News SEO: Challenges, Revenue Models, and Unchanging Truths | Barry Adams

Hi, and welcome to the Search Session. You know that we always love to chat with our guests about the latest news, and fortunately or unfortunately, the latest news has been a lot, and especially related to everything AI and search. But today I want to talk about news, literally. news and the publishing ecosystem. So I thought to invite, that was a good idea to invite to this session, the SEO and audience growth consultant and founder of Polemic Digital, also co-founder of the News and Editorial SEO Summit, which I really invite you to go and discover on Google. because in October it's going to have its 5th edition. It's an online event, so no problem with travel, hotels, and all these classic hassles. You can watch it from your home. And this person is Barry. How are you doing?

I'm fine. It's Friday afternoon when we're recording this, Gianluca. I'm doing really, really well. How are you?

I'm fine. Yes, yes, it's Friday, so Somehow we are relaxed because the weekend is coming and we are going to have at least a few, a couple of days of, I mean, we have to save also our mental health and hopefully neither me or you and no one in our audience is going to think about AI search and AI mode and the world that is collapsing and all these wonderful positive things. Talking about this, how the AI overlords are treating you lately?

No complaints so far. Yeah, AI is an interesting one. AI overviews initially seemed to be a bit of an existential threat to news and publishing on the web. I sort of predicted that was a bit of a storm in a teacup because, you know, AI overviews in the initial version don't summarize news. They don't show up for news-specific queries. If there's a top stories carousel on the Google search, you're not seeing an AI overview. And that's a very deliberate decision that Google made because they realized that they couldn't keep the output of the AI overview up to date with the latest developments in news. So they thought, yeah, we're not not going to show that. AI mode, that's going to be a different story because you can actually ask AI mode for news queries to summarize the latest news or to ask it about a specific news topic. And it'll give you a summary of what is happening. And it'll still cite sources. Of course, it'll give you the option to click through to the news articles that it derives the summaries from. I do think that the click-through rate to those news articles will be higher than the average click-through rate we see from AI overviews. But it'll be a lot lower than the click-through rate that we're currently getting from top stories carousels, because top stories drive a huge amount of traffic to publishers. So in my particular niche, news and publishing, the impact of AI overviews was felt, but not dramatically so. You know, it's just another chip off Google's traffic stream. I suspect the impact of AI mode will be quite significant. Especially when Google starts making it the default search experience, which I do suspect they're going to do. I do feel that when that happens, we're probably gonna see for most publishers about half their Google traffic disappear, their Google search traffic. There will be other channels which going to, going to make up for that. Discover is probably going to be a bigger source of traffic for news publishers, even bigger than it already is, especially because it's rolling out to The desktop version of the Chrome browser, but I don't think it'll mitigate the the full impact of AI mode. So, you know, the impact of AI is is going to be felt. Initially, I was a little bit skeptical, but the more I see of it, the the more I realize that this is going to have a huge impact. This is going to be painful for a lot of publishers, and we're going to have to find alternative ways to drive traffic and drive revenue. to the news industry as a whole?

I can imagine it. And yes, I agree with you that AI overview is not having an impact also because I think that Google is very, in this case, it knows very well how AI overview can be dangerous also for the same image of Google if applied to news. Because of the hallucination. Even if Google is trying to use, to ponder and to limit hallucination, and actually it improved a lot thanks to RAG, but I mean, it can, it doesn't control, it seems as if the ranking, classic ranking factor that are maybe making a more trustable newsletter, news website or publisher, being more visible than, I don't know, classic obscure pamphlet on both sides of extremism to be visible. In AI overview, it's not so. So that could be the problem also in terms of images. And I think that in this case, it may be more let's protect our brand as Google than anything else, maybe.

Yeah, I suspect AI overviews are probably going to disappear and be replaced by AI mode. And I also think that AI mode is much more robust in its output than AI overviews. It's trivially easy to make an AI overview spew out bullshit, basically. You know, you can sort of ask it leading questions or trigger it to give you false information. With AI mode, that is much, much harder. I haven't yet seen many examples of AI mode giving you objectively false information. I think it's fundamentally a different system where Google performs a lot more searches in the background, a lot more summarizing, a lot more reliance on trusted authoritative sources than it does in AI overviews. And I'll be honest with you, when I started playing with AI mode myself, I found it to be exceptionally useful. And I'm not one who has an awful lot of faith in AI as a technology. I think it's massively overhyped. I don't think is nearly as useful as a lot of its advocates proclaim it to be. But in this particular iteration, this particular product that Google is rolling out, I can see that becoming a default search experience because it reduces friction a lot. It makes things easier for people to find and to perform research and to get the information that they want and reduces the need to jump through things like cookie consent forms or all these advertising banners we see on websites. So. I think a lot of people will prefer the experience that AI mode provides them because they will still have the informational needs catered for in a very accurate and detailed way without all the friction that is implied in having to visit websites and actually read the content yourself and then create your own internal summaries. I think Google is still struggling to find the right monetization approach for AI mode. Advertising obviously will be that monetization. And I, I am not entirely sure about the economies of AI mode at scale, because I imagine it's much more expensive for Google to generate an AI mode result rather than a standard classic search result. But I think Google has the business and financial foundation to play the long game and make sure that this is their way to dominate the AI chatbot market, as it were. And, you know, we're just going to have to come to grips as a broader industry.

Yeah.

that AI mode is very likely going to become the core search experience. And I'll be honest, that is something I've only recently come to accept. I used to be very much of the opinion that this was just Google playing around. They weren't really going to undermine the classic search experience. And I really thought that, you know, this might just become another extra vertical, like, like the news tab or the images tab and things like that. Now that I've seen it in action, I've had to change my mind and say, no, this is too good. I almost hate to say it, but AI mode is too good and it will become the core search experience because I think it's what you users want. It is the direction user behavior is heading in and we can't deny that any longer. The moment you start playing with it yourself, you realize the power of it. Much more powerful than AI overviews, much more useful than AI overviews. So AI mode is the future of search.

Yes, I too believe the same. And also because AI mode, as it was announced, it's totally based on the most powerful model of Gemini 2.5 Pro, but the Pro also includes the deep search functionality of what was the best product of Gemini, which is deep search. And deep search really was astonishing. It's really good, really good, especially whenever you wanted to have a first profound brief about a topic, and then from there doing your own research or even feeding it with your own sources and asking it to discover new sources. So yes, I think too that AI mode will slowly— somehow as if they will test things on AI mode and then test the same feature on AI overview and slowly creating a metamorphosis of AI overview into AI mode and conquering the space that is left below the fold now for classic search. And one thing that I maybe believe, because honestly, at least I'm probably— I'm a single person, obviously I'm not statistically valid as an example, but could it be a mode for news somehow like the metro newspaper, the newspaper that people give you when you are entering in the subway? And so you have things you can start reading, but then actually you have your news application installed on your mobile. And because For instance, this is what I do. I usually don't reach news, don't read news starting from a Google search. Only if it's maybe casually I'm doing a search and there is a news and as I catch my attention and I click. But usually I go directly to the newspapers that I used to read using their own application. And for the ones that I really, really like to read, I even subscribe. So is this, which is not an old strategy for catching and conquering public and maintaining public and also to monetize on the public, so is the subscription, isn't maybe something that news sites should even more strengthen as a strategy?

Oh yes, oh yes. Google as a total source of traffic for publishers, for most of my publishing clients, accounts for at least half of their total traffic. And I don't want to underestimate because like you, I tend to go directly to the news sites I want to read, but I also regularly perform news searches on Google to find other articles in top stories and other stories, especially if it's like a topic I know I want to read and I go to my standard news site and I can't find what I'm looking for. Don't really appreciate what they're reporting or don't really want to read it. I just go to Google and find alternative sources. And for most of my clients, you know, the combination between the clicks they get from top stories, primarily top stories boxes on, on, on regular search results, and the clicks they get from the Discover feed for people who use the Chrome browser on mobile, that accounts for huge amounts of that traffic. 60, 70% of traffic is not uncommon. And then the rest is made up by a combination of direct traffic, email newsletter visits, social media visits, other sources that they might have at their disposal. And it's very important for publishers in this day and age to try and build loyal audiences. It has benefits beyond just, you know, making yourself immune from the technology intermediaries like Google. It actually also helps your presence in Google if you have a loyal audience and people actively search for your brand. And it makes you easier to find. It gives you more brand footprint. It allows you to be shown more often in the AI-generated answers and just, you know, tends to result in higher conversion rates, be that for subscription paywalls or just registration paywalls or asking for people to donate for free. Like for example, The Guardian does. And those are the sorts of business models that news websites will have to pursue. I do genuinely believe that. As a society, we need to start getting used to paying for news again. You know, we have been used to free news for the better part of 25 years now. And that's, that's a relatively recent thing because news before the advent of the web was never free. It was something you had to pay for. You paid a newspaper subscription or you bought a newspaper at a newsstand to read the news. And now we got used to doing that for free on the web. And I think that particular timeframe is now over and we're going to have to pay for news again. I also think that the web has encouraged initially the last 25 years, the growth of news and media publishing on the web because it was very easy to do and low cost of entry. And that has amounted to millions and millions of news websites all over the world. And what we're now seeing with AI mode and the narrowing of the traffic opportunities thanks to that. Thanks to the other competing systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity. I think we'll see a narrowing of the news space as well, where again, we'll have fewer news publishers because the economic models have just changed. The incentives aren't there anymore. And that's sad in a way, you know, because journalism as a whole has been struggling with revenue and finances for a very long time now, especially because Google is the gatekeeper of traffic on the web, and if you have a web-based news business, you're going to have to play tag with Google. There's no way around it. But Google also owns the advertising stack almost entirely from top to bottom. So whatever you do, you're beholden to Google, and they seem to be the only one who's winning in this particular scenario. And I think that that is one of the bright points that will come out of this platform shift to, to AI search engines where yes, we'll end up with fewer news publishers, but they will be healthier news publishers. I truly believe that. I think they'll be better equipped to handle the coming challenges. They'll have loyal audiences, profitable, hopefully revenue streams, and have really narrowed down what makes their journalism worth paying for. 'Cause if you just have exchangeable journalism where you, you are not really differentiating from another website, then People aren't going to pay for that. But if you have something unique that you can bring to the table, then you know people will find that worth paying for, and you'll end up in a better economic position.

I totally agree because I was going to comment the same thing. Yeah, I remember when I was younger and I was buying La Gazzetta dello Sport to to read the news, sport news, and I was happy to to buy it, especially during the summer with these long. very boring days on the beach. So you were reading every single little news for passing the day. And I think also that I try always not to see how to assign the guilt of something to just one. We know Google is evil. The do not evil is more a myth than anything else. But also the news, the publisher, the publishing industry, as its own guilt in order to— the lowering of the quality of the average news sites in order to catch the biggest amount and chunk of traffic. I think it's evident for everybody. So this situation, and that is where I'm really coincident with you, it's if you want people to be loyal to you, then you don't totally have to, yes, still maintaining some sort of daily news, curious news, because people are so— we always like to see the classic what the fuck news, because of the fourth-hand news like drop rain of frogs in, I don't know, Chichester, something like this. But yes, more deeper news, a return to the classic journalism, investigative one. Deeper research and so on. So in order to make people stay on the news and returning on the news and even desiring to subscribe to the news. But there is also another possibility. One recent news is the deal between the New York Times and Amazon. So there is also this thought, okay, if we are not going to have Google sending us traffic and us monetizing from it, we have to also find new channels. And these channels can be collaborating with other technological giants, in this case, New York Times and Amazon. But also when it comes to feeding the beast, as I say, having deals with OpenAI in order to, let's say, use our content to model your system and so on. So what do you think? Are you seeing more and more of these sort of movement in the news?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a really interesting case there because at the same time, the New York Times also has a lawsuit pending against OpenAI for using its content to train its LLM. And I think the deal with Amazon shows, as Ricky Sutton pointed out on LinkedIn, I believe, that there is economic value in news publishers selling their content to AI systems. And therefore that creates precedent that the, the LLMs who have taken this content without paying for it have violated agreements or broken copyright. I do think that the, you know, the model where news publishers license their content to be used by LLMs is generally only applicable to the largest news publishers. You know, someone like Amazon or Microsoft or OpenAI or Google doesn't have to make agreements with 100 million news websites. They might only need agreement for several thousand, several hundred thousand, maybe a million if you want to broaden the scale. And then you've basically got more than enough content to do whatever you need to do as a large language model. And again, like I said, it'll lead to a narrowing of the space. But I do think that as if you're any sort of decent skilled publisher, you should explore those opportunities to have licensing agreements with the large language models, because otherwise, you know, they're going to take your content anyway. You might as well get paid for it. Um, and it creates an interesting dynamic there where, you know, you can have a certain preference for a large language model depending on which kind of content it ingests. Because New York Times, for example, has very different journalism than say Fox News. And here in the UK, The Guardian has very different journalism to the Daily Mail. And if they make different agreements with different LLM providers, you end up with different outputs from those LLM providers because these companies, these publishers have very outspoken brand presence in how they present the news, the kind of stories they write and how they write their story. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of impact that might have on the output of the LLMs, depending on which licensing agreements they have in place. And also on all the other previous litigation that's currently ongoing about, you know, the use of the content on the web to train these LLMs. I still believe that the content that was used to train LLMs is basically a breach of copyright because they didn't ask permission. And I don't think the clauses in copyright law, neither in the US nor in Europe, that account for things like fair use or transformative use are applicable here because these LLMs are, especially now with what ChatGPT is doing and also what Google is doing with AI mode, are directly competing with the publishers, the creators of the content. So it's not transformative use. It's reproducing the content in a slightly different format. Competing with the original creator. So the downsides of those arguments is that the legal system doesn't seem to be particularly inclined to agree with that interpretation and tends to fall on the side of the technology companies, which I think is a dangerous precedent because it basically, again, disincentivizes the creation of content in the first place, which might hasten the travel to the entirely paywalled ecosystem where very few publishers will be free to read and it's all going to be locked down behind some sort of gatekeeping system. Be that microtransactions, full subscription models, or you have to download an app to read a website's news and they just don't have an open website anymore. It's all about getting into their locked ecosystem. I do think that the free and open web that we've more or less been enjoying for the last 25 years is, is not going to survive in its current form on the back end of this AI revolution. I think the incentive to throw stuff behind locked doors, especially informational content, are too strong. You know, you can't keep giving it away for free because the model of giving content away for free in return for traffic has been entirely upended. So now the content itself, we can't give it away for free anymore. We need some sort of remuneration for it, be that in the form of a subscription or a licensing fee, or, you know, some sort of brand loyalty to whatever the outlet is that we can then monetize in a different way.

This can be somehow tricky passage and situation, but that even if it's not so true that also the big, big publisher corporation, people always think that, let's say, a Washington Post will never fail. We know that we have seen many, many prestigious and classic news company that ultimately failed or not to fail needed to merge into a bigger corporation, which usually is not even related to news. But obviously this is going to be especially critical for the small independent publisher. And I'm not talking of the publisher like the blogger, but the blogger is not even a publisher, even if We can— he is proud to define himself like a publisher. I'm not talking about the small ones, like the niche publication, the ones that, you know, when we were younger, we were going to the newsstand and we were buying for a magazine about, I don't know, OVNI, UFOs, or things like this. That kind of publisher. are going to really suffer. From your experience and from what you have seen with big publishers, which usually are your clients, what of the things that these big publishers are doing you believe can be doable also for these smaller niche publishers that I'm talking about now?

Yes. I don't think you have to be a very big publisher to be successful in a post-search era, because that's really what we're talking about, I do think you need to look beyond just text as your output. If you have a very niche focus, UFOs, science fiction, Warhammer 40K, that sort of stuff, you can still be very successful even if you don't have a big operation. But you need to think beyond search as a traffic source. You need to try and build communities of loyal fans. You need to maybe think about doing podcasts, which are also, you don't need an awful lot of subscribers to make a podcast. Podcast profitable. Maybe short-form videos. Video is very easy to produce nowadays. The cost of video production is now close to zero. And you can do all kinds of fun things with that. You need to look at social media, old-fashioned social media, and user-generated forums like Reddit as potential sources of traffic. And again, building that community around you. And I've seen some creators do that very successfully as well. And yeah, search will probably play a small role still in that particular ecosystem because, you know, people will still use search. But there will be less traffic coming out of search to your website off the back of that. And you need to look at maybe finding ways to monetize your content in other ways. You know, Google has been hammering down quite hard on, on things like affiliate content in, in publishing websites, but maybe we need to revisit that particular part of the, the monetization opportunity because if you become less reliant on Google as a traffic source, then maybe we should stop caring about what Google penalizes and what it doesn't penalize. And just go back to putting those affiliate links in and try to make money that way, or even become a direct e-commerce partner with whoever your particular niche is supplying from. You know, I think publishers need to just think beyond just the direct output of text content and look a bit more of a broader holistic view of what their business actually is about and the kind of audience that they want to serve and how that audience can best be served, not just with the news content, but also with the peripherals around. that news content.

Yes, I think you said the magic word, creator, because I really truly believe that what we see being done by the most successful creators, and I follow many for my hobby, you cited Warhammer 40K, so they are really, really, really able to Build community around them, around the topic. So building community and with dedication and constance, they were able also to to build trust. The classic EAT stuff that Google is also teaching. A lot of things. But the real meaning of EAT trust and not like some some cryptic ranking.

A lot of publishers, a lot of journalists are already doing this in the form of, for example, Substack newsletters. There's a lot of journalists who went out and created their own Substack and found that to be a very good avenue for them to make money and to build a loyal community around that particular type of journalism.

Yes, and exactly. And in this case, maybe the big news who are hiring these journalists could create synergies with the personal brand of a journalist, which is Something that in the past, because of what we say, the generalization of news, many times, okay, I can accept when Reuters is signing a news because this is how news works. But many times it was something like a very generic sign because, I mean, there was really no journalist writing many of the news. And maybe it's Returning to this, I want to go to The Guardian because on The Guardian is writing this journalist because I follow him on Substack and I really like what he says, etc., etc. So maybe also these works is another variant of a bigger strategy that the news can offer. And then I think that, you know, that AI mode, Google is also saying to us that Not now, not in this moment, but quite soon because I said it's going to be in the summer. Personalization is going to be even more stronger than it is now. The searches are already personalized, but it's going to be even more. So it's going to connect thanks to the presence of Gemini practically in everything, in every application of Google. So from our Gmail, from our Docs, from our searches, historic searches, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe all these things that we were saying before, so creating loyalty, readership, and so on, creating people subscribing to our newsletter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is also a way to, okay, Google is not going to send me traffic, but please give me the highest visibility. Don't you think?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I suspect a lot of publishers, especially the bigger ones, will have hybrid models where, for example, they will have parts of their output that'll be still open to crawl and index for Google, primarily to try and get Discover traffic, because Discover traffic, like I said, is huge for a lot of publishers and will probably stay a cornerstone of a lot of publishers' traffic acquisition strategies. And then maybe have other content behind paywalls that is maybe a bit more advanced, a bit more focused on the loyal audience, on the brand loyalties there and maybe have alternative content streams in terms of podcast videos, short-form videos, whatever that may be, new newsletters. And a lot of publishers already do this, but, you know, as I feel personally that a lot of publishers lack that overarching strategy with a very clear picture of where each type of channel fits in. They're just trying stuff out and see what works. And I think that's something that publishers will have to really nail down and try to you know, properly understand what their purpose is, who their audience is, and how that audience can best be served in all these different channels and different opportunities. And, you know, the publishers who, who do that well are the ones who are going to be thriving. The publishers who are just going to keep trying stuff out and chasing after cheap clicks, like you said before, they're just not gonna go— they're not gonna be around anymore in, in a couple of years. Although having said that, the fact that Discover remains a powerful channel doesn't bode well for the overall quality of the output because the kind of, of news that drives a lot of engagement on discovery isn't necessarily the best kind of news. It is sort of clickbait stuff, you know? So the, I, I think that that particular addiction will continue to encourage some websites to go after the cheap click rather than try and nail down what the point of quality, the point of uniqueness should be.

I agree. And I think that maybe the smarter ones will be the ones that are able to create a balance between the 2 kinds of journalism. And so let's try to move a little bit from AI. We already dedicated half an hour to it. And let's talk about the work. I've always been curious to know Walt, my friends in the field, what is the first thing you go to see and check whenever you start to work with a client?

Oh, I just use the website. I try to become a user and a reader and try to get a bit of a gauge of how to navigate through the website, what the points of friction are when I click through one page to the other, how easy it is to find specific topics, category pages, tag pages that I might be interested in. How that journalism is presented in both visual way and in a headline way, and how the headlines are crafted and those sorts of things. It also sort of depends on what kind of engagement it is. If it's, for example, a purely technical audit that I have to do, or technical consulting for a client, I tend not to dive into the editorial side too much. If it's a more holistic, all bells and whistles audit, then definitely I look at the editorial aspects of it and, and try to sort of get a bit of a gauge of what their processes might be. And then also, you know, engage with the client to understand, well, what are your publishing processes? How is SEO integrated into your workflows? How can that be improved? I do find that, you know, different clients have different needs and are at different levels of maturity in terms of their own SEO journey. And the ones that I get the most satisfaction from working with generally are the ones that are quite mature in their SEO lifecycle and have decent processes in place and are trying to find that extra 1%, 2%. Growth opportunity or things that they might be missing. And I find those to be quite rewarding projects. But sometimes it's also great to be working with maybe a small local publisher or a nonprofit publisher who is fairly new to SEO and is still trying to understand, you know, what it actually means for them, what it could mean for them, what the potential is, and what kind of investment they need to be putting into that. So yeah, because news publishers come in all different sizes and scopes and the maturity levels in SEO. Also come in all across the whole spectrum. There isn't really one particular approach I have for every single client. Every client has slightly different needs. I will say though that I am one of those SEO guys who likes to do things manually. I don't use many tools. I am an old, an old school SEO in many ways where I still like unpicking HTML code and, you know, do just looking at the raw data from a crawl and see what kind of Output I get from that. I find that it's, it's very seductive to look at a website purely through the lens of SEO tools and not really see the actual website for what it is and what its purpose is. And it's a mistake that I myself have made a few times over the years. And I realized that that is because the tools point me in certain directions and tell me certain things, but sometimes those aren't actual problems. They're just, you know, false flags or. You know, mirages that are being painted that aren't actually really impacting the website's performance in search. And it is about trying to nail down what you can actually do in a meaningful way to improve a website's traffic, be that from Google or from Discover or other organic search channels. And yeah, like I said, every website has a different approach for that. I do still use checklists, let's be honest, to make sure primarily that I check everything that needs to be checked. But for me, the checklist isn't the, the goal itself. The checklist is purely a means to an end. And I let myself go on exploratory pathways when I work with a website to find stuff out that goes beyond the checklist and, and see, you know, if I can find anything really new and interesting there. And my checklists also keep evolving, right? Keep adding stuff in or moving other stuff in just to make sure that I am looking at every website, every publishing site in the right way, with the right perspective, the right frame of mind, and not have too many preconceived notions about what might work or might not work for that particular website. And I like to do a lot of trainings and do a lot of training sessions for, for clients, editorial trainings for journalists and editors, but also technical trainings for, for development teams. And I really enjoy doing those because I try to cater every training session to that particular client context. And how they work, give them examples from their own website and sometimes competing websites so that they really see how, you know, these best practices can work in the real world, in real scenarios, and what the rewards are for doing things slightly differently. And it's not about giving journalists more work to do, although sometimes it is more work, but about making sure that when they craft a headline and when they pick an image to go along with it, that they have the right frame of mind that will encourage that article to perform as best as it possibly can. can in Google's overall ecosystem as well as in other ecosystems.

Yes. This is something that I do too. And personally, I'm a teacher. I'm a professor in a master's, but it's not a classic SEO master's, something like this. It's a recognized master's for copywriters in Italy. And I take care of the SEO part. And one thing that I usually like to To say to these copywriters that maybe are already working and they come with all this baggage of things that they learn about SEO. And the first thing that I say usually is, uh, you have to know things about SEO, but then you have to forget them because if not, you're going to create crap.

Yeah.

And so substantially it's, it's more like how to use Google and search and Google Trends more than how you must write the article with checklist and pointed list. At the end of the day, I just simply explaining them how to find sources well and how to write content in a way that is natural, but why, and why is writing natural is going to be rewarded also by search engines and now also by LLMs.

Yeah.

Because it's natural, all the semantics. I'm not going to tell them you have to write with monosemanticity because everything must be really— because they don't understand it. I mean, it's not their work to understand. And this is maybe in the past was the classic reason why so many journalists hated SEOs because SEOs were trying to push in their throat what they have to do.

Yeah, exactly. I, I, I say that with every, every editorial training that I do, that, you know, never let SEO get in the way of journalism. The journalism comes first. The journalism is, is, is the thing. And what we're trying to do is make sure that that journalism gets the biggest audience it can possibly get. And that's why we need to cater to the tech platforms in the form of, of SEO for Google, form of Open Graph for, for, for Facebook, Twitter Cards for, for, for Twitter, those sorts of things. But the journalism always comes first. And I think when a website loses sight of that and starts chasing after the clicks, it's a downward spiral. You've mentioned this several times already today before. When you start chasing after clicks, you get bad habits. So never write with search first and foremost. And this is also something Google has been saying for years and years and years already. And I think there's a grain of truth in that. I think those click-chasing tactics can definitely work. But those websites who engage in that nearly always tend to get caught up in an algorithm update at some stage down the line and just see a lot of their search traffic disappear, as well as their discover traffic, because, you know, they're being seen as low-quality outlets. And also, if you chase after clicks, you're not making yourself unique and distinguishable in any way. You're just going to be one of the other outlets who writes the same sort of stories. And like we've just talked about before, if you're not unique, if you don't have a unique selling point, something worth paying for, then you're going to have a very bad time in the next several years. So, you know, it, it all starts with the journalism. And that's one of the reasons why I like working with news websites, cuz generally I'm their ally. I'm not trying to teach them bad habits. I'm trying to make them shine even more. You know, it's, it's, I don't have to teach journalists how to write, which is great. The, the content generally is already really, really good. And sometimes I get to work with, with particular types of publishers whose content is truly mind-bogglingly good, like fantastic pieces of analysis and, and in-depth reviews that, you know, there is no bad habit to unlearn there. It's more about what can we do to give this the biggest possible audience that it deserves. And those are very gratifying projects to work on because yeah, you really feel like you are you're broadening the audience to this amazing content that these companies are generating and that deserves a bigger footprint in Google, bigger footprint across the whole web, bigger footprint beyond the web as well.

This question may sound like asking you for an anecdote, but in reality it's something more. What I was going to ask you is, do you have a specific story about a client in the news that you really, really return back, not in the negative way, in the positive way, in the way that you were surprised by them in how they work and were able to make their voice, editorial voice, being shared, being seen in the correct way. So where you learn something. Instead of teaching something.

Yeah, look, I learn with, from every single client I work with. I never try to close myself off from being proven wrong. And every publisher has their own way of doing things. And sometimes, yes, publisher surprises me with how they do things and how it actually works. I'll give you an example from several years ago. I did work for the Daily Mail, and I know some people are going to cringe at that, but You have to give credit to the Daily Mail. They're very, very good at what they do. They have a very specific brand voice that is evident in all their output, and it works for them because their audience wants that brand voice. They want to read that kind of content. However, the way that the, the Mail's brand voice is evidenced in their online articles is by very writing very long headlines, basically entire paragraphs, which goes against everything that we are taught as SEOs to do. I mean, you know, 65 to 70 characters. In, in top stories in Google News, you can write up to 110-character-long headlines before Google starts really cutting them off. So that was a learning moment for me as well when I realized, hey, you don't have to strictly adhere to those sorts of limits. You can scope a little bit beyond that and also work intelligently within the different visual ways that those headlines are shown in Google because the top stories headline can be 70, 80 characters long before you get the dot dot dot cutoff. And the actual hard limit is still 110 characters. The title of an article can be thousands of characters long, but yeah, Google will have a visual cutoff at about 65 to 70 characters. In Discover, different lengths, headlines are sometimes shown over multiple sentences, multiple lines of text. And therefore, you know, you have a bit more scope to play with there as well. And you can provide different attributes in an HTML document to Google for different types of headlines. Google will use the Open Graph headline very often in Discover. The structured data headline is generally what Google tends to use in top stories, as well as the H1 headline. And of course, the 10 blue links will have the old, the classic title tag there. And smart publishers will allow the journalists to supply different values for these fields. Optionally, you don't have to do it, but it's encouraged to do that, to give an article more, more opportunities to shine in different environments and different contexts. And then on the other hand, you've got publishers who, who do the exact opposite of what I think good SEO should be with, for example, LADbible. I've worked with them as well. And they write headlines very much geared towards social and towards discover with, you know, not explicitly saying in the headline what the article is about, but sort of teasing it in a very clickbaity and emotive way. And, you know, that's not something I try to encourage because I have seen websites get punished in algorithm updates off the back of it. But it seems to work really, really well for LADbible. And I think it works well for them because they have a very strong brand presence. People actively seek out that sort of content. And yeah, it might hinder them a little bit in search. It might not work as much in classic search and top stories, but it works really well for Discover. There is enormous amounts of traffic for them from the Discover feed. So who am I to say that that's, you know, bad practice? At most, I can point out the dangers that they might get hit by an algorithm update, but I'm not gonna tell them to drastically revise their editorial strategies because, you know, it would be suicide for a company like Land Bible to do that. So, you know, there, there isn't one specific method of achieving success in Google. You and I have been around the block often enough that we see all kinds of different websites achieve success in different ways. And I think we need to keep an open mind about those things as well and, and learn from every client that we engage with. Find out how they do things, what is working for them, what is not working for them. And, and like I said, I keep learning with every project that I do. Every new website that I work with, you know, has slightly different challenges that they're trying to meet. And it, it makes me better with every project that I do and, and makes my output better. If I look at the trainings and, and audit reports I send out now versus the ones I sent out 5 years ago, I, my quality has progressed by leaps and bounds, and I hope that will continue to do so. And that they don't get stuck in a rut of always doing the same things in the same way, because that's just, you can't afford to be stagnant in this, this industry of ours where it's—

A part of it would become, would start to make our own, your own job, my own job really boring.

Yeah, exactly.

And nothing worse than working on a job that you find boring. And we were talking about textual. Content. And we say before that, and I also see it as a user of new website, how much the multimedia elements like the podcast embedded in the, in the website, or the video embedded in the podcast, or the use of the so-called street journalists, so obtaining the rights to reproduce short, short video made by Normal people like me, like you. It started with the classic, we already classic case of Arabic Spring. I don't know if it's something that exists in English. Primavera Árabe in Spanish.

Yes, we know that.

Yeah. And how much?

2009, wasn't that? 2010, something like that?

No, it was, yes, around that part of the 2010s. Yes, in the middle was, if I remember well. Well, it's almost— we should come down with a Syrian war because they did it, the Arab Spring, and also coincident with the start of the war in Syria. And how much of your work now, if you do that also, is also about optimizing or working for making these multimedia elements of a bigger news website being more visible, not just in Google search, but let's say on Spotify, if they are in Spotify, or YouTube, which is probably the most important channel. I'm not sure if your work is also moving to that direction.

Not as much as I'd like, if I'm honest, but also because I've chosen to focus down on my own strengths and, and Understand where my weaknesses are. It's something I still probably need to grow and learn more from. My strengths have been in classic SEO and news SEO, which is text-based output. And I know how to optimize for that. I'm still learning how to optimize for video. I'm still learning how to optimize podcasts. And I don't feel comfortable giving advice to clients because I have very limited experience doing that sort of thing. So I feel, you know, it's an area of growth for me as well, especially now that we're moving to a post-search. environment and, and the demand for SEO services is probably going to decrease or change in a, in a certain way. And it's always good to add more strings to your bow and be able to do more, more things and be a meaningful, you know, advisor to clients on multiple different channels and not just on, on the, the text output search channel. So there, I see that as a challenge for me. I see that as an opportunity to grow as a consultant, as a person, as a provider of services. And I hope I get the opportunity to work together with clients on that who sort of take a chance on me, as it were, so that I can also learn from them and they can, they can learn from me. But it's, at the moment, it's a fairly limited part of my repertoire.

Okay. Well, already 1 hour, eh, of a conversation. Time flies. So let's conclude this conversation with just a few questions about you. Really simple questions. I'm not going too personal. But well, personally, yes, but in a very healthy way. For instance, for the people watching and listening to us, maybe not everybody knows that you are Dutch, even if you are living in Northern Ireland. So we are very similar because I'm Italian, but I live in Spain for 20 years, more than 20 years now. Sometimes I don't know if it happens to you, But in Italy they think I'm Spanish, and in Spain they say, no, you are Italian. I don't know if this happened to you, but one question that I have to you, how much of a time you think in Dutch and how many times you think in English?

Most of the time I think in English. I just found that when I'm in a stressful situation, I revert back to Dutch. Example, when I go to the gym, I might not look it, but I love going to the gym. I love picking up heavy things and I count my reps. I count my, in my head in Dutch, not in English, but most of my thinking is in English because I speak English all the time. Every day to my wife, to my clients. Most of my clients are English-speaking clients. And in my day-to-day environment here living in Northern Ireland, it's English all the time. So the switch to thinking mainly in English happened fairly early on after I moved to Northern Ireland. I moved here in 2009. Except when I am under, in a pressure situation, somehow my brain reverts back to the native Dutch language. And my accent's a bit funny as well. I don't have a typical Dutch accent anymore. It's still an obvious accent, but people sometimes can't really place where I'm from until they hear me talk long enough and then they pick up, yeah, there's certain elements in that, that, that make it obvious that I'm a Dutchman. But if you hear me speak English versus a Dutchman who's still living in the Netherlands and, and has never left the country, Then it's very clear that there's a difference in accent there. And I find that quite interesting that I pick up some Northern Irish bits in my accent as well, which I think is natural. You know, you live here for a very long time, you pick those things up and you adopt local dialect and local things.

Yeah. Yes. I know it by myself because I, moreover, I learned Spanish substantially living in Spain. And so I took all the you know, idiosyncrasies of real spoken Spanish. And another question, I mean, I know you well and you know you are a wonderful person, but sometimes you are, let's say, passionate person. So what is the thing, I mean, I know that you are able to be really passionate or able to Just don't give a beep to many things, but what is the thing that really make you turn in rage mode?

Oh, I probably have too many buttons that people can push, Gianluca. I, I'm very easily enraged, but it tends to pass fairly quickly as well. I think I'm actually mellowing in my old age a little bit. I think I used to be a lot angrier, but the older I get, the more I realize that a lot of it is wasted energy. I think what still pisses me off is actually a, a worrying trend in wider society that people don't seem to care about what's true anymore. And I pride myself on being a rationalist and a realist. I do believe there is something called an objective reality that we're perceiving with our senses and trying to make sense of. And when people don't seem to care about the truth of objective reality and just make up their own reality bubbles, I find that deeply and intensely frustrating and something that is probably the root cause of a lot of anger that I have, that people just, you know, don't accept things that I believe are true and factual. Or, you know, if they come up with an alternative interpretation of what I believe is true, that they don't back it up with facts and falsifiable evidence. And maybe I'm expecting too much from people and, you know, I maybe need to give people a bit more grace and a bit more leeway there. But I care deeply about what's true and what's not true and find that in this era, and mainly thanks to social media, that, you know, the lowering value of truth is a dangerous trend. And I'm not sure that we as a society should be particularly happy about that. I think we should care about truth, care about what is real and what is not real, and try to build a society that embraces reality and doesn't try to live in alternative realities that don't make any sense or built on fables or false assumptions.

Oh, maybe this is, maybe it's a silly correlation, but maybe this is also because you like to do SEO for news because—

Yeah. And news journalism cares about truth. I mean, it should, doesn't always happen, but journalism should be about finding out the truth and reporting it.

And last question. What is the book or a movie or a TV series or theater or something, if you attended it, that you would really like to suggest or recommend to our listeners and watchers?

Oh, where do I even begin? There's lots of—

No, one of the— in the last period, where do you—

There is one science fiction book I always recommend to people, which is called Blindsight by Peter Watts. It was published in, I think, the late 2000s, and it's a science fiction novel, basically a first contact scenario, but a very interesting alternative view of first contact where I'm not gonna spoil the, the underlying premises of it too much, but it, it blew my mind. But it's also a science fiction book that demands a lot from its reader. It demands that you pay attention and it probably helps to have an iPad open with Wikipedia next to it because sometimes you might have to find stuff out that the writer just puts out there without any explanation or very limited explanation. But I found that was one of the very few books that challenged my view of the world, my view of humanity, my view of intelligence, and my view of what might be out there in, in the, the wider universe. So that is probably one of the most significant pieces of fiction that I've, I've ever read in my life.

Sounds like more a revelation, more than It's just entertainment. Okay, Barry, it was really, really nice to talk with you. I'm really grateful you spent this time with me and with all of us. And let's say, maybe let's give us, make us a promise to meet up again in the future for a new episode. And let's see what's happening in the meme wallet.

Yeah, absolutely. I really enjoyed this, Gianluca. Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you, Barry, and thank you to all of you. And please remember, this is my classic creator YouTuber moment, but click on subscribe, ring on the bell, and give it a like if you liked this video. Bye.