I don't think I was the first person by a long way to draw the conclusion that AI posed an existential threat to the publishing industry. While far too many publishers took one look at large language models and saw a way to make the cost of content significantly cheaper, my background in audience development told me straight away that the ability of LLMs to ingest content and spit out a summary was going to fundamentally change search engines, to the long-term detriment of publishers. Why click on a link when Google can give you an answer?
Ben Thompson – still one of the sharpest commentators on the relationship between tech and media – this the nail on the head when he talks about LLMs as an extension of aggregation theory:
LLMs are breaking down all written text ever into massive models that don’t even bother with pages: they simply give you the answer.
Google's announcement at Google I/O that it would roll out AI Overviews on search pages in the US seems to have finally got people's attention. Google is, of course, claiming this will increase clicks to publishers, which seems barely credible -- and the fact it's not giving publishers any way to see if a click originates from AI Overviews in Google Search Console suggests it really doesn't want anyone measuring that claim.
And don't think as a publisher you can opt out. The only way to do that is to opt out of search entirely. While you can opt out of being crawled for use in the Gemini chatbot, you can't opt out of AI Overviews on its own.
Gartner estimates the fall in traffic down to having AI-driven answers on the results page at between 35-60%, which would be a catastrophic fall for most publishers.
I think this is only the start: AI answers are not conversational, and for many situations – especially purchases – a conversational interface is generally superior to a simple text search. Turning search into a conversation is a huge step and it's likely to further impact publishers as a new generation gets used to "talking" to a machine to get exactly the answer they want.
So what should you do? The only way forward is to build direct audience, and focus on owning the relationship between you and the reader without being mediated by the large platforms. That may mean subscription - but it could also mean focusing on a smaller but highly valuable audience, wether that's a niche in the B2B market or focusing on building community rather than giving answers.
Treat your existing ad revenue and affiliate revenue as a cash cow, not a growth market. Although my gut feeling is that AI Overviews won't impact on affiliate content as heavily as the kind of answers-based pages which have been big traffic drivers for the past few years, their time will come too.
Be entertaining – remember that audiences don't just read content for information, they want to be entertained, provoked into thought, and to come away from an article or site feeling like it's really delivered. That probably means raising the quality of your writing – think New Yorker or The Verge.
But most of all: be yourselves. Don't try and be anyone else. For as long as I've been in publishing one of its scourges has been the reverse of "not invented here": a kind of belief that competitors are somehow ahead of you, that they have their strategy straight while you're still stuck in some kind of technological or content strategy dark ages. It's never been true: everywhere I've worked has felt the same way about whoever their competitors were.
You need to know your audience better than Google does, better than Facebook does. Can you do that? I think you probably can.
