Eric Siu discusses how AI is reshaping search traffic for publishers. Condé Nast's CEO advised treating SEO as dead and planning for single-digit search traffic. Publishers face steeper challenges than e-commerce sites because they need massive volume to monetize, making the shift away from search more painful.
Conde Nast CEO said, you want to act as if SEO is dead. Assume there's no search. You have to have your business plan as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero. We expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic. My take on this is that I think it's a smart thing to act as if it was zero, but that doesn't mean you treat it as nothing. Okay? So you still treat it as part of your strategy, right? Because the understanding is AI overviews or LLMs, they're still grounding on these search results.
Condé Nast is a publisher. Their monetization model is very different than most businesses, right? Most businesses that I know are not publishers. I agree it's really hard for publishers. If you're in e-commerce, you're selling a service or a product or whatever it may be that's non-publishing, I think SEO traffic is still really valuable, but you don't need the views that a publisher does.
