Publishers churning out commodity content and living off Google clicks are, in Barry Adams’s phrase, in serious trouble. He was one of three search specialists at WAN-IFRA, and the least diplomatic. Adams, an independent SEO consultant whose clients include the New York Times, came with a blunt read on AI overviews and where the traffic is heading. Clara Soteras Acosta, an SEO and digital strategy consultant and author of the SEO Playbook for Publishers, brought fresh data from Google I/O and a framework for acting on it. David Buttle, founder of DJB Strategies and a former director of platform strategy at the Financial Times, brought supply-side research spanning ten-billion-page referrals from eight major UK publishers. They disagreed on plenty. On one thing they didn’t: publishers treating this as a new crisis haven’t been paying attention to the old one.
Plan for zero
What would you do differently if you knew the Google traffic was going to zero? Soteras Acosta opened by asking publ…
