Why SEO is No Longer Enough:The Rise of AI Overviews

Good morning, Tyler. How are you?

Good, good, good morning.

Excellent, excellent. Yeah. Nice snowy day in New Hampshire. I'm Tyler from Newsletter Glue, and we are going to talk about AI, what it's doing to publishers, what Google says it's doing to publishers. And we're going to actually look at an example that I dug into earlier of one of our publishers and how AI is affecting their search results and what they're doing about it. This is pretty cool stuff. If you. Hang on, you're going to get the breakdown for that.

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All right, so are you ready to jump in?

Let's do it.

This is, this is crazy days with AI. We've, we, we did this podcast before, but this is a. This is an update with a lot of new information. So let me just share my screen. And we're going to talk about the fishermen in a minute. They are a niche publisher. They cover basically fishing along the coast in the Northeast. They've been doing this a long time. They have three print editions and they're leaning into digital, and they're. They're kicking butt. Now, let's get to some bad news, shall we?

Hmm.

Okay, so what Google is telling us and what publishers are telling us are very different. Google had a record quarter. They announced that they had their, their search revenue across 400 billion for the first time ever. And that quote, they, they quoted this, that it's an expansionary moment for them because of search and AI overviews and all that. And, and, and really what it is, is it's an expansionary moment for them, but it's a contractionary. That's a word. Moment for publishers.

Yeah.

So just. And there's a lot of data out here. I just want to hit a couple of high points. When I was doing the research, I almost got overwhelmed by, like, how much bad news there is in terms of how AI overviews are content away from publishers websites, and folks are getting stuck in AI overviews and never even landing on the website, which is the big problem. So, you know, this is from chartbeat originally, and it's essentially that Google traffic has dropped about 30%, maybe 38% in the US to publishers websites. They look specifically at publishers. This is probably the only number we need to talk about. There's a lot of stuff, I mean, if you're not nervous enough yet, AI mode queries, people are hanging out three times longer in AI mode versus just hitting search and then doing the research. Follow up questions are common. Click through rates have dropped 61% on queries. That's a ridiculous number. Absolutely ridiculous number. And now we're getting into the world of what they call zero click searches. You're doing a search for something in Google. Their AI overviews gives you the data and you just read it and we're like, oh, that was nice, thank you very much. And you go away, you never click anywhere. Right. So for a publisher that's, I mean that's just sounds like a hellscape, right? Oh my God. All right, so there's a lot more stuff here I'm going to jump into and there are a few things you can do. I guess I'll get right into it. Like licensing. I know that some of the AI companies are offered offering licensing deals for the, for content, Right. I don't know if you've run into that with any of your publishers.

We've had questions about it.

You get questions about it? Yep. And you know, the idea is they'll give you a fraction of a penny for, for content consumed. But you know, then you're, you're essentially not getting the advantage of a subscription revenue, a bigger email list for your newsletter, ad revenue or sponsorship revenue because your audience, you're not controlling your audience and your audience is technically turning into one big AI company. You know, your events suffer and whatever other products you have, like, it's just a cascading effect of disaster and not getting paid a lot for it. I mean, I ran into this article, you know, this is a Nieman Lab article. Publishers will see no meaningful AI licensing revenue, period. Right. So I mean, the numbers just don't add up. All right, this is something that's driving me crazy with. This is, this is like classic Internet. There's a new KPI stack they're calling it, right. It's. The industry is talking about pushing share of answer or citation visibility or brand recall, which is like Google saying, hey, you want to be part, you want to be a share of our Google AI overviews answer. Right? So when you look for something, you get a bunch of stuff. It's like, yeah, you want to like be in there a little bit, right? That's what you should be targeting. Oh my God, my head's going to blow up. Like this is like a distraction, right? Like, don't go after. Share of answer. Don't spend your energy there. I mean, it's good that you show up there, but don't go after it. Right. So that was driving me nuts. Robots, text, we've talked about. It's like, it's supposed to block bots, but it really doesn't. Don't even. I mean, yeah, that's tough.

Yeah, you can, you can block. They have various AI systems, but again, it's not bulletproof. Right. AI has to listen to those rules, so. And sometimes it doesn't. So.

Right.

There's no bulletproof way to prevent AI from scraping content on your site, outside of maybe one thing that we talk about all the time, and that's adding a free registration prompt across the entire site, which would then only allow AI to scrape maybe a sentence or two.

Of your content, locking it down. Yeah, let's talk about that in a bit. That is absolutely something that you can do. That you can do. One of the things I've been hearing too recently is, oh, niche media fares better now, to be fair. Yeah, it does for the most part. But. But, you know, for now, like, like niche media, you know, AI is coming for everything. It's not, it's not just going to focus on general news. I'm going to show you in a second what I mean. And you know, we did our last podcast or two couple podcasts ago, we talked to Mexico and News Daily, and they're a niche media news provider. They actually haven't seen any search traffic drop, organic traffic drop, which is amazing yet. Right. So they're, they're a little bit insulated at this point, but, but it's coming. And so even if you're in a deep niche, you still need to pay attention to what's happening to AI. And I'd say the one thing is like, look at your organic search and just track it over time. Like, what happened in the last year? Did it go up? Did it go down? Did it stay the same? Like, these are things you like, you should really pay attention to. Okay, so now let's jump into the fishermen here. So what's going on with them? So earlier I went and I decided, I'll do a search. Let's pretend I'm a someone who's looking to go fishing. And I typed in, if you're listening, I typed in, where is the best fishing today? Off of Long Island. Right. So I know for a fact that Long island is one of the regions that they cover exclusively. They actually have a print edition focused On Long island. And they have their website focused on Long island and you get the AI overview, right? And then it talks about, you know, for the best fishing off Long island today, target Montauk Point, you know, Chinook Inlet, Captree State Park, Jones Beach. It's throwing all sorts of links. I can hit the show more link now. I got a whole bunch of stuff. They do show up in one of these links. I can't remember which one it is, but the fisherman is listed in this. So they have a share of attention in here. But look at this, right? I mean, how do you get found in this? How do you survive this AI overview? Right.

You might as well be on the page of Google if you're that far into this summary. Because as you said, people are searching and then they're not clicking, they're just kind of getting the answer and okay, great, I'm done.

Yeah, exactly.

People are. The AI is benefiting from all the content that the publishers created and just coughing it up in a, in a natural language, you know, way. And that's it, right?

Yeah. And you can hit the dive deeper in AI mode and just go absolutely bananas. So the reason this really hit me hard is because if you think about this, the fishermen, it's ocean, generally, ocean fishing news from the Northeast. We're talking Maine to Connecticut, Long island, and then New Jersey to Delaware. That's their regional focus. And they have three print editions still that are focused on that, that are doing fine. And then they have set up their digital presence to really target that information with live fishing reports. Right? Like they have real time data. They have, they have people out, captains out on the water that every day text in to a number saying, hey, caught some fish today, or hey, no fish over here. And so they're like accumulating this live reporting, which is amazing, right? Absolutely amazing. This is better than anything because you're talking about boats that are in the water that are reporting in the moment. Right. But yet how do you bring that data, like to your reader? Not to AI overviews, but to your reader, right? So it's like, it's just nuts. So, yeah, niche, you know, you're a niche publisher. Great. You probably have a buffer for a while. You're a local news publisher. That's really a niche, right? You'll probably have a buffer for a while, but at some point, you know, AI is just getting so powerful so quickly, it's gonna start sniffing into your content and start delivering this niche data to everybody and it's just sucking your content away. Okay, so now we've painted this grim picture, but what's the bright spot here? Okay, how do you take control of this and deal with this? I know you know the answer to this, Tyler. It's forget about this. Focus on your audience. The only thing's gonna save you from AI is your audience. Right? It's the only thing, your audience. You have to connect to your audience. All right, so let me show you how fisherman does it. Okay, so I'm on their homepage. I've clicked around a little bit, but I'm just gonna go to this main article here. 26 Marine electronics buyer's Guide. Okay, great. So I'm going to scroll down. Oh, what do I get here? A free registration prompt. I don't get any content. I get a. This story is free for you. I put in my email address. They even have their three fishing regions available. So I can check off New England or Long island or New Jersey and Delaware and get the newsletters that I want and then register for free. So tell me what this does, Tyler. Give me the breakdown here on the.

Yeah, so let me just put this in context of you remember when publishers used to panic about like losing traffic to social. Right? So AI, in my opinion is sort of an iteration that's obviously a more powerful iteration of that, right? It's like you're losing control of distribution, right? Where you can't really. You can only do your best to get traffic from Google. Right? But it's not something that you can count on as a sustainable thing that happens over time. And so this free registration can help you control that distribution. So if you can get them on your website, that's a massive success that you've been able to do that. And if you can get them to sign up here and in this case signing up for particular newsletters that you offer and get their email address, then you can control distribution back to your website whenever you decide you want to do that. So you've got a newsletter for the week, for the, for the day. You now have an audience that's inside of your email service provider.

That's right. Control and your audience. Those are two really important points. So your, your superpower is content and audience. At this point in time, you produce great content. Your audience is willing to pay for it. They're certainly willing to register for free to get more content. And so when you do like a newsletter pop up, like, hey, please join our newsletter. I think the opt in rate is like 3 or 5% or something like that. I can't Remember what it is. Yeah, please.

Please is not enough.

Yeah, you're saying please, please, but that doesn't really work as well as saying you have to drop off an email address in order to get access to this story. And of course you get our newsletter as well. That conversion rate's around 20%. It's a massive conversion rate bump. And I'm going to show you a chart in a second, which is pretty cool. So email and password is a good place to start. You put in your email address, put in your password, that reader then gets registered in the system and now that email gets sent to your to mailchimp or Flowletter or newsletter glue or whatever, you know, wherever it goes. I know it doesn't technically go to newsletter glue, but. And you have the email and now you have your list. Your email list is your like mountain of gold. It's your foundation of really everything. It's your audience. And your newsletter is now sending people back. You publish your content, sends readers back to your website. They don't get lost on Google and AIO reviews. They are, you now are taking, you're nurturing them, you're sending them back and you're giving them upgrade messaging over time to get full access to all your great content. It's as simple as that. Powerful, but simple. So that registration wall, it's called, or we call it a free registration. It's something. If you're not doing it now, that's probably the first thing you should be setting up. Yeah, it grows your list. You get control of your list, grows your traffic. I mean one of the other things we see is that a bigger list and an active newsletter, it's hard to pick numbers. But I can't tell you how many publishers I've talked to that have literally doubled their traffic in a year. Yeah. Just because they're growing their list so fast with a registration.

And again, this will prevent AI from scraping up the entire article here. So having a free registration box that gates the content, especially if you're gating all content, especially this high value stuff like this, this buyer's guide, this prevents AI from sucking that up. And you know, you not really benefiting at all from all the work you did, so.

Right.

Yeah. Set this up.

Yeah. So let's, let's talk a little bit about how to set this up. Because there's really two ways and one is where you have you meter the content. Right. In this case, this is a hard lock on this buyer's guide. AI does not get to it. Great. However, if you're metering your content. Let's say you let one free article through per month or whatever, and then you have to register and then you get maybe another one or two or something like that. With that soft paywall or leaky paywall setup, you let Google index your content, you let AI in at all your content. And so you, you have to. Which is kind of how most publishers are set up today. I'd say the minority of publishers are really have a hard wall locked on their entire site. Some do, but I'd say 80%, 90% do not. And you're still gaining the benefit of Google SEO showing up in search. Yes, of course, you show up in AI searches, but not as much by a long shot. And you get social media sharing because if you leak one article, then anybody can grab that, throw it in Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever it is and share that. So those are the benefits of having sort of the soft paywall set up. But you need to look at your own organic traffic. You need to look at your. How big is your, is your newsletter? Do you have 20% of your market on your email list? Like, that's the question I would ask. And if we look at, we've looked at the data, right? So if local news is easier to track than niche publishers, but if you look at a local news market, say 100,000 people, you should be able to get at least 5% of those people to pay for a subscription, right? We've looked at lots of metro markets and the leaders in those market, and they're getting 5 to 10% right now. Today, of the population paying for subscriptions, how many folks should be on your newsletter? Well, in a hundred thousand population target market, you should, you should target 20% of those readers being on your newsletter. I mean, I track, I have friends who run newsletters. You know, they, they live locally. This is, these are the numbers that they're reaching. So if you're for the fishermen, you have to look at the coast and how many, how many people are enthusiasts, you know, phishing persons. And then that's your target market. You have to, sometimes you have to take a guesstimate and figure out what is 5% paid and 20% should be on your email list. So back to the original thought of, you know, do you, if you, if you listen to Tyler and you say, okay, I'm ready to lock down my entire site to block AI, you're also blocking search, you're blocking social sharing. Cold social sharing, I would say. And you should, you should have, you should feel confident you're going to do that. If you feel confident, if you're, if you have an email list that you know is pushing at least 10%, 20% paid subscriptions are cooking along. That's great. If you're, if you're not there, you're probably looking for that social sharing. You're looking for SEO. You're probably going to want to leak an article or two at the most, but actually one at the most. And then you'll get the advantage of everything for this window of time, I would say. And then as, as AI starts to suck and suck more of your content up and you. But your list is building through the registration wall and your subscriptions are building, you'll gain the confidence to eventually say, you know what that said, get, get AI out. I'm going to focus on my list. One thing to keep in mind is Google SEO and Google AI overviews are the same bot, right? They're the same thing. So as soon as you lock down and hardwall your site, you lose SEO, you lose the bot, you lose everything. You can't target the bot and say, google, please don't send your AI bot, just send your SEO bot. No, they did that on purpose. They want to, they want, they know that publishers want SEO that, to leave it, leave it out there for their. For sure. They get some SEO benefits still, of course, and, but the bots come in and pull the content. Okay, so just for fun, let's look at this chart that I promised.

So.

I'm not going to reveal any numbers, but you can see kind of the chart here. So not that long ago, the fisherman put up a registration wall. Can you tell when it happened?

Yeah, if you're looking at this on YouTube January 25th, something happened.

Yeah. So the registration wall went up and things were going along pretty, pretty decently over the last year or so. But as soon as the registration wall went up, looks like their free registrations tripled. I think they, you know what they did is they tightened their wall. Sorry, I was incorrect. They're tight in their wall. Just like that article we looked at 00 views. And what's funny is that when you tighten your walls, not only does your pink line free registrations go up, but your paid subscriptions also tend to go up because you're forcing people to make a decision. It's an amazing thing. Somebody talked to a publisher a little while back who put up a registration wall. They started getting like hundreds of registrations started coming through and then they took it down and somebody up the chain who wasn't involved in the process looked at Google Analytics and said, hey, I see a lot of bounces off our site. You know, like our bounce rate had really, really escalated so we can't have this registration wall up. So they took it down and now they have nothing. They just have AI sucking all their content and they may come back and do it, but it's. Do you want highly, do you want highly engaged readers that your registration wall grabs? Right. Or do you just want random traffic?

Right, right.

And if you, if you don't put up the registration wall, you miss the opportunity. You lose the ability to, to capture highly engaged readers. You just, you, you, yeah, you get the newsletter pop up and that'll get 3 to 5% or whatever, but you're losing like over 15% of list building ability, if that makes sense.

Well, it goes back to the whole reason for having a subscription model and that is traffic on its face is not really that valuable. Right. It's, I mean it's great and especially if you've got some local advertising and if you're able to cultivate that. But traffic for the sake of traffic and bounce rates, for the sake of, you know, bounce rates don't really mean much to you as the publisher as far as income. Right. So you, you want to, you want to convert people into this free registration. You want highly engaged people as, as you just pointed out. And then you want them to convert to paid because you know that $9 or $19 per month subscription is worth way more than the point00001 that you're going to get per. Actually, it's probably less than that. Probably like you know, 15 zeros.

Right.

For, for, for ad impressions or even for Google AI or any other AI licensing of content that, you know, it's just way more valuable.

So you get the, you get the subscription revenue. You have a bigger email list by a long shot. Have, you know, sponsors want big email lists. They absolutely do. You have the opportunity to upsell a bigger subscription base and a bigger email list like gift subscriptions or corporate subscriptions or whatever products you come up with. You may have events, you know, that get fueled by your big, bigger audience, your own list. I mean, there's so many. It's like a domino effect. Once you really start cranking up your audience numbers, everything goes up, traffic included.

Yeah. And I think one of the things that's sort of underrated is that there's a lot of predictability. Right. So you've got subscriber pay monthly, who pay yearly. And you can count on that, right? More so than you can count on like what Google or any other platform decides to do with their AI models. You know, who knows what's going to happen in tomorrow or, you know, in two years, how that, how those things are going to change. So, yeah, if you can start building your, your own sort of fortress of emails and paid subscribers, you're going to be less, you know, worried by all of the noise that's out there with.

Yep. And I'll say it again. You have, you know, as a publisher, you have two superpowers. You have your content and you have your audience. So you need to really leverage both, right? And so your content, you restrict it. That's how you leverage your content. People want your content. That's why you're in business. So you have to, you have to put in an aggressive restriction. But it's a fair trade, right? And you can, you can decide, oh, if you give me your email address, I'll give you, I'll give you 10 articles a month. I wouldn't do that. But you could do that. You could start there and then tighten things up. And I'd say, generally speaking, if you have a registration and things are going really well, consider, keep an eye on your organic traffic and considering at some point locking down your entire site, but still run the free registration so you can still build your list as people hit it and want to unlock articles. If you don't have one, I would start with the free registration leak one article per month so that on the second article the registration wall hits and you start building up your email list. And you'll see once you, once you do that successfully, you'll see your needle will move a lot traffic, right? Subscriptions, everything goes up, sponsors, ads, whatever, everything, everything moves up. And so the other thing too is like we have, we have a new extension that we were using now on some sites. We haven't released it yet, but soon, I believe. And it's like article sharing for subscribers, right? So another benefit. So if you're a paid subscriber, you can, you can share articles, New York Times does it and some other bigger publications. And we've looked at it for a while and it makes sense, right? You know, especially if you're going to lock content down, you can still get your super fans to share as a benefit your content to, you know, friends and other people that are really important to you that you may want to get on your email list at the very least and maybe convert to a paid subscriber. So. So that's. That's the. So do what the fisherman's doing. Meter your content, set up a registration wall, start locking things down, requiring email addresses there. I'm sure that at some point down the road, a fisherman's gonna hard lock the whole site because their list has grown so nicely and their revenues are growing along with that list. And then just to. Just to keep AI out. And that's the message of the day. Did we nail it?

I hope so.

Yeah. It's. Well, it's something to pay attention to. You might not be in an emergency situation yet, but you know AI is coming for your content, and so you definitely need to think about how to deal with it.

So.

Tyler, that was good. Thanks for that.

Thank you. Thank you.

Catch you next time.

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