Lifestyle publishers are confronted with distinct challenges of the generating functionality of the Google AI AI adds to its search engine, such as IA and IA mode.
Content with persistent and lifestyle – like science, health and society – has traditionally led to traffic to publishers by answering the types of questions that people hit in Google. But now these basic requests are answered by summaries generated Overview of the AI or in AI mode, and Clicks from Google search are downEven if the impressions remain stable.
As such, lifestyle publishers are particularly at risk of losing large expanses of their audience, given their high dependence on the content of persistent leaf service which has traditionally performed well in research.
Reference chiefs and content strategy in four major digital lifestyle publishers told Digiday that they had seen Google Search’s reference traffic drops between 30% and 50% since the deployment of IA previews in May 2024.
But rather than panic, they double the content that always works in research – and abandoning what is not. “We are trying to control the parts we can,” said a SEO director of a lifestyle publisher who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “There are no more silver balls that will bring you the research traffic.”
Naturally, it will not be so easy to relax decades of editorial strategies shaped around writing for search engines – habits built for SEO do not disappear overnight. “The extent of what Google can refer is still great. We must always pay attention to optimizing performance content,” said an entertainment editor, who asked to speak anonymously.
However, SEO and editorial strategies are evolving to prioritize the categories, styles and content formats that lead clicks to AI and research engines.
Here’s how lifestyle and entertainment publishers treat the drop in research reference traffic:
Abandon the content that answers basic questions
Lifestyle and entertainment publishers used to lead traffic to their sites by writing items suitable for simple research requests, such as “what is a three -seater sofa?”
But now, the answers to these types of requests are summarized directly on the page of research results by generating functionalities of the AI (such as the previews of Google AI) and chatbots (like Chatgpt). Publishers now prioritize the content of writing that responds to requests that go further, with more personalized and unique perspectives, such as “what are the best sofas of the X brand?” Or “How do you get REPHOLSTER X SOFA?” And “How do you know if the oven chicken is cooked?”
These publishers do not try to take up what is engulfed by the previews of the AI. They have to go further.
“Do not run after these things which are a lost cause,” said a second SEO director, who asked for anonymity. Their publication also reduced the areas of cover that were not at the heart of its recipe brand, such as cooking conceptions. The SEO Director said that communication with “consistency and authority” at Google algorithm helped the reference traffic of their publication.
The publisher’s recipe site reports more than 100% google Search traffic than a year ago, according to the second director of SEO.
“Nothing is a miracle solution, but you start Daisy to erase all the best practices,” they said. “The golden rule in reference referring to the main updates of Google.
Go further and more personal
The abandonment of the production of content around these requests releases editorial teams to deepen what works, so that they can then redefine more personal and original content. It is a strategy that lifestyle publishers were already starting to go around two years When the Openai chatgpt was launched.
Buzzfeed, for example, diversifies its strategy of targeting keywords by focusing on the requests that leaders believe cannot be quickly answered in an AI overview. Content production revolves around “inspiration, comparison, decision -making or entertainment,” said Grace Keller, the main strategist for the referencing of Buzzfeed. “These types of requests still benefit from a deeper context, personality and perspective, where our editorial voice shines.”
Keller also said that Buzzfeed produces more content formats than AI cannot reproduce, such as “organized lists, POV explanators, quiz and persistent leaf guides with personality”. Traffic from research represents only 9% of American web traffic and buzzfeed applications, a company spokesman said.
High volume content production strategies are dead
The old method of publication of a ton of articles and to see what stimulates the most traffic is dead, according to the people interviewed for this story. Instead, content production plans must be supported by data and rooted in originality, they said.
For an editor, it looks like the analysis of all the published content of the previous month and the search for which articles lead the scale and the return readership, and what has generated the most time on site or more pages viewed by visit, according to the executive entertainment of the publishing.
“When traffic was at its peak, media societies could publish a huge volume of content, and each of these stories would do well enough … Now we are in an environment where audience levels decrease, and that makes us want to spend much more time to do analyzes around what the content works very well and what the content does not do … to make decisions about what to publish.”
The publisher also focuses on new, original and investigation reports. The summaries of the AI in research can do a very good job to give older information to users, so the key is to break or be early on the coverage of the news, according to the executive entertainment of the publishing.
“We put more and more resources around investigation reports, people who can get information about the announcements,” they said. “We just notice a rapid drop in areas where this is news that has been on the market for (a few) days. There is really not much commitment.”
More cross -collaboration
Of course, publishers can turn to other channels to drive the public on their sites. But none of these channels can be compared to the Google scale – at least for the moment. Lifestyle editors cannot afford to completely abandon the search engine.
“You can build your direct traffic, you can build your email, but you are not even in the area of the traffic number (Google Difés),” said the second director of SEO. Improving their dependence on Google would mean having even less traffic, they said.
The first Director of SEO said that Google Research Traffic down has led to greater collaboration between teams in their business, with SEO, social and data teams working together to analyze production and content performance.
The executive of the entertainment edition leads the SEO team to diversify the distribution of content beyond Google, and follow-up on YouTube, Facebook, Tiktok, as well as their own newsletters, they said. The objective is to monetize the public they have on these platforms, even if the reference traffic decreases, they said.