AI Searchwebsite SEOWebsite Traffic
AI-powered search rewrote the rules of SEO this year with diminishing click-through rates and referral traffic upending decades of SEO strategies. In kind, publishers shifted from optimizing headlines and keywords to brand visibility and attribution tracking to appear in AI search results.
The shifts are still underway as publishers head into 2026: KPIs are changing, more AI search data is becoming available, and publishers are looking beyond search to grow their audiences and revenue.
But the basics haven’t changed, according to Ed Hyatt, director of newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal.
“It really goes back to… being intentional with your content and intentional with your audiences. Really focus on building authority in those key topic areas. Stay focused on your brand,” he said. “Really being focused on the type of content that’s resilient to AI but additional helps you create meaningful long-term connections with the audience.”
Here are the biggest SEO lessons in 2025 for publishers:
One of the biggest shifts this year — and perhaps the most challenging — is that traffic can no longer be the main way to measure whether SEO strategies are successful. “You have this new world where clicks as a KPI…is just not enough. You need to think super holistically about what metrics you’re tracking,” Hyatt said.
Faith Durand, svp of content at Apartment Therapy, said her team is spending half of their time continuing to optimize for traditional search, and the other half figuring out which KPIs to optimize for now.
“We have to think about the KPIs differently [and figure out] how these KPIs can further business goals. It’s not just a vanity metric,” she said.
Many publishers are turning to how to get more subscribers and free registrations. Forbes launched an AI-powered dynamic paywall in November to diversify its revenue sources in an effort to reduce its reliance on search-driven, programmatic revenue. The Economist is testing strategies to incentivize some of its large social following to provide their email and become registered users.
“We’re in a state of flux where the new model needs to be figured out,” said Michael King, founder and CEO of a content marketing and SEO agency iPullRank.
For publishers like Apartment Therapy, those new KPIs include focusing on membership conversions. Its food publication The Kitchn is launching a paid membership program in 2026.
“You can go a mile wide and an inch deep with lots and lots and lots of people and monetize it with $20 or $30 RPMs. Or you can go much deeper with a smaller group of people, and monetize it however much… and serve them better,” Durand said.
Clicks and subscription conversions are still the primary metrics for Hyatt’s team at The Wall Street Journal.
“Now there are additional meaningful KPIs to track, because all of these different figures point to an ultimate goal for publishers, which is more connected readers, subscriptions, free registrations and ultimately revenue,” Hyatt said.
Another notable shift this year in SEO was all the new tracking, reporting and dashboards folks had to learn and familiarize themselves with to better understand traffic and visibility in AI search.
Multiple publishers said the biggest change this year is the influx of data associated with these new AI strategies — and the dashboards that have come online to track them.
New predictive AI visibility tools from analytics and marketing firms like Profound, Semrush and Similarweb cropped up to help publishers and brands better understand AI-driven discovery, with prompt data and citation tracking.
“There’s a lot of value in being able to track these things but there’s still a lot to be done yet on sort of making that make good sense for your business,” Hyatt said.
These new tools and data at publishers’ disposal don’t necessarily mean publishers can make sense of it yet.
Because people are searching more on platforms like AI and search tools, publishers’ SEO teams need to be connected to their social and audience colleagues more than ever.
“You have to be on Reddit, you need to be on YouTube, you need to be in all these places,” King said.
Hyatt said the way people are connecting with journalists and creators on these platforms, LLMs are also using that to understand your brand, which makes it more important to focus on a distributed model.
“They’re assessing the journalists or the creators that you employ that are writing content, producing video content,” Hyatt said. “Whether it’s Google or ChatGPT, we’re seeing this become more and more important as to how these LLMs can understand your brand and understand your people.
In AI search, evergreen content loses visibility more quickly because LLMs reward recently updated, or “fresh,” content. Google AI Overviews have also gobbled up evergreen content, meaning many of the search queries that would in the past surface links (think: “symptoms of the flu”) now get served to users in an AI-generated summary at the top of the search page, without much reason to click through to a site to get that information.
“The biggest thing for publishers is that the whole evergreen play is kind of done. There’s so many sources for that information, and you’re not likely going to be one of those sources. Because there’s going to be such diminishing returns on that traffic, it’s not really worth investing heavily into that anymore,” King said.
Agentic search is coming. AI-powered browsers like Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s Atlas can soon do all the work for users: search flights, hotels, attractions, dates, prices – and book it all, without ever serving a link to the user. It’s unclear what this will mean, but it’s certainly on the mind of SEO teams as they figure out how to optimize their sites and content for this new version of the open web.
“The elephant in the room is agentic search,” Ray said. “The fundamental idea is that agents can do a lot of the internet work for you. [People will need to figure out] how to set up your website and your content and your products to be fully discoverable and retrievable for agents. That’s really kind of the hot topic in the space right now,” Ray said.
Adaptability stopped being a nice-to-have for publishers years ago; it became a survival skill. Here’s a look at Digiday’s guide to what’s in and out for 2026.
Here are some of the moments that defined how publishers adapted to the AI era this year.
As 2025 winds down, we rounded up the biggest trends of the year, based on the data that resonated the most with Digiday’s readers.
Get access to tools and analysis to stay ahead of the trends transforming media and marketing
Visit your account page to make changes and renew.
Get Digiday's top stories every morning in your email inbox.
Follow @Digiday for the latest news, insider access to events and more.
