This might be a personalised content briefing, a marketing message or the follow-up to a sales call.
Until fairly recently, the atomic unit of publishing was the article (video or podcast) – a single serving of content that you might not fully consume but this is what we’re served with, so take it or leave it. Obviously, we value the craft of the writer in producing great pieces of content that are more than the sum of their parts, that add value and reinforce the personality of our brands. We love it when people read our articles and listen to our podcasts – they get the full experience. But sometimes they don’t want to. AI blows that up into lots of tiny units of information / meaning that can be put back together in a myriad of different ways according to what the user wants at that moment. Now they know this is possible, if we don’t facilitate it, they’ll find their own way to do it anyway – and then we’ll lose all the insight into what they wanted as well as the brownie points for delivering it.
There are various ways to do this. We block LLMs from accessing our content, but provide our own GenAI search so users don’t miss out. Along with some other publishers, we are exploring how to allow authenticated subscribers to connect their own AI to our content via an MCP server, which is probably even better provided we don’t lose knowledge of how people are using it.
Enjoy the ride!
The pace of change has picked up significantly. Now that AI is actually very good at writing code and does it at impressive speed, we’re seeing an AI arms race between the big LLMs with new launches and features every week. New and existing SaaS providers are delivering significant new functionality, rather than just sticking an AI badge on their product and expecting to charge more for it.
If you’re not a developer you can vibe code a half-decent app in your spare time, but if you are a developer and know what you’re doing, you can probably do a week’s worth of 2025 work in about a day and make a better job of it.
Put this all together and it’s quite an exhilarating ride – somewhat reminiscent of the digital publishing world in the early noughties. A world full of boundless possibilities, but this time it’s actually a lot quicker and easier to get things done. So, buckle up and hold on to your breakfast because whether you like it or not this is going to be fun!
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
