"It's disappeared. It's not there. If you just look at the sheer amount of search queries on Google every day, and you open the window and you do it like a month or longer, the kind of volume we used to have from which we could benefit, has just disappeared. And so it's impossible to capitalize on certain events in the same way you did before, because there's just not enough people looking for it, for you to take a bite of that traffic."
"Call it complaining, call it doom and gloom. Whatever you call it, publishers spent the majority of the closed-door town hall session at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in Lisbon, Portugal on Monday (Oct. 27) griping about the impact of Google search volatility and AI summarization tools on their site traffic and businesses. This shouldn't come as a surprise. This topic has been the focus of DPS town hall discussions for the past year. But this year, it got existential real fast."
Publishers report that Google referral traffic has largely disappeared, removing the volume needed to monetize event-driven search queries. AI summarization tools and search features are producing zero-click outcomes that divert users away from publisher sites and threaten ad and subscription revenue. Additional concerns include search-result volatility, Google Discover amplifying misinformation, and legacy publishers experimenting with paywalls to protect revenue. Many publishing executives express deep pessimism about traffic recovery while simultaneously considering new monetization and product strategies to adapt to a fundamentally shifted distribution landscape.
Read at Digiday
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