Earlier this year, media executives got together at the Digiday Publishing Summit (DPS) in March to voice their frustration with declining referral traffic. It seems not much has changed since then.

This week, execs aired their grievances around Google search, especially with the expansion of AI-generated summaries AI Overviews on the search results page. Google felt like the bully in the room. Publishing execs spoke in a closed-door town hall session during DPS in Miami, Florida under Chatham House rules so Digiday could share what was said while maintaining the executives’ anonymity. 

Despite a lot of doom and gloom, some publishers were optimistic about the strategies they were implementing to offset Google search traffic declines.

As one publishing exec put it: “Newsletters [are] a help. I think praying to God helps.”

Here’s what publishing execs had to say at the Digiday Publishing Summit about the mysterious beast that is Google search:

Referral traffic is still on the decline

“What we observed is that the decline from Google is not complemented by OpenAI or Perplexity kind of traffic. So overall, definitely, we’re seeing a drop in search traffic… A noticeable drop.”

“We are not seeing our traffic stabilize and we are way down year over year… It’s a cliff, and it’s definitely not stabilizing, at least from our perspective… It has forced us to think about everything else. What are the other traffic sources? What’s the most exposed, what’s less exposed? Which is a healthy exercise, like it’s the right thing to do.”

“It was not gradual. We saw a moment in time in late March, April — and then it was really precipitous. We had literally a day when Discover and Google News [traffic] went away, just away… Everyone has these surreal conversations with their Google News rep, and they’re like, ‘Oh no, I can’t talk to what’s going on.’ … Something was corrected [a little bit], but it never came back.”

More cracks in Google’s relationship with publishers 

“I think they saw themselves falling behind, and they were like ‘Crap.’ … They’re not focused on spam or [algorithm] updates so much. I’m not that stressed about algo updates anymore, and not for a good reason. [Google is] really focused on figuring out how they stay relevant, how they keep their market share, and so they’re throwing a lot of stuff at the wall in search, and they’re kind of not caring too much about publishers. We keep asking the question… Have you guys thought about your relationship with publishers? Because the value exchange is really shifting really radically, and they don’t really have any answers at this point… or answers they don’t want to share with us at this time.”

“I think Google has always wanted to have OK relationships with publishers to the extent that they cared about it. But right now, they fear that OpenAI, Perplexity is an existential threat to them. So right now, they don’t really care as much. They want to become OpenAI before OpenAI becomes Google.”

“They’re taking away your search, they’re giving back Google Discover in some cases, opening it up on desktop. We’ve seen a big increase in Discover. But the Discover traffic is not nearly as important as the search. The long term keywords… they seem to be disintermediating, taking for themselves.”

“Google worried about losing market share. ChatGPT, Perpleixty are taking market share from Google… [but] the way that they are experimenting in traditional search is really where I think all of us are feeling it. It’s not like everybody’s rushing over to Gemini or AI Mode. They’re not. It’s the [AI] Overviews, and then it’s everything else that they do in that first page of search. They’re focusing on a lot of the same [very high-performing] search terms that we were focusing on. So you look at the results for searches like that, and there’s three spots for organic content, and then it’ll be [AI] Overviews, and then the audio thing, and some FAQs and another thing and another thing. And it’s 90% Google, and 10% everybody else.”

Some publishers saw more promising signs

“The latest Google algorithm has reduced my worries because we actually saw traffic to come back up in certain high ticket items, which gives me motivation that for lower funnel, when people are trying to make their buying decisions, they are still relying on publishers which are providing authoritative content.”

“It was very motivating to see traffic come back up a little bit. And I don’t think we are in a fear that all the search queries for buying big ticket items will go on AI Mode, because they are still going to have to rely on our expertise versus a random person on Reddit… if you are in a niche creating good content, I think you’ll be fine.”

What we’ve heard

“The choice we made at the time and to date is still not to license for training. Certainly we’re still in conversation with all of the companies, and as commercial models are evolving, we are having new types of conversations.”

– Bloomberg Media CEO Karen Saltser onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami, Florida, on Monday.

Numbers to know

$15 billion: The amount President Donald Trump is seeking from The New York Times in a defamation lawsuit, claiming articles and a book damaged his reputation.

192,000 sq. ft.: The size of the space Condé Nast is subleasing to Bank of New York in its 1 World Trade Center offices.

49%: The year-over-year traffic increase to Substack in August, the only site of the 50 biggest English-language news websites in the world to grow in that time.

$16.50 per share: The amount Hearst has offered to buy Dallas Morning News, raising its offer once again to ward off a competing bid by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. 

What we’ve covered

How People Inc. is prioritizing traffic and revenue diversification to prepare for AI era

• People Inc. is preparing for all the changes that come with AI’s impact on search and content discovery by focusing on traffic and revenue diversification, and direct to consumer relationships.
• Alysia Borsa, People Inc.’s chief business officer and president of lifestyle, health and finance, outlined the different platforms and businesses – such as newsletters, events and new onsite products – that are key to this strategy, onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami, Fla., on Monday.

Read the DPS session recap here.

One year in, Business Insider’s AI onsite search is boosting engagement

• Business Insider’s AI search tool is currently only used by roughly 1% of its readership, but click-through to articles has increased by 50% since October, according to BI CTO Harry Hope during a talk at this week’s Digiday Publishing Summit.
• Consumption of BI’s AI audio briefings has also grown by 20% month-over-month. Hope estimated that between 80-90% of staff were using AI tools.

Read the DPS session recap here.

WTF is headless browsing, and how are AI agents fueling it?

• New AI-powered browsers launched this last year — like Perplexity’s Comet and Browser Company of New York’s Dia — are bringing new meaning to the term “headless browsing.”
• For media companies, that raises questions: How much traffic is real vs. automated? How should analytics platforms account for agent-driven browsing? And for advertisers, it raises concerns about whether AI-driven sessions will distort measurement or expose new vulnerabilities to fraud.

Find out more about AI headless browsing here.

Bleacher Report puts a fan-first spin on NFL coverage

• Bleacher Report is kicking off its first official season with the NFL, a partnership the publisher says will help drive a 50% sponsorship revenue boost this year.
• For Bleacher Report, it’s a chance to test new content formats, audience strategies and advertiser opportunities.

Read more here.

Publishers and advertisers face new AI agent oversight hurdles 

• The next wave of AI isn’t just about smarter tools, it’s about autonomous ones. And that poses some sticky questions: who is really in control when agents are instructing other agents, and who is accountable if they make mistakes?
• If AI agents are more proactively going out and trying to find the right customers, the right visitors, and the right audience targets, then that could radically change advertising, marketing, media and more

Read more here.

What we’re reading

Publishers join new mechanism to get AI companies to pay them for content

Publishers and platforms like Reddit, Yahoo and People Inc. are supporting Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a new content licensing standard that allows publishers to get bots to pay to scrape their sites for AI training data, The Verge reported.

Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries

Penske Media Corporation (PMC) has sued Google for illegally using its content to power AI summaries and reducing traffic to its sites, Axios reported. It’s the first antitrust suit brought by a major U.S. publisher against Google over AI search. PMC claimed declining search traffic has led to its affiliate revenue declining by more than a third by the end of 2024.

Axel Springer wants to grow its U.S. media presence

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner is pushing to expand its media footprint beyond Politico in the U.S. to build a larger portfolio in the region, Bloomberg reported. 

Gannett launches gen AI chatbot

Gannett is rolling out a generative AI chatbot tool called DeeperDive to communicate with readers, summarize insights from its reporting and recommend content from across its sites, Wired reported..

Media companies are souring on Google

Google is becoming the media industry’s villain, with publishers angry at the tech giant for gobbling up content to train its AI tools, according to Fortune.