770 | Barry Adams - How Google's AI Mode Is Reshaping News Publishing

Google's AI is threatening to wipe out news publishers' traffic by half. SEO expert Barry Adams reveals what's at stake and what publishers must do to survive.

Today on The Edge, your weekly digital marketing trends with industry trendsetting guests powered by your digital marketing pioneers, Site Strategics. This week's featured guest is Barry Adams, SEO consultant at Polemic Digital. Now here's your host, Aaron Sparks.

Hey, this episode is brought to you by our title sponsor, Bruce Clay, and his new app, prewriter.ai, the next level AI-driven content research and briefing tool. Create ultra-relevant, humanized, SEO-ready drafts customized for your audience pain points. Visit edgeofthewebradio.com/prewriter and and see how much time you can save and the ranking power that you can earn. Guess what? We're back at Brighton SEO this year. Brighton SEO US, teaming up with the Brighton SEO team in San Diego, September 23rd and 24th. Check this out. We have 15% off a friend or a training ticket to Brighton SEO for the Edge audience. Simply use the code EDGE15 on the ticket page or go to edgeofthewebradio.com/brightonseo. Great lineup of speakers, talks, and networking. Keynotes from Ross Simmons and Brittany Muller. Find out more at edgeofthewebradio.com/brightenseo. This is Edge of the Web Radio, episode 770, and I'm your host, Aaron Sparks. We talk to top industry leaders from around the world to give you some top-level knowledge on digital marketing tactics and philosophies behind them every week. We do this for you, the digital marketing pro. Check out edgeofthewebradio.com. We have each show we do there, along with all the key links that we mention, and much more. We're going to jump into our interview with Barry Adams real quick. Make sure that you follow our guests that come on the show and ask them questions about what you've heard on the show. Give them some feedback. That's the best way to be able to give them knowledge that you heard them here. Also, please rate the show if you would at ratethispodcast.com/edge. It helps us grow our show. Now let's meet this week's expert guest. Welcome back to The Edge. I'm going to reintroduce you to Barry Adams, a friend of the show here. He's an SEO consultant at Polemic Digital. He's an award-winning SEO consultant specializing in technical and editorial SEO for news publishers around the globe. He's been building and ranking websites since 1998 and has worked on a wide range of clients from microbusinesses to the world's largest media brands. An incredible resource of knowledge in the SEO news space. As an independent SEO consultant, he delivers specialized services to international media brands as well, such as Fox, Future PLC, Investing .com, News UK, and many more publishers out there. He's been doing this for 26 years now and has specialized in SEO for news publishers. He's got a great blog as well as great newsletter. You got to check those out. He's had a number of different awards, including Best Blog at the 2013 UK Search Awards, and as well as that, the 2014 Danny Awards, 2016 UK Search Awards, 2018 he won Best SEO Campaign at the Danny Awards. He's a regular speaker at a lot of top digital conferences, and he was just at a few here just recently. But you can see him at PubCon, SMX, Brighton SEO, Friends of Search, and the like. So I wanted to get him on here again because he's been on a number of times. We always want to be able to dig deep in the well of knowledge of Barry Adams. So Barry, thank you for joining us today.

Thanks. Thanks very much for having me, Aaron.

You're more than welcome. It's great to be able to sync up with you and learn from one of the best when it comes down to SEO as it applies to news publishing. You posted something on LinkedIn. And I've been— you gotta forgive me, I haven't had you on in a little while. And this one really kind of shook me to the core. Whenever you posted on LinkedIn, I had to reach out and get you on board here. We'll have this LinkedIn post in the show notes itself. But to summarize, he posted something in regards to Google AI overviews and how it's reducing some publishers' traffic. News sites are still visible in top stories for breaking news. However, the Google AI mode is a bigger threat and it can summarize News and cite sources, but drives far fewer clicks to publishers' websites. So organic traffic is the coin of the realm outside of ad traffic, obviously, and ad monetization on their sites. But, uh, we're in a new era here with AI, uh, assets that Google's rolling through. Tee it up to me. What is the current state of news publishing in relation to Google's evolving AI features?

Yeah, for the time being, because AI mode is optional and only rolled out in the US and just a separate tab. The biggest exposure that news publishers have to Google's AI adventure is through AI overviews. And AI overviews tend not to trigger if there is a top stories news box present on the search result, which means that most news-focused publishers have not really felt a massive impact from AI overviews. They have seen some loss of clicks on some more evergreen types of queries, evergreen articles and backgrounders and explainers. But news has been relatively unaffected by AI overviews because the top stories carousel is a huge driver of traffic to news publishers.

Right.

And there's a top stories box that tends not to be an AI overview. And initially when Google rolled out AI overviews and I saw what it was and I saw publishers panicking, I thought, yeah, you know what, bit of a storm in a teacup. This is not going to be the death of publishing on the web. And so far that has borne fruit. You know, AI overviews have rolled out globally now and News publishing is still healthy and still getting a lot of traffic from Google. And then I started playing with AI mode when it was announced at the last Google I/O. And then I realized, oh wait, this is the real threat. This is really, really potentially very dangerous, primarily because AI mode does not exclude news. You can ask AI mode in Google for the latest headlines, the latest news. It'll serve those to you. You can ask it for specific news stories. It'll give you very detailed answers. You can then ask it a follow-up question to dig deeper into specific aspects of the news. And again, it'll give you exactly what you're asking, what you're looking for. And yes, it will cite sources. It will provide links to the publishers where it gets that information from. But as with AI overviews, in AI mode, it's not likely a lot of people are going to be clicking on those cited source links. And I realized at that point that AI mode accomplishes something that no other Google feature has managed to do so far. No other search engine has managed to do so far. And that is for users to be able to engage with the output of the whole web, of all websites out there, without the friction of having to visit web pages. Because web pages are tough to use nowadays. You land on a website you've never visited before. before, you get a cookie consent form, you get an email signup overlay, you get interstitials of all different types, you get intrusive advertising. And if you're lucky, the content you're looking for is actually present somewhere hidden down on that page. With AI mode, all of that disappears. You get exactly what you're looking for and provided with the source links that could prove that it's an accurate answer, which is also something that contrasts it with AI overviews in that AI mode, because I think it uses much more of a grounding process with the query fan-out technique than AI Overviews. AI Mode is much more accurate. It's much more up to date. It's much more real-time. And it's very hard, if not entirely impossible, to get a definite wrong answer out of AI Mode. Whereas with AI Overviews, it's quite easy to get Google to generate a blatantly wrong AI Overview.

Right.

I haven't yet caught AI Mode in giving me Bad information.

Just to quickly interject here, that's a huge point here is what we were positioned to have to do on our websites with cookie consents from a number of different legal platforms. And we had to jump through so many hoops, right? And we still have to monetize these websites. All that, to your point, friction goes away and the user experience is very, um, light compared to diving into different websites. So we've been forced into having to have these type of elements over time to be able to right ourselves legally. That's all away whenever you're interacting with AIMO. So AIMO is pulling that information in and you're already consenting to Google's interactive experience and it's curating everything to the top without having to endure one website after another website. Sorry, I just want to summarize that because it's very, very important point here because the, the, the SAM box that Google is wanting us to interact with, with all those different elements. There's a huge benefit for the users just to be in that space because there are no elements like that on the site. Just wanted to reiterate that. Keep on going.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's not something that is entirely voluntary for websites, like you just said, you know, cookie consent forms are legally mandatory. But I also have to say websites Can't absolve themselves entirely of responsibility of bad experiences.

No.

Because a lot of them are way too aggressive with how they get people to just click accept all to make it go away and not really allowing them the option of rejecting cookies in a smooth way. The advertising themselves is often very intrusive, if not outright dangerous for websites. The aggressive way in which signup forms and subscription forms are pushed to the front is also not something that's necessary, but that websites feel perfectly fine doing. And AI mode removes all of that friction, all of it, both the legally mandated friction and the aggressive commercialization of the web. And yes, you can argue a lot about the incentives that have created this aggressive commercialized web environment. And Google does carry a significant burden there as well. But websites also have to be honest with themselves and say they've made a lot of decisions that aren't in their users' best interest, but in their own best interests. But with AI mode, you end up with an experience that gives you the benefit of access to all that content without the friction of engaging with that content. And that also made me realize that it is very likely, I can't say for certain, obviously, but I think it's very likely Google is going to make this a core search experience. At the moment, it's just an optional tab and the latest user statistics show not a lot of American users engage with AI mode, like 1 to 1.5% at most. But I do think Google is probably going to replace AI overviews with an AI mode of some sort. I'm not yet sure how that implementation is going to look. And there is a real threat that Google is going to make AI mode the default search experience because, and I'm saying this as an AI skeptic, AI mode is that good. It is really, really good.

Wow.

And I, for one, have been quite critical of both Google's AI adventures and the other AI chatbots, both in the quality of their results and the potential dangers that they might pose for the web ecosystem. But I think AI mode is the real thing. This is something we're going to have to get ready for in one way or another, because from a user point of view, it has no downsides. And I think the only obstacle Google is still trying to overcome to make this the default experience is the monetization aspect.

Yep.

Because Google relies very heavily on ads in search results, and they haven't yet cracked that nut in AI mode yet. But the moment they do that, I expect AI mode to become a default search experience. And that is really going to throw a hand grenade into the web publishing ecosystem.

To quickly interject, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai actually stated that AI mode is the direction of the— where the company is headed. And with new features being tested there before integrating into the main search experience, that's happening. And that's the North Star that they've already communicated. It's much more conversational. The AI mode experience is Also very personalized, right, as well. So there's a lot of— we've talked about this AI concierge of sorts, and we've had that for a while inside of the mobile devices here, but it's right there at your desktop. It's going to be tracking and giving you the content that you like to read, how you like to read it. And there's no website that can actually do that to the scale. You have this intermediary.

Right.

that's taking more and more of the real estate and more and more of the— providing more and more of the value to that personalized experience. And we're still feeding the beast. We're still moving content and allowing that content to be curated. So at some point in time, we have to make some decisions. But how do you— Well, let me ask you this here for news publishers, because there's a lot in this realm that has to be unpacked here. But are there any data or metrics that publishers are using right now that could actually measure the impact of these changes that are happening? Obviously, we've got organic traffic from an analytics standpoint. What other areas could publishers look at to start seeing this visitor interaction being taken away from them?

That's hard to measure that in a reliable way at the moment, because measuring AI tools relies very heavily on the prompts and brand visibility that you get in there. Right. The closest proxy we have is that we know ChatGPT You know, which is sort of an AI mode in a separate tool, sends very little traffic to all kinds of websites, including news websites. Despite the fact that ChatGPT has, you know, hundreds of millions of users, they do millions and millions and millions of prompts and queries a day, but they send very little traffic to external sources. And I suspect AI mode will probably not be quite as drastic as that. I think Google still has strong incentives to continue to send traffic to publishers. But it'll be a lot less. And, you know, the exact impact of that, I honestly don't know. I think we're just going to have to play a guessing game. My estimate is that if AI mode becomes the default search experience, traffic to the wider web, including news websites and all content-based websites, will drop by half at the very least.

Wow.

I think that's a reasonable estimate to make because of the quality and accuracy of the AI mode answers. And a lot of users just don't see the need to go to the source websites anymore. Right. Um, but that is just a guess. That is an educated guess, but still a guess. And we'll, we'll not know until we actually see it happen live.

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That presupposes that the other player in this role is still contributing. And those are the news publishers, right? Because Google with AI mode is getting accuracy from content that publishers are still allowing Google to consume. There's a tactic there that I want to explore in a little bit further conversation. But you did mention that when Google figures out how to monetize AI mode, It'll switch it on completely and never give you the ability to turn it off. But we are also seeing ads show up in the AI overviews already. So there's the real estate's already being penetrated with ad variations and we can't regularly duplicate it. On top of that, you can't actually control it inside of the ad space of directing your, your ad campaigns into that AI mode. So there's a lot of elusiveness that's happening there. But what you're saying here is once that monetization goes through, nobody's going to be able to pivot away from that experience. That's a pretty forceful position that Google is actually putting in front of all of its users, right? They've got to be able to weigh the factors there because there is a pushback. There is a pushback on AI in the real estate of Google that consumers can still do right now, right?

Yeah, I think there still will be the option. I think, you know, people will always have an option to click to a different tab at the top of search results. Like, yeah, yeah, go to a new tab, images tab, video tab. There's a web tab, which is a very clean tab that removes basically all search features. And I think Google will keep those tabs specifically so that when it comes to lawsuits, Google can say, hey, we give users the options.

Exactly.

And users don't use those tabs. We know that even the most popular tab, images tab, is just a fraction of the total usage of the actual standard default search result. So there will always be an option to not get AI overview or AI-generated answers. I just don't think users are going to make use of those options because AI mode is just basically all you need in terms of information-based query. If you're in e-commerce or you have some sort of service or offering that Google cannot replicate in AI mode, you're still also going to feel a hit on traffic, but perhaps not in conversions. You might even see an uplift in conversions if you're mentioned quite prominently.

Right.

Because, you know, if Google can't replicate what you have, they still have to send the click to you. Content-based websites, however, like news, mm-hmm, everything that you produce and allow Google to crawl and index can then be reproduced in an AI mode result. I don't expect websites to start blocking Googlebot though, because Google Search is just one of the traffic channels that Google offers. Google Discover being the other one. Google Discover, the Discover feed on Android phones. Yeah. when you open the browser or in the Google app or the Chrome browser on iPhone as well, is a huge, huge source of traffic for almost every publisher that I work with. And that is a traffic channel you don't want to turn off, even though it's highly volatile, very unpredictable, and it's very hard to build a content strategy around. It still means that you will need to let Google crawl and index your content to be seen in the Discover feed. So, you know, I think Google also does that on purpose to a certain extent so that they continue to have access to the web and consume that content and make sure that the AI mode answers are as good as they can be. Because if you turn off that tap entirely, you turn off all Google traffic. And that is a tap that very few publishers are willing to make.

So here's, here's the play as we kind of go through the chronology here. They had SGE, the Search Generative Experience, that was in Search Labs up until the end of 2023. It got released in April as AI Overview. So the play that rolled through in 2024 was, okay, use Yep, this is sloppy. Yep, these answers are incorrect. Yep, you can turn it off, but we won't tell you how to, but you can certainly find it. So more and more they were beta testing AI Overviews on user experience and getting better and better results. To your point, you can still easily manipulate an AI Overview, especially with Reddit being a key factor of information. It's generating this information, but they started to train the user on that experience. And then— With AI mode. Hold on a second. At the same time AI mode is getting rolled out, guess what they just did? They just rolled out Google Discover on desktop. So it's no longer on the phone. It's actually following you along the way in your desktop experience. So if you've got a 50/50 type of digital consumption behavior on your phone, on your desktop, you are still being shored up personalized content that Google knows about you. And then AI mode also switched in and it's being released systematically across the US as well as the globe. I think India just got picked up inside of AI mode as well. So there is a bit of a bait and switch here is that AI overview over here, you don't like to play here. And then you've got AI mode that's much more accurate. And if publishers do turn off, and this was the tactic that we were talking about earlier, blocking content from Google. That's a drastic, drastic measure here. But if you don't want your content curated, yeah, you can tell Googlebot not to crawl it. But now you're losing that desktop Discover real estate as well as the mobile real estate. And publishers just can't afford to lose both sectors of information, right? So do I have the chronology correct here?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You're spot on. And it is just Google iterating basically live and using the entire world as a testbed. for the AI adventure. And I should stress that Google didn't want to do this at this timescale. They were going to moving in the direction of an AI-first company, but at a much slower pace. But OpenAI and ChatGPT forced their hand. And Google decided that, right, okay, we can't let OpenAI dominate this new era of online computing, especially with AI technology that was invented by Google, because Google invented the transformers technology that underpins all the LLMs.

Right.

So they're like, okay, then we'll go all in on AI. And we'll figure it out along the way. And I actually think Google has already won the AI race. I think ChatGPT is probably not going to exist in about 4 or 5 years because Google is able to deliver better results, cheaper, more accurately, and can tap into all those trillions of annual searches that are already happening. And very quickly, people are going to realize that they don't need very expensive ChatGPT subscriptions for things that they can already do in AI mode. And for the few extra things that AI mode can't do, Google has a very affordable Gemini subscription that is a very easy upsell for them. Plus, contrary to OpenAI, I think Google can afford to lose money on their AI offering for about 10 or 15 years before they really start to worry about their bottom line. Whereas OpenAI and its current venture capitalist funding base is already starting to show some signs of being undermined and losing some trust from investors. So I think Google has already won this. It'll just take a while for the markets to realize and for the wider Silicon Valley to realize this. And people who are hoping for a very diverse next-generation search ecosystem where Google is just one of the players and is no longer dominant position, I think that's a vain hope. I think Google will continue to be the dominant 800-pound gorilla on the block. And all the other work that we're now trying to do to optimize for ChatGPT and Perplexity is basically wasted effort, if you ask me.

Hey listeners, here's a quick housekeeping break. Just want to let you know who's going to be coming up on the show here in the next few episodes. Coming up, we're going to talk about LLMS.text with Carolyn Shelby, and Will Reynolds is going to be on the show. Check out our recent interview as well with Bruce Clay as we discussed his new platform, prewriter.ai. We're always on the hunt for the next guest on The Edge. If you're interested in being part of the show, drop us a line at info@edgethewebradio.com. Make sure that you check out our weekly news podcast as well, covering the most recent digital marketing news and Google updates. We're having a little bit more deep dive focus into different topics— SEO, local SEM, social, AI, and more. We're dropping it in the middle of the week, so watch for your favorite subject in the news with top specialists helping us cover that news. Last week we had AI and SEO with Crystal Carter. Here's, here's some headlines for you. Meta follows YouTube in the crackdown on unoriginal content. Google launches AI shopping tools Virtual try-ons and smart price alerts. That's kind of interesting. Google's web guide for AI organized search results. Google's AI overviews are hurting clicks, says a Pew study. Google says AI won't replace the need for SEO. There's lots more in that show, including some crappy septic jokes. So check that out. Uh, had a great time there. Check out episode 769 to hear from Crystal Carter from Wix on AI and SEO news. Make sure that you check out our sponsors for this episode. That's prewriter.ai as well as Waikai, what AI knows about you. Check them out from the show links so they know that you heard them on The Edge. They're here to make your digital marketing work week better. With all our show housekeeping taken care of, let's get back to the show. So they're going to be, uh, they've already pushed back on the other LLMs. All the other LLMs are also trying to make sure that they are completely innovating the user experience. And that's exactly what Google's doing. And they've been able to beta test the interactivity much to a much greater degree than any of those platforms had. So these testings are at scale and it's all getting worked back into AI mode for all that knowledge. But at the same time, there's 2 different factors happening. You've got them muscling through. They did this correctly. Pushing back on the LLM platforms, owning that space here in the next 4 or 5 years. But they've also trained the user on how to utilize the Google interface more and more. So by and large, users are going to be staying in that space because the user experience is not only useful, not only valuable, it's also personalized. And there the end result is any publisher, any content provider is— the exchange is no longer there. We always had a balanced exchange of, we'll give you rankings if you give us content. Now they're not giving rankings anymore. They're curating and repositioning your content to make their own logical points of knowledge that they don't have to cite you on. And legally, it's not your content as they morph it into the AI response. There's no partner exchange anymore. And websites by and large, they still realize that they are the source of truth for this information. The news publishers are still the source of truth. Is there going to be a boycott of the Google consumption? Because we know that the user's been trained to utilize Google more and more in these different AI aspects. Will there be a pushback even as the platform, the LLM platforms are going to subside in interactivity? They're going to burn out if they can't actually get that user market, will content providers block the gates because the transaction is no longer weighted evenly?

No. I do think, like I said, traffic is going to take a hit. It's not going to disappear. Google traffic is not going to evaporate. It's not going to go the way of Facebook, where Facebook just became an unviable source of traffic because they throttled the newsfeed in such a way that you see very little external links in the Facebook newsfeed. No, I think Google will continue to send traffic to publishers, including news publishers, just less, a lot less, but it will stay a viable source because for most of my news clients, 50, 55, 60% of the total traffic is Google traffic. You halve that traffic, you still end up with, you know, huge amounts of traffic that is worth optimizing for. And like we talked about earlier, Discover will probably pick up some of the slack there a little bit with the rollout on desktop. Yeah. And clicks themselves, even Google search, will not entirely disappear. There's also other verticals like the Google News vertical, the news tab, that are not hugely popular but still get decent usage. So I don't expect, you know, news traffic, traffic to news publishers in Google to entirely evaporate. There will always be value in optimizing for news rankings in Google's ecosystem, but we do have to get ready for a Google traffic apocalypse where that traffic number is just going to drastically reduce because users will see less need to click through to search results. What I do also think is that this makes the advertising-funded news model on the web very hard to sustain.

Right.

There will be fewer websites who will be able to pay the bills just by showing online advertising to their readers. And that will mean paywalls will become more of a norm. And I actually think that's healthy for news and publishing. I think Users, readers have gotten too used to free news. And I think we need to start getting used to paying for news again. We used to pay for newspapers all the time before the web came along. So I think people need to start doing that again. They need to start buying newspapers online with online subscriptions. And a lot of news websites are, you know, already embarking on the path of paywalls. There's a lot of very successful paywalled news websites, especially websites that have something that, you know, people find worth paying for, either by the quality of the journalism or the specific topic. that website covers. Local news websites find it relatively easy to put on paywalls because they have the type of news that is very relevant to a very specific audience and that that audience sees worth paying for. Whereas if you're a fairly generic news publisher and you don't really have a USP and you're not doing a lot of quality original reporting, then you are going to have a very bad time.

Absolutely.

You're going to be supplanted by other websites that are doing things better than you can. And, you know, the worst thing you can be as a publisher is to be forgettable and interchangeable. You need to have something that users are actively willing to seek out and actively willing to pay for. And you need to double down on those USPs to bind an audience directly to you so that that extra obstacle of paying for you or engaging with you in another way that removes the intermediary, for example, with newsletters or app installs or subscribing to your podcast, whatever it may be, that users see that as worthwhile and that you can capitalize on that traffic and that audience that way. And if you don't have that, if you're just another news website in whatever niche you need to cover that doesn't have anything special, you should have seen the writing on the wall for many, many years already.

Yeah.

Because I'm pretty sure the Google algorithm updates haven't been kind to you in the first place. And this is just going to accelerate the process even more. And you're going to have to find that USP or you're just not going to exist in another few years.

And what you just revealed there is, is really the countermeasure is you've got to, for news publishers and niche publishers, they've got to personalize that content and be able to guide users to that experience. So because users are getting it personalized through Google, so you got to, got to go tit for tat and be able to give as much personalized information on your gated content so users would be persuaded. To not only engage, but also with brand loyalty, commit to that paid environment so they can have that all shored up to them. That's really the only tactic that news purveyors can actually do is to shore up exactly what type of content that user wants and invest into the technology to, and on top of that, create their own AI system to be able to deliver that straight to that user's email inbox. Right. As well as social feed or anything that they can, they can connect to that user. They have to personalize or they're dead. Would you ascribe to that?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think people especially want to personalize experiences. I think if anything, social media has proven that people like personalized feeds and like seeing more of the stuff they like to engage with. The Discover feed in Google is a very clear example of this as well. It's a very personalized feed. Everybody's Discover feed is different and users have a very high dwell time and engagement time on the Discover feed. And I think news websites and websites in general probably need to go that extra step further. And fortunately now the technology is there that makes that relatively straightforward to do.

Right.

Because previously this was kind of complicated. Nowadays, no, it's not anymore. You can very easily use AI-powered tools to build very personalized news experiences. If I land on a website that I visit every single day, the website should know which categories of news I frequent most often and give those prominent placement both in the app and on the website. And if you're not already embarking on that particular path, you're also going to be left behind. So yeah, personalization is definitely one of the key trends that I see happening. Paywalls is the other key trend. Diversification of traffic, we already talked a little bit about that with newsletters and podcasts and short-form video, I think also has a great future there. And I also think that a wider industry trend is going to be consolidation. Where news brands are going to work together, perhaps even merge, but keeping separate news brands, but allowing users to subscribe to all of those news brands with one single subscription. Oh, very cool.

Yeah.

Publishers that already have a sense of scale, already have multiple publications like Condé Nast, for example, are going to get a lot of benefit from that because they can do both individual subscriptions to like wired.com, but also do bundled subscriptions to Vogue and Glamour and a few others that are aligned more or less in their audiences. I see this happening in Europe already, where there's some nationwide publishers who own a range of national, nationwide and local news websites offering bundled subscriptions, where with one monthly fee, you get access to all of the paywalled content on all those websites. And I think that we'll see continued trends like that, where small publishers will have to combine themselves or get bought out by larger publishers just to get that sense of scale and allow the commercial models to make sense because If you're a very small niche publisher that is working independently, it's going to be tough to generate enough traffic and revenue, even for loyal audiences, to make ends meet and pay the bills.

Our friends at Inlinks have made a really cool tool, Waikay, W-A-I-K-A-Y, What AI Knows About You. Are you aware of how AI is shaping your brand's online presence? With Waikay, you can stay informed about what AI is saying about your brand. This powerful tool gives you insights into how your brand is perceived by key audiences and provides actionable ways to improve it. Waikai helps you compare your AI presence to competitors, uncovering valuable content opportunities and identifying harmful link hallucinations all in one simple report. Plus, there's a brand new SEO report to be able to help you fine-tune your website's search and performance. It's the easiest way to monitor and optimize your brand's digital narrative in AI. Best of all, Waikai provides concrete recommendations to enhance your AI visibility. If you're looking to stay ahead of the curve in AI and manage your brand's digital image, go over to edgeofthewebradio.com/waikai. That's W-A-I-K-A-Y. That's your go-to solution, and the best part, it's free. Go check this out. Yeah. With smaller publishers that have limited resources to be able to jump into these hoops, they're going to have to position themselves as niche value and look for being acquired because they're not going to be able to match the user's expectation that the big tech's actually delivering to them. I just had a recent example subscribing to a newsletter, and I also saw that bundle happening again. Free of charge, but it was a very persuasive point. It was, okay, you subscribe to this letter and here's some others that you might be interested in. And I was more apt to actually say, yeah, go ahead and send me this, this, because they match what I'm looking for in my intel. It was a very easy way to actually convert me into multiple platforms delivering into my inbox, which is the most intimate kind of digital space that a digital consumer can actually allow a publisher to be in. So it's already there and you're seeing it, you've given some great examples of what's happening in the UK, but this does actually kind of bode the key warnings that small publishing is going to be gone the way of the dodo and we're going to have to hopefully see the consolidation of these brands to be able to provide something that's even more valuable than the consumers getting on the aggregated personalized front. on Google and the rich tapestry of AI resources that it's got. They have to counter in that way, right?

Yeah, I do think there will be a space for small publishers, but there'll be a slightly different ecosystem where you see this on Substack, where individual journalists are really successful and very profitable with their brand of journalism. There's one website I always like to quote as an example called 404 Media. which is a technology news website, and they've been pretty successful almost from the get-go, despite the fact that it took them quite a while to get traction in Google, but they were break-even way before they got included in Google's news ecosystem because of the quality of their reporting, really valuable, unique, original journalism based around the tech industry combined with a podcast and other channels as well.

Right.

So there will be space for small publishers, but again, it is about having that That uniqueness that is, that people are willing to pay for, people are willing to actively seek out. And I think that is something that you have to find as a publisher. If you lack that uniqueness, you lack that strength, why are you in business in the first place?

It does take time. It does take quality resources to create that niche. And there's a whole nother direction that we could go into, AI content writing on news publishing. I think we have actually talked about that. previously. That's a whole nother space that we do not recommend publishers ever grapple. It's— that's the death knell if you're trying to curate and have homogenized content. To help differentiate you, you've got to invest vertically into your market, into great resources to be able to combat. That's the only way that your value is going to hold up a candle to what Google's doing at scale.

You can use AI tools in a newsroom. You can use AI to help you, especially when it comes to, for example, researching large datasets.

Absolutely.

It's part of investigative journalism or crafting the right headlines optimized for social, for SEO, for Discover. But AI should never take the place of journalism because that is a very quick route to total mediocrity. And you don't want to be mediocre in this space anymore. No.

No, absolutely. And if you did want it, why in the world were you actually doing it to begin with? Anyway, wrapping up here, Barry, thank you so much for your time today. This was a really good exposé on that post, and we certainly want to watch more of what you're doing and saying in this, in the news SEO space. Publishers should be paying attention to you regularly, and I know they do, but you got to get— got to keep on churning out that insight and information because it is a battle royale right now. Not to throw my Fortnite reference in the mix there, but it is. There's a change in publishing that's upon us right now, and if you don't know that it's happening, you've got to pay attention because you could very well lose half, if not more of your audience, if you're not investing in yourself and the quality of your content, right?

Yep. Yep. 100%. It's all about finding your strengths as a publisher and leaning into that as much as you can to build a loyal audience. At the same time, try not to fall into the audience capture trap where you're just telling your audience what they want to read rather than what is actually true, which I see some publishers, even the big ones falling into. And that's, that's a tough balancing act, but I think one that's very important for the future of journalism. Because this, you know, the temptation is definitely there to just churn out the type of content, you know, your readers want to hear rather than actually report the facts. But if you can find that balance, then, you know, you're actually looking at a fairly good future. And I think the next few years are going to be tough for media to adjust, but at the end of it, I do sincerely hope we end up with a better, healthier media ecosystem.

Very good, Barry. Can we promote anything for you on the show here? I know you've got a conference coming up.

Yeah, we have the annual News and Editorial SEO Summit, which is a 2-day virtual online conference dedicated to all things SEO for news publishers. This is the 5th edition now taking place the 21st and 22nd of October this year. We have another absolutely fantastic speaker lineup. I mean, every year we put together the speakers and we have a wishlist of people who we want to speak and no expectation of actually getting them. But every year, most of them say yes. And we, yeah, this year again, it's going to be absolutely fantastic. Fantastic, with both media and publishing represented.

I saw the list. It's pretty mighty. So everybody who's interested in— it really is anybody who's interested in checking and going deep diving into SEO news, certainly we'll have a link to that event as well on the show notes. Well, Barry, it's always a pleasure to be able to have you on the show. Any final words for our audience who's struggling with this particular challenge?

I'd say don't panic. You don't have to be an early adopter to be successful. None of the big technology companies were first with what they did. They just did it better because they watched other people make their mistakes first. So it's okay to not jump on every single hype and every single bandwagon and to just take a beat, look at what's happening and make informed decisions about whatever strategy you want to implement and just stay calm, carry on because Google might take your traffic. They will not take your market away. People still want to read your news. People still want to buy your products. That doesn't change. You just have to adapt to ways that you reach that particular audience.

Very good. Don't panic and make sure you have a towel for everybody who knows that reference. All right. Thank you, sir. There we go. Make sure that you track Barry Adams down on BlueSky. You can search for his name. You'll find him right there as well as on LinkedIn. He's always pushing out some great content. Certainly want to lift you up on a regular basis, man. You're doing a great job in your space. And if there's anything we can do for you in the future, just let us know. Okay.

Really, really appreciate that. Thanks for having me, Aaron. Always a really good time having these conversations with you.

You're more than welcome. Thank you. All right. Make sure you check out our news podcast as we're churning up different specialized news on a regular basis, social media, SEO, SEM, and the like. So check that out and pick your favorite news channel. Kind of like we're personalizing it for you guys, as well as check out the additional interviews that we're doing each and every week. Also, thanks to our sponsors. Make sure that you click on their link in the show notes. They're wanting to make your digital marketing work week better. So reach out to them, let them know that you found them on The Edge. From all of us over at Edge, be safe, be well, and don't be a piece of cyber driftwood. We'll talk to you next week. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.