Search Engine Rankings

This clip of Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch is going viral on X. Lynch says that he has directed the company to act as if they will get zero search traffic. This is obviously bad because publications will likely need to lay off staff. But I think there's also a chance to hit the reset button and invest in new ways of reaching audiences directly. Traffic does not always incentivize the best reporting. Google Trends incentivizes copycat reporting where everyone piles onto the hot topic and publishes nearly identical stories. And SEO pressure rewards quantity over quality, churning out keyword-stuffed articles instead of doing original work. I'm hopeful that losing the search traffic crutch forces media companies to finally answer the harder question: why should someone come back to us every day? Truly, why? Sit with it for a second. The publications that survive will be the ones that build a genuine relationship with their audience, through newsletters, podcasts, communities, and journalism people actually seek out. In my opinion, that's a better business model and role for journalism anyway.

There's a noticable trend among some publishers - often US news publishers - that the Google traffic losses they're seeing is due to 'Google being broken' or 'AI Overviews stealing our traffic'. And that is a huge load of BS. Sure, Google has its issues, but it's not fundamentally broken. It still serves news content on billions of search results, and users still click on those news stories (arguably more than ever). The latest Google zero-click study as well as the 2024 Reuters digital news report support the assertion that Google continues to be a strong (the strongest, in fact) traffic source for news websites. And AI Overviews, well... contrary to the hysterical declarations from some media commentators, AIO wasn't the 'end of publishing on the web' and hasn't 'killed search as we know it'. In fact, AIO has become just another search feature, with no direct noticable impact on traffic. Google has also rolled back the prevalence of AI Overviews in its results, with now only 7% of SERPs showing an AIO by default. So hiding your traffic losses behind Google's antics is only valid if you've been directly impacted by an algorithm update. There are plenty of examples to be found for that, but ironically the publishers who I hear complain are the ones who have NOT been hit by algorithm updates. Many US publishers are losing ground in Google, that is true. But that has nothing to do with algo updates or AI overviews or broken SERPs. It has everything to do with complacency. US publishers have been taking Google traffic for granted. And now they're being out-competed. I've worked with publishers across the globe, and I know for a fact that when it comes to SEO strategies and tactics, many US publishers are simply not as advanced and consistent as publishers based in the UK and elsewhere. And guess what? UK and other non-US English language publishers are now making strong inroads into the US news market on Google. This isn't because 'Google is broken'. It's because they're better at SEO. More consistent. More advanced. Nimbler, quicker, more eager to learn and adapt. You most assuredly can still succeed in Google as a publisher. But you have to earn it. You have to put the effort in. Just being a big news brand isn't enough anymore. You got to put in the work to get those rankings and build that traffic. And giving up with 'it's Google, not us' is an admission of defeat that belies the reality of the online news ecosystem. Get better, or lose.

The latest Ipsos iris data paints a challenging picture for local news publishers. Across the UK's 75 largest local news websites, average monthly audience fell by 19% year-on-year in April, while average minutes spent dropped by more than 16%. Only 16 titles grew audience and just 15 increased engagement. Many of the sharpest declines appear linked to changes in Google's ecosystem. Reach plc, which had previously benefited significantly from Google Discover traffic, has seen that referral stream fall away as algorithms have evolved. That's important context for another major development recently: the Competition and Markets Authority ordering Google to give publishers greater control over how their content is used in AI-generated search results and to improve transparency around search rankings. Taken together, these developments highlight the central challenge facing modern publishing. For years, publishers have accepted a trade-off. Platforms deliver audiences at scale, but they also control the rules of distribution. When those rules change, traffic can disappear overnight. The rise of AI search has intensified that tension. Publishers invest heavily in creating original journalism, only to see increasing numbers of users receive answers directly within search results rather than clicking through to the source. The result is a growing disconnect between the value created by publishers and the value captured by platforms. The CMA's intervention is therefore about much more than rankings or attribution. It is an acknowledgement that search has become critical infrastructure for news businesses and that publishers need greater transparency, more control and stronger bargaining power. Whether the new measures go far enough is another question. Many publishers argue that an opt-out model still leaves Google holding most of the cards, while others point out that transparency without meaningful outcome measures may not solve the underlying problem. What's clear is that the economics of digital publishing are entering a new phase. The old debate was about referral traffic from search and social platforms. The new debate is about whether AI systems can use publishers' content to answer users' questions without returning equivalent value to the organisations that created it. Against that backdrop, the publishers seeing the strongest performance are often those doubling down on distinctive reporting, deep local relevance and direct audience relationships. That may prove to be the most important lesson from all of this. Regulators can create fairer market conditions. Platforms can alter their products. Algorithms will continue to evolve. But publishers who own strong relationships with their audiences will always be in a stronger position than those whose growth depends primarily on decisions made in Silicon Valley. Citypress

The rise of answers, the fall of clicks The latest Similarweb data is striking: 46 of the top 50 news sites in US lost traffic YoY - CNN (-34%), Fox News (-25%), The New York Times (-7%) almost everyone is down. Meanwhile, Substack - the newsletter platform, where you can probably find some of the best curated content on the Web right now is up +47%. The reason? The way people search is being fundamentally disrupted. Google is no longer just a search engine, it’s becoming an answer engine. With AI Overviews, users are clicking less and consuming information directly on the search results page(+LLMs). Even Google itself admitted that the "open web is in rapid decline" This shift has massive implications: less referral traffic, falling ad revenues, and an urgent need to rethink how to build relevance (and real value) for consumers. This goes beyond media consumption habits, it’s a business transformation. Advertisers, publishers, and creators must learn to own the relationship with their audiences, or risk becoming invisible in the age of AI. Source: Similarweb via press gazzette / Chartr newsletter (Sherwood News)

We've all heard that SEO changes are hurting publishers in the personal finance industry. What's interesting about it is that it seems to be hitting everyone -- small blogs to publicly traded companies -- in and outside of personal finance. For smaller publishers: --The popular travel blog The Planet D was forced to shut down entirely after its traffic dropped by 90%. --UK entertainment site Ready Steady Cut lost 50% of its traffic overnight and had to lay off its entire writing team. For larger publishers: CNN's website traffic has dropped by approximately 30% year-over-year. OprahDaily.com lost 58% of its search traffic. New York Magazine dropped 32%. GQ.com fell 26%. It’s showing up in the Q2 2025 earnings reports, too: NerdWallet (NASDAQ: NRDS)—a company that built a financial empire on search traffic—reported a 25% year-over-year revenue decline in its Credit Cards vertical. Management cited more pronounced organic traffic challenges. When an SEO-driven business tells Wall Street that SEO isn’t working anymore, you pay attention. HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS)—the company that wrote the playbook on content marketing—is now executing a massive strategic pivot. On their Q2 earnings call, the CEO revealed that a staggering 90% of the company's leads now originate from non-blog sources like social media and podcasts. That last point is worth repeating. The company that taught everyone else how to do content marketing is actively de-risking its business away from the very search engine it helped everyone optimize for. If HubSpot can't rely on SEO anymore, should you? ***** You can find all the sources and a deeper dive on this topic in the latest Edition of The Free Toaster Newsletter (link under my name at the top of this post).

Last month, our SEO completely tanked. It taught me something about SEO that no articles, courses, or YouTube videos talk about 👇 -> The Problem: We had just integrated a job board, agency listings, and a product directory into our main site. The idea was to bring everything under one domain for marketers. For the first month, it worked beautifully and traffic was climbing. We were averaging ~1,000 clicks/day. Then, it collapsed and we dropped to 200-300 clicks. -> The Diagnosis: We dug into content, backlinks, and keywords for months. Nothing made sense. Finally, we opened the Crawl Report in Google Search Console. And there we found the problem. Our job board was auto-generating multiple new URLs for every expired job post. That means, every deleted job created a chain reaction of thin, useless, duplicate pages... and Google was crawling all of them. -> The Side Effects: - Our crawl rate dropped from 50k URLs/day to 2-3k/day. - New blog posts and job posts weren't being indexed. - Old, irrelevant pages were still appearing in search. - GSC was bloated with weird, duplicate, or expired URLs. Basically, Google stopped trusting the site. And for a media business, this was quite a mess. -> The Fix: Once we knew the problem, we: - Disallowed all auto-generated URLs in robots.txt. - Started serving 410 Gone for anything extra that shouldn't exist. - Cleaned up old links and reduced redirects. - Started monitoring crawl stats daily. Slowly, things are recovering. Our crawl rate is rising. Google is re-learning which URLs actually matter. -> The Real Learning: Every SEO article talks about content, metas, and backlinks. Almost no one talks about crawl management. Once you lose crawl efficiency, even the best content won't get seen. If you're managing a large site, don't just think about indexing more pages. Think about earning Google’s crawl attention. And that was my experience in learning SEO the hard way while building Marketing Monk. #SEO #TechnicalSEO #StartupJourney #BuildingInPublic #MarketingMonk #MediaBusiness

Not since 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮 have publishers faced such a challenge. New data from 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗡𝗲𝘅𝘁 (𝗗𝗖𝗡) — representing brands like 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗬𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀, 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗲́ 𝗡𝗮𝘀𝘁, and 𝗩𝗼𝘅 — shows that over an 8-week span in May–June 2025, most publishers saw Google Search referral traffic decline between 1 % and 25 %. Median YoY drop: −10 % overall, −7 % for news, −14 % for non-news. 𝗝𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝘁, CEO of DCN, attributes these losses directly to Google AI Overviews, challenging Google’s claims of “quality clicks.” Research from 𝗣𝗲𝘄 shows AI summaries make users less likely to click through to source links. In the UK, the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) warns that AI Overviews and AI Mode are driving “zero-click” behavior, cutting discovery traffic and eroding publisher revenue. https://lnkd.in/gk6T99Qs

The recent TollBit report on what AI search is doing to publisher traffic was eye-opening. ICYMI, it revealed that referral traffic from AI search engines is *91% less* than from traditional search, with AI chatbots performing even worse at 96% lower. Yes, the report confirms what we all knew, but it's value to have more data. Plus it helps assess the value of content to AI engines, which until now has mostly been evaluated from the AI companies' perspective. The report is a good opportunity to "reverse the telescope" and look at how much potential revenue is lost from AI summarization of content: 📉 AI search CTR is a mere 0.74% compared to Google's 8.63% 🕷️ Traffic from AI crawlers and bots is roughly 2% of publisher traffic, and growing 💸 Doing the math (full walkthrough in The Media Copilot newsletter), for a theoretical media company with $10M in ad revenue, AI search could represent $2M in losses It may be a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's a starting point for publishers looking for fair value for their content as they pursue licensing deals As everyone nervously awaits Google to expands its AI summarization to news, at least we have a better idea of what's at stake.

PM Insights' impression rates increased ~10-11x (~1,000% y-o-y) on Google. Ever the skeptic, I asked myself if this is something to celebrate! ...Who do we have to thank for this? Is it legitimate? Here's a quick synopsis of my rabbit-hole: Google's search dominance is getting disrupted by a myriad of companies we/PMi tracks valuations on, including OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, & Mistral. As the search market evolves, and in part disrupts itself with Gemini/etc, traditional performance measures are also being disrupted. Trends in Total Impressions: While total searches grew less than 5% across the world wide web holistically, reported impressions in tools like Google Search Console saw drastic fluctuations:  Initial Surge (May 2025): Early 2025 reports showed a 49% increase in search impressions compared to 2024, attributed to the broader rollout of AI Overviews (AIOs), which often cited multiple sources simultaneously. Reporting Drop (September 2025): In mid-September 2025, many site owners reported a ~50% drop in impressions. This was primarily due to Google disabling the "&num=100" parameter, which removed "vanity" or "inflated" impressions previously generated by automated scrapers and rank-tracking tools. As Google and others fight for market-share as opposed to outright dominance, it's helpful to know they are also trying to normalize the data to account for changes in how search is used practically in today's new normal (below - added color). Click-Through Rate (CTR) Decline: Organic CTRs fell by roughly 30% year-over-year. For queries where AI Overviews appeared, organic CTR dropped by as much as 61% by late 2025. Impact on Publishers: The median publisher saw a 10% year-over-year traffic decline in the first half of 2025, with news sites being hit even harder (some reporting drops between 27% and 59%). Source: largely Gemini These data are quite validating of our search practices as a general public, and nice context for PMi's being an outsized relative win; if Private Markets were an interest for you in 2025, we hope they'll be a strategy in 2026. Whether the trend is your friend, or you're bucking it, it's going to be a stellar 2026 🍾

Publishers and Advertisers Hate Google, but They’re Still Hooked In an explosive new exposé from The Information, publishers and advertisers worldwide are voicing major frustrations with Google, yet no one can break free(Amazon, maybe😉 ). Despite plummeting traffic and shaky ad placements, abandoning the tech giant could mean disaster. What’s Going Wrong Dwindling traffic: Media outlets are seeing sharp drops in referrals from Google Search, largely due to changes like AI-powered summaries and “zero-click” results that keep users from clicking outbound. Ad headaches: Advertisers complain that their ads often fail to appear next to the very search terms they’ve paid for. Yet shifting away from Google risks visibility and revenue. The Uncomfortable Truth Publishers feel “betrayed,” caught in a trap where boycotting Google isn’t an option. Deep dependence on ad revenue and search visibility means even bitter critics continue pouring ad dollars into the platform. Why This Matters Digital media in crisis: News sites and niche publishers face existential threats as Google’s AI and aggregation tools consume clicks, views, and ad dollars. A monopolist’s stranglehold: Even as policymakers try to rein in Big Tech, Google continues to dominate the ad and search ecosystems without meaningful alternatives in sight. Urgent need for strategy: Publishers must diversify, build first-party data, explore subscription models, and seek ad partnerships beyond Google’s walled garden. Final Thought This is a reminder: when your business model relies on a single platform, even one that’s failing you, you’re not free. The solution lies in innovation, direct relationships, and new digital strategies that don’t depend solely on one mega-platform. For more information read(Paywal): https://lnkd.in/dAvNC7p3