Is Google Killing the News Industry? SEO Expert Reveals the Truth

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of the BuzzStream Podcast. My name is Vince Nero. I'm your host, and today I'm joined by Barry Adams. If you don't know Barry, he's been in the game for almost 30 years. He currently runs an SEO consultancy, Atlantic Digital. But he's also an advisor to FT Strategies, which is kind of like the consulting arm of FT. He's co-founder of NEST, which is the News and Editorial SEO Summit that you might have heard of. He's a guest lecturer on the SEO Pro Academy, among many, many other titles he's had in the past. But Barry also runs the SEO for Google News Substack, which is kind of where I have been following his work. And he recently wrote a post All about Google Zero and how Google Zero might be a lie. This idea that, you know, the reason that these news publishers are losing traffic is because Google is stealing from them. Now, there is a lot to say about this, and this is kind of what we're going to be talking about today, because as digital PRs, I know you've heard this narrative. News publishers are dying and, you know, it's Google's fault, it's AI's fault, it's social media's fault, it's whoever's fault. But as you know, our livelihood is an industry, not to mention, you know, the livelihood of news and the importance of news and culture and freedom and democracy and whatnot. We rely on news. So understanding the status and the challenges that the news industry faces, I think, is wholly important for us as digital PRs and people even in the SEO industry. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Before I do jump into this, I just want to remind people to like, Subscribe, share this stuff with your colleagues. The more that you do, the more I can have great guests on like Barry. Secondly, just a reminder that ListIQ is out and launched and getting some great feedback. This is our AI-powered media list building tool. It helps you build lists right from Google News and helps really streamline the data collection portion of it. Really, it'll bring in email addresses, tell you if the journalists are active at the publication. It'll tell you their recent articles, all that stuff that usually takes good 10 minutes to collect per journalist, you can get in a few seconds. So check it out. You get some free credits if you sign up and it's available now. All right, Barry, thanks so much for joining. How you doing?

Thank you for having me, Vince. Yeah, it's been a good day so far. The sun is shining over here, so no complaints.

Yeah, that's fantastic. I feel like every time I talk to someone from your neck of the woods, it's either rainy or gloomy. So sun is shining.

Usually it is. We have, in my part of the world where I live in Northern Ireland, about 200 days of rain every year. So you caught me at a good time.

Yeah. All right. Well, that bodes well for this podcast, I think. Let's get right into it, Barry. Can you help explain what Google Zero is? You wrote this great article about it, and I want you to just give users, like, set the stage on what Google Zero is.

Yeah. I think it was first coined by the chief editor of The Verge website, where he predicted that traffic From Google to news websites as a whole would continue to decline and start reaching zero. And he had some data to back that up and some traffic trends to show that. When I first heard the term Google Zero, I thought it was perhaps a useful concept for publishers to understand that Google was going to become more challenging as a traffic source, which it has become. And we can dig into the whys of that a bit later. But it seems to have taken on a bit of a life of its own where a lot of websites, a lot of publishers now believe that Google traffic is going to entirely disappear. And there is no signs of that actually happening. I think what has happened is that a lot of publishers have coasted on Google's own growth rather than actually growing their own share of voice in the market. Google as a search engine, as a search platform, has continued to grow year over year for pretty much as long as it has existed in terms of the amount of queries it fulfilled and the amount of traffic it kept sending to the web. That upward graph has now flatlined. Google isn't growing anymore. Google is stable, maybe even slowing, some, some mild indications that it's declining, but only quite mild. And that means that whereas previously search and SEO in general was not a zero-sum game because there was always more pie to be distributed, that pie has ceased to grow and therefore now it is a zero-sum game. If you get the click, your competitor does not get the click. And that has created a new dynamic where a lot of websites, including publishers, now have to fight harder for the traffic that they feel they should be getting. And for a lot of publishers, they see that traffic flatline, traffic line from Google flatlining as well. There's no real growth anymore, with maybe some exception of Discover traffic, which is an entirely different can of worms. We can also talk about that if you want. But it's become a bit of a, almost a meme inside the publishing world that Google traffic is disappearing. And yes, some publishers have been hit by certain aspects of Google's search system changing, and there is no denying that. But none of those changes that Google has been rolling out, which are algorithm updates, spam penalties, and of course AI-generated answers, are particularly new. Google has always done these things and has always enriched its search results with new elements and new, new features. So I found it quite astonishing that publishers are now embracing this panic because suddenly there's an AI buzzword that can sort of serve as the catalyst for that. I can't deny AI has accelerated the process because AI overviews definitely are damaging to traffic-dependent websites, but the panic that exists in the publishing world that Google traffic is going to disappear. Which then leads to publishers making the conscious decision to reduce investment in search and SEO is, I think, extremely dangerous because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think search traffic is declining and will disappear, and therefore you stop investing in search, guess what happens? Search traffic will decline and disappear because you've stopped investing in search. And I have seen many publishers who don't reduced their investment in search and they are actually doing quite well. Publishers that by any feasible metric should be suffering in search because, for example, they have a very hard paywall or a very niche in their news output are actually growing because they keep investing in search as a channel. So that's why I wrote that post about Google Lie is Zero is a Lie, because I think that needs to be a counterpoint to the sense of panic in the news and publishing industry, a bit of realism, a bit of data, and maybe a bit more of a nuanced discussion where my point of view that everything is fine isn't actually entirely accurate either because it's not. We do see some decline, but the opposite point of view that, oh, Google is going to disappear isn't true either. There is a middle there and we need to have nuance in that discussion. And when one point of view is so extreme, Google traffic is disappearing, you have to take an extreme opposite view. to sort of find that middle ground, which is why I wrote that quite inflammatory headline, Google Zero is a Lie. My article itself probably has a bit more nuance in it, but it needs to be, you know, you need to come out with those sorts of guns blazing to even have the discussion in the first place.

Yeah, I mean, that makes me think, you know, in your article, you did actually bring up some data points. So let's actually, it's a good transition into that because one of them that you brought up, I think, is indicative of kind of I don't want to call it misinformation, but it's maybe this, like, again, this is probably not the right word, but like lazy narrative, right? Based off of some of this data out there. So for instance, in your article, you mentioned a graph that Chartbeat had shared at some presentation where a lot of Chartbeat's brands were losing Google traffic. So a lot of their news publishers were losing traffic, organic traffic. And when in reality, you've worked on some of these brands personally, and you know that they aren't losing traffic. So, I mean, what's happening there? Why the discrepancy?

There are quite a few interesting theories I have about it. I think Chartbeat just aggregated all the data and didn't do any normalization in terms of the size of the publisher or the context in which that traffic was calculated. I also read a very detailed report that Chartbeat does on their Q1 traffic for their clients, and they have some really interesting, and I say probably misleading graphs in there that make me really put a big question mark to any data that they show. For example, in that Q1 2026 report that I read today, actually, it showed that Facebook traffic to publishers is only slightly below Google search traffic to publishers, and that just does not align to any data that I have seen for the publishers that I work with. And I work with a lot of different publishers. They also have this internal traffic metric that they use, which tends to skew the graph entirely in favor of internal traffic because every internal click is measured as an internal traffic source. I don't understand why they heap that all together. And other people also pointed out to me that that initial graph that I shared, that Chartbeat is comparing, for example, the US election cycle with the 2025 non-election cycle. And that of course will heavily skew the data because the election cycle is always a peak news moment anyway. Plus you throw in some other potential variables. For example, in 2024 and 2025, we had a few major Google algorithm updates. We've had Google handing out penalties to publishers. Off the back of their site reputation abuse spam policies, where publishers who were working with affiliate companies to drive affiliate clicks on things like product reviews and product recommendations saw massive declines in traffic off the back of that penalty, whereas the news traffic was unaffected. So it just has so many holes in it, that data, just so many plot holes, so many narrative gaps that just do not fit with what I'm seeing among my clients. Now, I can't deny some clients are feeling the impact from certain aspects of Google, but all of those have fairly clear explanations about the whys. And there are certain types of news publishers that, like I said in the article, are just not affected at all. The publishers that are affected, that feel the pain from things like the site reputation abuse penalties, that feel the pain from algorithm updates. That are feeling the effect of AI overviews at the top of search results. Those publishers, generally speaking, have always, or the last 5 years probably, been very focused on maximizing clicks from Google. Um, to the extent that maybe they went down certain editorial strategies that went a bit too far from what their core purpose as a publisher should have been. Whereas the publishers that have not seen any impact or just even seen growth are the ones who just report the news. And there's 2 types of publishers that I see thriving very, very well, which are like nationwide publishers who just report the news and don't do anything with evergreen. They don't do anything with affiliate content, no product reviews, no supplementary content, just news and hyperlocal news publishers who also do it for very small countries and cities and towns. Those 2 publishers are fine. Absolutely fine. From what I can see, there's very few publishers who have either one of those editorial strategies that are suffering in Google search because Google can't replicate that with AI. AI in general can't replicate just reporting the news. AI can only summarize it after the fact. It's the publishers who've been trying to do many things, who have not just news sections, but also lifestyle content and product review content and all of that sort of stuff. Yeah, they are suffering a little bit. Some are suffering quite a lot because that content is just not getting the search visibility that it used to get. It is being replaced to an extent by AI overviews and AI-generated answers in other systems like ChatGPT and Gemini. And they are also often, you know, having to be very careful with their product review content if they have an affiliate link in there, because that site reputation abuse spam policy that Google introduced in 2024. The initial wave was in March, April, May of 2024, and then a second wave of penalties in November 2024. That has been quite damaging for a lot of publishers who have been relying on driving traffic to that product content to then monetize it with clicks on those links and then earning affiliate income from that. Revenue stream has basically disappeared for those publishers and the traffic stream off the back of that as well. So yeah, there has definitely been a lot of pain involved with that. And I also want to highlight the fact that Google introducing new features on its search results, like AI overviews, is it new? Before AI overviews, we had featured snippets at the top of a search result. Google is also getting very good at giving direct answers in search results. A lot of sports websites suffered quite a lot when Google started showing sports game results directly on the top of a search result. So you didn't have to click through anymore, but with live updates and everything. Google Maps, of course, was a huge disruptor when it was launched and Google just integrated it into search. So none of these things are new. And I think the publishers who are complaining the most are the publishers who maybe have tried to over-optimize for Google and sort of become addicted to that traffic stream and maybe have lost a bit of sight of what their main purpose is or what their role as a news publisher should be and how they can best serve their audience. That is, of course, a very difficult conversation to have with a publisher because if you've scaled up your news organization to such an extent off the back of all those different content streams and tactics, and now suddenly that revenue is evaporated, that traffic is evaporated, and you have to narrow down what you are as a company, that's never a pleasant process. I do think it's a necessary process for a lot of publishers, and those will require hard conversations and Probably a bit of introspection, self-awareness that maybe not every news publisher actually has. News publishers generally are broadcast outlets and are not particularly comfortable in receiving criticism or feedback from their own readers. They just prefer to shout things out rather than listen. So it's an interesting ecosystem we're in at the moment, and I do feel that some publishers are not going to be able to adapt and will disappear. I do think in the next 5 years, we will end up with a healthier, better, publishing ecosystem where publishers will have found their core purpose again, or already have a core purpose and are just really focused on delivering the maximum value that they can. But I also think a lot of news will go behind paywalls because paywalls seem to be a much more reliable income stream than anything that relies on, on a direct traffic and page view that publishers have historically relied on to generate ad impressions and things like that.

Yeah, I mean, the paywall thing is interesting to me cuz I think about, I just read this article about how New York Times, you know, they have over 3,000 or 6,000 journalists, you know, under their purview now. And I was commenting on, you know, how this is a good thing, but you know, when you look into it a little bit more, understanding that they have, you know, they've acquired The Athletic, they've acquired Wirecutter, and The Athletic, you know, alone, I think probably makes up a lot of those journalists. Yeah. And then you have things like their games, right? New York Times Games and Wordle and all that stuff. I, you know, and my parents, I know, play that religiously every day. And so you start to think about how these publishers are getting smarter about revenue streams. And I mean, that I think is a case where they did it in a way that they're able to diversify and like get into some different markets without losing the core of what New York Times is versus some of these other publishers who try to just be everything to everyone instead of having kind of separate entities or separate sub-brands or whatever, which, you know, can get you in trouble with the site reputation abuse and that sort of thing. So there's a nuance to it for sure. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see how a lot of this stuff plays out. I'm curious. I mean, are you seeing this? Is this kind of a universal or international issue? Like, is this the same in the US as it is in the UK in terms of how publishers are, you know, reacting to this?

Yes. For many countries, some countries are an exception. For example, France does not have AI overviews in their Google search results for legal reasons. There are certain countries where Google just isn't allowed to roll out certain features that are standard in the UK and the US and most English language countries. And of course, publishers there have a very different context in which they then can drive traffic to their websites. So UK, US generally are the first markets to feel Google's expansion and rollout of new services and new features, and also the first to feel the pain when it comes to algorithm updates and spam penalties. Because English language, most of the web is in the English language, and Google tends to feel quite comfortable with rolling those features out for the English language first before they roll it out to other countries. But the overall trend is pretty much identical all across the world in that Google growth is just flatlined because, you know, there might be different nuances in different countries, but the overall trends are pretty similar. And it also depends on, for example, adoption of Android phones. If you're talking about Google Discover traffic, which in the UK and the US, iPhones are still quite popular, but in like South America, Southeast Asia, Androids have like 95% plus market share, which of course gives it a bit more emphasis on traffic from the Discover feed, which is already probably the single largest source of traffic to publishers as it is. Very SEO adjacent. So it's not like you have to do anything drastically new for Discover. It's just maybe a bit more awareness of the specific context in which Discover shows articles. And how you can optimize for that, but that's a different topic for a different day. But yeah, it is a global phenomenon overall because these tech companies are so big and so dominant that when they do something, the entire world has to follow. And there's not an awful lot of room for flexibility there.

Yeah. Okay. So we have kind of Google flatlining and that might be a big driver of the flatlining of growth. There's also this idea of publishers who have kind of over-indexed or over-invested in some of the same SEO tactics that a lot of SEOs have done and with review sites and affiliate plays and that sort of thing. So, okay. Outside of those 2 kinds of drivers, another thing that I think I've experienced or seen is this idea of people just getting news from different places, right? So there was a Nieman Lab study that I think it was in the summer of 2025 that came out saying that for the first time ever, social media has overtaken TV and online news as where Americans primarily get their news. And I thought that was very telling too, just kind of this idea. And because, you know, we've heard this in the past, like, uh, Gen Z uses TikTok as a search platform. And, you know, there's, there's all these little snippets. And when you get into the demographics, you know, you realize how they, they change things. But this seems to be kind of more universal where people are starting to universally just diversify, let's say, their platforms. And I know when I went to Google Search Central last year, I mean, Google is well aware of this phenomenon. And, and one of the slides that they showed at this presentation was people should not expect the same amount of organic traffic that they've had in the past. And a lot of it is due to this. I mean, they talk about it in the frame of like multi- Multimodal searches, you know, but it seems like that is to me at least where a lot of this is going, where people are just getting their news from different places and publishers, you know, it would behoove them to invest in video content and social. Like we've seen, I think it was Reach PLC recently said something about how, you know, they've invested heavily now in video. So I mean, do you think that plays a big role too? Because I also know that AI is not a big driver, right? Like you've said that we even did a study saying, showing that most Americans don't get their news from AI. Like that's not a thing that people are doing. So, so what, I mean, do you think it's just these people are diversifying their platforms?

Absolutely. And that is definitely a context publishers need to look at as well. Um, I do have theories about that, to be honest. I have seen this happen myself where a younger generation especially tends to not want to read news online. And that was the case 10 years ago and the case 20 years ago and the case 30 years ago. But as they grow older, they tend to gravitate towards different modes of consumption. And in the end, they end up going back to search and reading news again. But yeah, if you want to target a younger audience and get growth off of that, a written article on a website is probably not the best way of doing that because yeah, TikTok is hugely popular, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, all of those things. The problem as such with those channels is that they don't generate traffic. They generate views, they generate brand awareness, they generate indirect sources of recognition, and there might be ways to monetize that, but they don't generate traffic. And if you're a traffic-dependent website, you know, I do think you need to diversify how you acquire traffic and how you generate visibility. But you need to do that in the context of those sorts of exercises, tapping into the zeitgeist and making sure that you're present where your audience is present doesn't always lead to a directly attributable traffic stream. And attribution has always been a problem in online marketing and digital advertising and all of those things. So you need to have a bit more of a holistic strategy around how you want to reach out to your audience, how you want to be visible to your audience, and the role that social media plays in that. And social media has played a role in news consumption for, from the moment of its inception in the 2000s. Facebook was a huge source of traffic and visibility for news publishers until Facebook decided to downgrade external links in their, in their feed and focus more on social content from your actual connections. And it became much harder to earn traffic from that. Historically, X/Twitter has been a big source of traffic for publishers to an extent, but the same thing happened there. It's less about the links now and more about just shouting into the void and And who screams the loudest. So as a traffic source, it's sort of lost its potential as well. And now, of course, with visual social media like TikTok and YouTube and Instagram, you don't even get the opportunity to click through to a website, or if you do, very few people will make use of that. So if you want your news to be consumed and visible regardless of whether or not it earns you a click, yes, absolutely. You need to have very acute strategies around the kind of visual content that thrives on social media platforms. And I think generally for a lot of publishers, it's definitely worth doing. But if you are a very heavily traffic-dependent website, you need to make sure that you do that in the right context. Like I said, that there is a way for you to indirectly monetize that because otherwise it becomes a very expensive way of putting your news out there for free without getting anything back for it. And I do think that consumers generally do, are okay with paying for news in a direct or indirect way, providing they feel they get value from it. And I think that's where, you know, a platform like TikTok can have a lot of added value because it is a way for you to show your value as a news publisher so that at that point where that particular audience will eventually arrive on your website and is confronted with your paywall, they're like, yeah, I've seen these TikTok videos. These guys produce great journalism. This is the sort of stuff I'm willing to pay for. And then they buy the subscription for it. And you can also try and monetize it directly on the channels. I know some news publishers who actually make money off their YouTube videos because they're quite popular and they They earn ad impressions and also ways for people to subscribe via YouTube and give them directly money. Newsletters are also quite popular that some publishers are launching paid newsletters is also a good, interesting revenue stream. Podcasts, you know, if you, if you have a great piece of journalism, a great piece of investigative reporting, you shouldn't just write an article about it. The article is the starting point perhaps, and then you put maybe 2 or 3 journalists in a room with some cameras like you and I are sitting now, Vince. And then you let them talk about that piece of journalism and what they find and the process behind it. And yeah, you have a YouTube video. You can probably splice it up into 5 or 10 different shorts that you can also put on TikTok. You put it out as a podcast as well. So with, with basically one piece of content, you create multimodal avenues and different streams to get that content out there with the overall goal, not necessarily to drive traffic and clicks to your website, But to generate that brand awareness, that brand affinity, and hopefully convert that audience into some sort of paid audience later down the line. Yeah.

I mean, when you put it that way, it's funny because it's like, probably to a lot of our listeners, this is like, yeah, duh. You know, like this is the kind of like agencies that are listening is like, yeah, this is the kind of stuff we tell brands all the time. Right. That's it. But for, for news, you know, I've found at least journalists are kind of, the older ones are very dug in their ways and I'm sure that, you know, a lot of these brands that have been around for a long time, right? Like the New York Times or what have you. Like, it's hard to change these, these massive institutions and get them to embrace some of these things. But as obvious as a lot of this stuff sounds that you're saying, like, it just does not seem like something that— maybe it's internal red tape or whatever, but like, it just doesn't seem like something that they are open to doing. But it makes total sense. I mean, the idea of like multiple touchpoints and reusing content, you know, breaking it up into different Areas. I mean, yeah, Barry, I wanted to ask you something, you know, for, for our listeners specifically, this idea of like digital PR. So I kind of alluded to this in the beginning. News traffic drops, right? And these publishers start to fold. Digital PR is so heavily reliant on news for links and coverage. And now with AI, you know, it's getting mentions and news and whatever, as people are of kind of try to figure out this whole new thing, but do you think there is a place for digital PR as, or if publisher traffic diminishes?

Oh yes. Oh yes. Um, I think digital PR is actually probably going to be a bit of a boom industry in the short to medium term. First of all, I don't think most publishers are going to disappear. I think we'll have maybe a few. casualties along the way. I think most news publishers are going to be fine in the long run. In the short term, there will be some pain. There might be some restructuring, some layoffs, reevaluations of what their strategies are going to be. But in the long term, news as a concept and news as a product is going to be fine because people don't want less news. They want more news. They just want it maybe in a different way. And, uh, we need to figure out what the business models around that are. In terms of digital PR specifically, A lot of brands now, and we're not talking about news, but about general brands, businesses, e-commerce websites, whatever it is, care a lot about being cited in AI-generated answers, which is fine because that's how people increasingly do product research and get recommendations lists and all of those things. And one thing that we see as a consistent signal for increasing your citations in AI-generated answers is being mentioned on high-authority websites like news publishers. So what I am seeing is that the dynamic for digital PR actually got a little bit easier because previously digital PR was primarily about earning a link, link back to your website from a high authority website, which helped you drive your own rankings. Now there is a little bit slightly diminished values in the rankings with AI overviews and AI generated answers. Still value in rankings. Don't get me wrong. Google search isn't going away. It's just maybe a little bit less emphasis on it. But. Now, when AI-generated answers, you don't necessarily need to link. You just need to mention. Just being mentioned on these websites consistently in the right context, in the right type of content is already a win because it helps you be cited more often when these AI tools generate answers specific to your context and to your question and to the products that you're offering. I actually see digital PR as probably the one area of search and SEO that is going to be absolutely fine. They're going to be like, yeah, it's just about making sure that you craft that narrative to your clients that, yeah, if you don't get a link rate, as long as we get the mention in the right context for our products or services, then there's still value in it. And it might be a bit more of an indirect signal, but then most of marketing is about indirect signals that you build to drive authority and to drive buying behavior. So I think digital PR is in a very, very healthy place for the next couple of years, at least.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what we're saying. We did our big state of digital PR and that seems to be kind of the overall sentiment is that it's, you know, there's a lot more clients asking for AI mentions and citations and whatnot. And, and it's gotten, it's more successful for people. The 2 kind of yin and yang where it was more successful for people, more impactful, but also more challenging. Right.

And I think it's also about how you, how you, how you pitch it to news companies and publishers, because maybe the content opportunities for digital PR mentions have diminished a bit with publishers focusing more on their hard news and less on the peripheral content that we talked about that Google isn't really rewarding anymore, but there are still opportunities there that need to be a bit more creative and you need to maybe have a better offering in terms of how you earn the citations and earn the mentions. And I'm, I'm saying this. From my own context where I don't actually offer any digital PR services at all. It's not my wheelhouse at all. And I know some people who do digital PR and are very, very good at it. And yeah, it is something that they have to maybe be a bit more creative about. It's not just about blasting out emails to journalists anymore. You have to have something that a journalist is willing to write about that ties into the news, that is an interesting data point that they can maybe use. And so yeah, you maybe need to be a bit more creative about it, but the value of digital PR is only going to increase.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Um, Barry, was there anything, you know, I, we didn't cover that you'd like to just make sure the users, the listeners know about this stuff?

I don't know. I think we were pretty comprehensive, weren't we? I mean, I could probably blather on about this for another 2 hours, but I think people would be bored, bored out of their bloody minds at that point. I think just, you know, whenever someone gives you a blanket statement about X is dying or Y is going to happen or Z is going to change the world, you always need to look for the nuance and not just take it at face value. There is no denying that search and SEO has gotten more challenging. That is just the new reality. We're not going to put the AI genie back in its bottle, but it also shouldn't be news to people who've been doing SEO for a long time. It's always been getting harder and always new contexts that have emerged to have us change a little bit in emphasis on how we do things and how we position it. And now, of course, the whole kerfuffle around AI replacing search, which by the way, it really isn't, it's an addition to search. It's not a replacement to search. And people are now focusing on GEO or AEO or whatever they call it, which is basically just a classic SEO spamming repackaged. I think we need to just keep our heads on straight and continue to deliver the best value that we can for all our clients that we work with and all the companies that we work with. And also not be afraid to give some pushback when we know that a client is buying into certain data that just isn't giving the whole picture. And the best way to do that is to show more data that tells a different story and make sure that you come armed with the facts and always try to find deeper layers in that. And also be willing to have your mind changed. I've been wrong about things quite often in the 25-plus years I've been doing this, and I've had to change my gears and say, all right, I was wrong about that. I need to adapt. So no, never become entirely entrenched in your own beliefs because change is just a function of our industry and a function of what we do. need to embrace that and be willing to change along with it as well.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that seems to be the mainstay for the SEO industry these days is being flexible and, you know, staying on top of stuff. And obviously, you know, you can do that by following Barry's newsletter for sure. SEO— sorry, it is SEO for Google News, his Substack. I'll link to all this stuff in the In the podcast notes. And I think the other thing that I wanted to highlight from you, you know, my big takeaway thinking strategically about this, it seems like, you know, it gets back to this thing that people kind of think this idea is very kind of fluffy, this idea of like building a brand. And, and but I mean, it really does make a difference, right? Like if people are looking for your brand elsewhere, right? Like if they are Spreading out and using these multimodal approaches, you need to build a brand that people will understand, you know, why you stand out, why you are different than others, and build a brand in a way that people will want to visit you directly, or, you know, will, like you said, listen to a podcast or look at you on your, your social feeds and your stories and say, hey, they do a good job of this, like this, maybe this is where I want to get the news from. So I love that idea. And I think it's something that Too often gets kind of lumped together with like this, these, yeah, like qualitative kind of fluffy concepts. But I do think it is going to play a bigger role as we go forward.

Absolutely. I've always found it hilarious that marketing has always been a dirty word within the news industry because marketing was always associated with the commercial side, selling advertising and selling commercial opportunities. But marketing at its core is about having a product that fits what your market wants. And then building that, that audience around it. And that's, I think, why a lot of news publishers have been so hesitant to change gears and accept the new realities, because it means they have to step outside their comfort zone and do things that historically they haven't wanted to do.

Well, Barry, this has been awesome. Like I said, I'm going to link to your, your article and your newsletter in the show notes, as well as anything else that we talked about today. People can connect with Barry on LinkedIn. Definitely check out his post there. Give him a follow, give him a connection if you'd like. If people have questions about any of the stuff that we covered, if you have questions for Barry, leave it in the show notes, leave it in the comments. You know, I'm sure Barry will be more than happy to answer. I can forward them along to him as well. So thank you again, Barry. Thank you all so much for listening and good luck out there.