Two large US publishing groups held their earnings calls at the start of this month, and both said the same thing: Google search is sending them fewer visitors, and the decline is speeding up. Yet Google itself says that the number of searches on Google is still going up. Our reading is that people are still searching, but more and more often they finish reading the answer on the results page and don’t need to click through. One of the two, Ziff Davis, even sells SEO tools itself, and revenue from that business fell this quarter too. So in our view, how that answer describes you will decide the sale before your ranking does.

What happened

People Inc. is a large US publishing group that owns People magazine and a good number of food and home brands. According to the transcript published by the financial site The Motley Fool, CFO Tim Quinn said on the 3 November call that visits to the group’s main websites were down 26% on the same quarter last year, the steepest decline that they’ve seen yet; CEO Neil Vogel said that this was mainly because Google was sending them fewer people. Tim Quinn also said that more than 90% of the Google searches that the company tracks now show an AI Overview, the AI-written answer that sits at the top of the results page.

Ziff Davis owns the tech site CNET and the gaming site IGN, and it also has a business that sells SEO tools. In the transcript of its 6 November call, CEO Vivek Shah said that the number of people reaching its sites from Google search in the third quarter was down about 37% on a year earlier, and that the decline was faster than last year’s.

Google itself hasn’t gone quiet, though. In its third-quarter results on 28 October, parent company Alphabet said that searches on Google grew faster year over year than they had at any point in the past five years. People are asking more, but clicking through to these two publishers less, and as we understand it, most of the missing clicks belong to people who read the answer on the results page and leave.

Why it matters to you

To be clear from the start, publishers aren’t shops. What these two sell is content such as recipes, tech news and game guides. What follows is our inference: people who go to Google for these things mostly just want to look something up, which AI can answer in a paragraph, so publishers will feel the impact sooner, and harder, than most local businesses. The 90% figure from People Inc. mentioned above only covers the searches that the company tracks itself and can’t be applied to searches for a local business, and we couldn’t find comparable public figures for Taiwan either.

Still, customers looking for a business use the same results page, and when an AI Overview appears, it sits above the ordinary website links. Ziff Davis’s CEO also said that, according to statistics that Google has started to provide, links to the company’s sites appeared in Google’s AI answers this quarter nearly ten times as often as people clicked through to them from search.

Say you run a pest control company in Fengshan, Kaohsiung, and over the past few years you’ve written quite a few articles on how to tell whether you’ve got termites. Several of them rank well on Google, and now and then someone reads one and calls you. Those articles are the part of your website that’s most like a publisher’s. Now imagine a customer searches “My wooden floor keeps shedding powder. Is it termites? Who can deal with it in Fengshan?” An AI-written answer appears at the top of the results page, explaining how to tell, possibly using what your article says, and possibly ending with a few companies that can handle it. The customer finishes reading and calls the names on that list; you aren’t on it, so even if your article ranks first, that call won’t come to you.

What to do about it

It’s worth acting now. Ziff Davis’s CEO said on the call that the company isn’t planning on search traffic coming back and is running the business on the assumption that referrals will keep falling. As we see it, a small business can afford to wait even less than a big company can, and what it needs is for that answer to include it, and to get it right.

Even if you do have SEO work done, your reports mostly won’t show you what the AI wrote. SEO reports mostly list where you rank and how many people click through to your site; even where Google has started to provide a count of appearances, it’s only a count, and what the AI says about you and which businesses it lists aren’t in any report. Finding out how it actually describes you means searching each way that customers might phrase the question and reading the answers one by one, and that’s a different job from ranking.

If you want to know which answer your customers are reading now, you can read that answer with one of our consultants. Arrange a demo with a consultant, and they’ll take a line that your customers would type, search it on Google there and then, and look at whether an AI Overview comes up at the top, which businesses it lists and what it says about you, then put the same line to ChatGPT to compare. The same session also covers your website’s GEO audit score: that’s geoweb.tw’s free website audit, which checks across 12 areas how well AI can understand your site.

AI writes its answers from the information that it can read on the web, so that information needs looking after continually: we fill in and correct your website, we go through the other websites and maps that mention you one by one and bring them into line with your site, and we regularly put the questions that customers ask to ChatGPT, Gemini and other leading AI engines to see whether the answers have changed. We do all of this for you over the long term, and here we call it managed GEO.

Further reading