Ask a News SEO: Nic Newman
Nic sizes up the threat from AI Overviews, lessons from the creator economy and explains why smaller publishers may have an advantage in the realm of generative AI
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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from a fully stacked week: Dinosaur improv, MJ Lenderman, jumping on the Leafs bandwagon and playing both softball and fastball (for the first time since university)! To say I’m looking forward to sleeping 12 hours tonight is an understatement.
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This week: Ask a News SEO with Nic Newman, Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. We discussed the institute's trends and predictions report for 2025. This included the size of AI Overview's threat, lessons from the creator economy and why smaller publishers may have an advantage in the realm of generative AI.
Let’s get it.
THE INTERVIEW
WTF is SEO?: Your research shows referral traffic from social media is really, really down. That used to be a consistent driver for most publishers. There’s a worry that AI Overviews is going to take over search. How big of a threat is it, and how should publishers respond to the challenge?
Nic Newman: It won't be a surprise to people that the traffic from Facebook has been falling, although Facebook now says they're going to put more news in the feed. So, maybe that will increase again.
But certainly, over the last two years, we've seen a fall in traffic referrals to publisher websites of 67 per cent, according to Chartbeat aggregated data, and about 50 per cent from Twitter. This is traffic that publishers have depended on. Those referrals are really drying up, and then there's just a lot of uncertainty around AI Overviews.
Depending on whether you're in hard or soft news, you're going to see more AI Overviews. There's contradictory research around the impact: Google says that if you get one of these links, you get higher click-through rates. But, of course, on aggregate, if people are getting answers directly in the browser, then they're much less likely to click through.
The publisher fear is that, over time, as this new paradigm of finding information and getting answers takes over from the traditional blue link model, publishers are going to get less click-through. More of that is just going to go to the browser and to the aggregators, and that's going to impact traffic, revenue and the rest of it.
WTF is SEO?: Do you see any signs from publishers that they’re taking this challenge in stride and changing their strategies accordingly?
Nic Newman: Broadly, publishers are really worried about this and have been adapting for some time because this is not new — social media traffic has been going down for some time. So, the core strategies are to try and diversify, find alternative ways of getting traffic, and currently, the biggest new source of traffic is Google Discover. At the same time as Google is taking away traffic [because of] AI Overviews, they are delivering more traffic via Discover — but it's very hard to gain.
The broad change of strategy is that many publishers are recognizing that they need to just build better direct relationships.
And so, they're really trying to build loyal relationships — maybe with fewer people — by focusing more on email, mobile notifications and other ways to get people to come back more frequently, including offline events. There are a whole range of ways to build direct relationships. That's the core strategy.
Then, I think the other strategy — particularly for [younger] audiences — is to lean more into video and try to find ways of either generating revenue from that, driving subscriptions or building other longer-term relationships. At least starting by pushing more youth-based video content.
WTF is SEO?: There’s been a lot of discussion, especially post-election, about the role of influencers and their impact on politics and the media. We have talked a lot about the role of authorship as a core part of the strategy. What trends are you seeing around news influencers and how individuals are building personal brands in the media space?
Nic Newman: I think the first thing to say is that these trends are very real — particularly in the United States, but actually all over the world. And they probably didn’t even start in the U.S.
If you look at countries like Brazil and India, this has been happening for quite some time. Individuals have been building significant audiences, particularly in large markets, through platforms like YouTube, TikTok and others.
We've seen that starting to really hit the political arena in the U.S., but in other countries as well. This is new competition for audiences, but only slightly. It's still that battle for attention.
How do you use those personalities and video to build direct relationships and loyalty? That’s something many publishers are really thinking about, partly because of its effectiveness for some influencers.
In most markets, the audience is too small for journalists, for example, to leave their organization and start their own individual media company and make enough money from it. That’s why we’re seeing most of this happening in the U.S. — because the advertising market is large enough to support it.
In most other markets, it’s more about competing for attention, and a lot of it is driven by political motivations — people want to get their message across. So, they’re not necessarily doing it to make money in the same way as in the U.S.
WTF is SEO?: What lessons can we glean from the creator economy and apply on-site to improve the relationship between authors and audience?
Nic Newman: Some of it is stuff we've known for a long time.
If you’ve worked in radio and television, it’s the power of the host and personal connection, and authenticity — not just talking about difficult news all the time, but actually making news entertaining. This isn’t new; it’s just being reinvented in a slightly different form. A lot of it is stolen from publishers.
You'll notice that many influencers in the U.S. are actually former broadcasters who have taken a lot of the same lessons.
There are lessons around how you make content work on short-form vertical video platforms like TikTok or Instagram. It’s partly tone, but it's definitely about grabbing attention really early on. It's also about a two-way connection — listening and building that relationship with your audience.
These are social networks for a reason and although content drives it, the social aspect is actually also really important. These are things publishers can learn and bring those things back onto [their] websites.
We're seeing a lot more vertical video carousels appearing in The Economist, The New York Times, BBC and others. In some parts of the world, in Scandinavia for example, we're starting to see more video being consumed on publisher websites rather than off-publisher websites.
In those Scandinavian markets, publishers are learning the lessons from creators; and are investing in short-form formats and young talent that can tell stories in different ways with a different tone of voice.
WTF is SEO?: What are the generative AI opportunities you see publishers exploring?
Nic Newman: The opportunity is partly about efficiency: saving money and doing non-journalistic tasks more efficiently.
There are new opportunities to do journalistic work better, like deploying big data and generative AI to accomplish tasks that previously would have taken a lot of time, money or would have been economically impractical. Another opportunity lies in converting formats.
One of the big challenges the media has is that it produces this as a one-size-fits-all product. News personalization is very difficult. There's something in personalization of formats [for AI to do, for example] taking journalism in text and turning it into video or audio really easily or translating it.
There are opportunities around improving the quality of the journalism and things you couldn't do before economically and then personalizing the content and distributing in a much more effective way going forwards.
WTF is SEO?: Do you have any thoughts on what smaller publishers should be focusing on when they have fewer resources to be able to throw at generative AI, but still want to get in and experiment?
Nic Newman: I actually think it's quite a democratizing technology.
The fear was that only big companies were going to be able to afford it. What’s happened is that actually a lot of this technology is quite commoditized. It's quite easy. Much of it's available for free or for a very, very small subscription.
I think it's very much open to small companies and individuals to use generative AI and that's where we are seeing a lot of the innovation: smaller companies that don't have these huge policies and constraints.
If you're a very small company or an individual, you can deploy this stuff incredibly quickly and easily.
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Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley