Webinar: Is AI Killing Publisher Search Traffic? If Not, WTF is Going On?

Is AI killing publisher search traffic? If not, WTF is going on?

That's the question we put to two of the sharpest minds in publishing SEO: Jessie Willms, SEO editor at The Guardian US and co-founder of the WTF is SEO newsletter, and Harry Clarkson-Bennett, SEO director at The Telegraph and author of the Leadership in SEO newsletter.

They cover a lot of ground: why younger audiences are drifting away from publishers entirely, what the traffic data actually looks like, whether evergreen content still has a place, how to build audience loyalty when search is in decline, and whether paywalls offer any real protection from AI.

If you work in publishing SEO, or you're just trying to make sense of what's happening to organic traffic right now, this one's worth your time.

Webinar recording

By the way, you can also subscribe to the Sitebulb YouTube channel! And register here to be the first to find out about upcoming webinars. 

Chapters

0:00 Intro

2:35 Biggest threats to publisher traffic (excluding AI)

6:36 Does AI make things worse? Zero-click and the economics

9:13 Has AI changed internal strategy conversations?

13:29 What the traffic data actually shows: direct, affiliate, evergreen

16:24 How younger audiences discover news (Reuters Institute research)

21:31 Is evergreen content dead for publishers?

26:08 Building audience loyalty: signals, metrics, and surveys

32:11 Publishing on platforms you don't own

40:36 Paywalls vs free: different SEO priorities

48:44 Do paywalls protect you from AI summarization?

53:04 Should publishers block all bots by default?

56:44 Do paywalls cut you off from AI referral traffic?

58:38 Wrap-up

Webinar transcript

Patrick Hathaway

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another Sitebulb webinar. Today, we're talking SEO on publishing sites and what impact AI might be having on traffic, if any. I'm Patrick, CEO and co-founder of Sitebulb, and I'll be your host. Our guests on the panel today are [Jessie Wilms](LinkedIn URL — to confirm) from the Guardian US, and [Harry Clarkson-Bennett](LinkedIn URL — to add) from The Telegraph. Please give them a warm welcome in the chat. Tell us where you're joining from.

So a little bit of housekeeping before we start. Every single webinar we do without fail, we get this question. So I'll answer upfront. Yes, we are recording the session. Anyone who signed up will get the recording emailed to them tomorrow.

And we want your questions. So we'll save fifteen minutes or so at the end of the discussion for your Q&A. Please put the questions in the Q&A box alongside the chat, not in the chat itself. And you can also upvote other people's questions if you see something in there that you want answered. We don't always get a chance to get to every single question, but we will start with the ones that have the most upvotes. Democracy and all that.

So before I introduce our guests, let me very quickly introduce Sitebulb. We do website crawling, helping in-house and agency teams get to grips with technical SEO. And we've been dealing with more publishing sites, which are typically pretty big, since we launched Sitebulb Cloud, which can now handle websites with tens of billions of pages. So if you're watching this and thinking that you haven't reviewed your cloud crawler for a while, now might be the time to revisit it.

Anyway, enough about us. Let's introduce our wonderful guests, who are both extremely active in the publishing SEO community.

Jessie Wilms is SEO editor for The Guardian US and co-founder of WTF is SEO, a newsletter about search strategy for publishers. I will put the link in in a second. Harry Clarkson-Bennett is SEO director at The Telegraph, and he also has a newsletter called Leadership in SEO and writes a column for Search Engine Journal. So go ahead and sign up for their newsletters and follow them on LinkedIn if you care about the stuff. They are both excellent follows.

So welcome to you both, and thanks for joining us today.

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Patrick Hathaway

There you go. Jessie's already put the links in the chat. Amazing. Okay, cool. So let's get to the questions.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Oh, wow. You plug mine as well, Jessie. That's nice.

Patrick Hathaway

Hello?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

That —

Jessie Wilms

It's great. I read it every week. What are you talking about? Why wouldn't I?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

No, no. I just thought you were just plugging yours, so I get it. Yeah.

Patrick Hathaway

I'm surprised Harry hasn't put his in as well. That's weird.

Right. I'm really keen to hear from you both on this one, but Harry, you kick us off, please. So if you had to name the single biggest threat to publisher traffic in 2026, and AI wasn't allowed to be the answer, what would you say?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

I think audiences — particularly younger audiences — have been turning off the traditional publishing offering for a while, and I think that's been a slow creep. And I think, generally, what publishers have done is follow money and follow clicks, which has led them to search. And that's meant a lot of people have made decisions that maybe are not the best long-term thing for their brand, which is very understandable. But I think pretty much younger audiences particularly just have options that — they'd rather do other things. They'd rather spend time on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. Substack, obviously, is something that's flying at the minute.

People care about people. So I think what you could call something like this — the reverse halo effect. It used to be that you would be a journalist who'd work for a big brand, and that would be great for your credibility. But now it's kind of like the inverse is true in lots of cases, and actually big brands are the ones that now need to work with and leverage the trust that individuals and creators build with their own audiences. Yeah, I think it's the audiences turning off the publisher offering, and they're going elsewhere.

Patrick Hathaway

Cool.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Which I've bundled a few things together. I agree.

Patrick Hathaway

You did. Yeah. Jessie?

Jessie Wilms

Well, the bundle is a solution, isn't it? I would agree with Harry. I think fatigue and fragmentation are — I mean, not to give two answers when the question was one, but I think the fatigue of news is a threat to publishers. There's just so much — I obviously live in Canada but I work for an American publication. And so there's just a daily onslaught of headlines that don't make you feel great about the world. And so sometimes what you see happen is it's not that people are then digging into the alternative headlines that we do run — the lifestyle content, the sports content. Sometimes what happens is people step back entirely if what they see at the top of the homepage of a website day in, day out is just an onslaught of headlines that are not particularly rosy and don't reflect any positive momentum in the news. I think that sort of fatigue just means that a lot of people are going to opt out entirely and not even dig deeper for the life and arts content — music criticism, books, etcetera — if it's not presented to them at the top of a home page.

And then the second point, a little bit related to this, which Harry also alluded to, is fragmentation. Our attention is not going to publishers anymore. It's going in a million different places, and what we're sort of having to do is eke out little pockets of audience and little pockets of getting people to engage with our content and journalism.

Publishers who see massive declines in search traffic are saying, okay, now what do we do? What do we invest in? And sort of what you're doing is then fighting a million uphill battles to find and grow an audience on TikTok, on Instagram, on an off-platform newsletter that is your content but hosted on Substack. Or getting to the top of the podcast charts on Spotify. So I think it's the one-two punch of: people are turning away from news, they're finding it elsewhere. But then also, when publishers do that "elsewhere" work, it is a little bit of an uphill battle to get your foothold in those places where people also still don't necessarily want your content, because your big brand and your publisher. What they actually want is a creator. And because it's a creator, they're a start-up and their costs are lower. It's less expensive to be one person making cooking content than to be a cooking studio with different standards and budgets and editorial processes in place.

Patrick Hathaway

Okay. So if AI was allowed in that answer, would you have been saying it anyway or just not?

Jessie Wilms

I think so. Like, AI overviews encroaching on search results, taking up that traffic, taking up more and more of the search results — even sometimes when I'm doing a site search, like site:theguardian.com, and I put in a keyword to look for content, I'm getting an AI overview of my own content, which is very odd and weird. And the way that Google is putting AI summaries in more and more places in search results — like, it used to be an AI overview at the top of the search result that you could scroll past. But now it's in People Also Ask, or it was, and the places where publishers can rank on search because of AI overviews is getting narrower and narrower, and it's getting more and more bleak because of that AI summary. But Harry, do you want to jump in?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

It's definitely still an issue. But it's kind of zero click. Zero click marketing — I want to use that phrase, as it's just been happening for some time. So I suppose what AI has done is organise the web in a different manner and made it so that people don't have to click to find an answer, which is obviously pretty problematic for businesses whose business models revolve around a click.

So if you're not a publisher, it might be a good thing. If you are a publisher, it's pretty difficult, unfortunately. And I think the fact that these guys are so careless and voracious with their crawling, and their inability to strike deals with publishers in lots of cases — which I think is a massive shame, because it degrades the product for everybody. It degrades it for publishers because you don't get money for everything that you do.

Google's tried to enforce some stricter content standards — like them or not, that's made content more expensive to produce. So now we're having to spend more money to create stuff that will do well. Fine. But now the reward we get back is less, and now it's even less. So every year it goes down. So I think the real problem with this is the economics of it. Because you can still — lots of businesses can still survive without a first or second-stage click, but unfortunately the publisher business model is in a period of flux at the minute where we try to figure out how to do this. It's going to be a difficult few years for lots of businesses. We'll have to try and be pretty canny.

You see, like, the commercial departments in lots of companies really struggling — affiliate struggling, advertising struggling. All the standard stuff is becoming more and more challenging.

Patrick Hathaway

Yeah. Has the AI conversation made it harder or easier to have strategic conversations inside your organisations?

Jessie, you're nodding. Go ahead.

Jessie Wilms

Well, I would say — I know Barry is in the chat and has published a great "Google Zero is a Lie" piece that I'll link now — but I do think, like, the threat of it and the worry of it, and the fact that you're seeing arrows pointing in the wrong direction week over week. I think that sort of forces you to get realistic about what is the value of that traffic. And then also, if that traffic disappears entirely overnight, or as a process of slow decline, how do you make up that audience? Not only from a reach perspective — if you are monetising page views, which almost every publisher does — if those pages and that monetisation goes away, how much of a hole in your budget is there? But then also: if people aren't clicking links, how do you actually reach human readers, and how do you show up in their lives and create meaningful value that will create the incentive for them to support you in some sort of way — whether that's subscribing to newsletters, adding you as a preferred source, downloading your podcast, actually giving you financial contributions every month, or subscribing on a paywall.

I think it definitely should, for many organisations — if it hasn't already — prompt those slightly harder conversations to have about what is the thing that we're doing that's most valuable, that people actively seek us out for, and how can we better show up in people's lives in order to earn their support.

Patrick Hathaway

You've seen the same, Harry?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Yeah. I think that's kind of perfect. It's definitely taken the shine off search. And I'm sure I'm not the only business person, publisher, or agency person who has seen similar things — where in lots of cases it's been more difficult to either get things pushed through, or your influence has waned, and you're just not privy to all the conversations that happen, particularly editorially. And neither should we be in lots of cases — our job is not to lead the paper editorially. We are not the best people to do that. What we should be the best people at is generating the most value possible out of the content that gets created. So you still need to be bought in at the right time, and you still need a good structure and approach.

AI really shouldn't change any of that. I think it's made things — you have to work harder for a click. You have to work harder. Maybe "working harder" is the wrong framing; maybe we just haven't worked out what the best approach is yet. I think that's probably true for everybody. And I'm sure we'll come on to this, but the metrics that we track and how we try to show value will have to change. Because even selfishly — do any of us want to be tied to metrics that are just guaranteed to go down year after year? I think it would be sensible for us as an industry to try and steer the conversation into something a bit more fruitful.

Jessie Wilms

Mhmm. And it's interesting — I was an audience editor, then because I was doing so much SEO, I wanted to be specifically an SEO and audience editor. And now it's sort of swung back to where I'm looking and thinking, you know, a lot of SEO work is search engine optimisation, but it's also search everywhere optimisation. And in order to see long term, we sort of need to be in more places, which is then the work of an audience editor. So I think SEO has always been within the broader context of audience. And going forward, it might be that the 80/20 balance of how much SEO work you do versus audience work shifts. And you're taking just a more holistic approach and understanding of what it means to be an SEO editor. Maybe in the future we're not search engine optimisation experts, but we're search everywhere optimisation experts, thinking about that in terms of: what are people looking for on Instagram and TikTok, and how do we make sure that our content shows up for them? That same sort of instinct and impulse and behavioural aspect of SEO — that's honestly, for me, the fun stuff.

Patrick Hathaway

Yeah, just across different surfaces as well. Okay. So this next question now — I appreciate you might not be able to share everything here, so just use your discretion. When you look at actual traffic data across the last couple of years, what changes in audience behaviour are you seeing across the website? Are you seeing erosion in particular types of content?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

I think there are a fair few third-party things out there at the minute that I think are pretty accurate. And I think in lots of cases, direct traffic has suffered for quite a few brands. I'll be pretty generic here, but direct traffic to a lot of brands over the last few years has suffered.

I think affiliate content generally is way harder — way harder than it was. I think that's a real challenge, because that was obviously a really lucrative business line.

Obviously, anything that doesn't fit fairly tightly into what your brand is — if you're a big publisher — I think maybe a big part of the problem is that big publishers have done very well out of this. If you're the Guardian, the Telegraph, the BBC, you could rank for and do anything. At least you could a few years ago. And I think that's waned for everybody in lots of cases. And then they did manual actions for parasite SEO, because they obviously couldn't figure out a good way to handle it algorithmically post the helpful content update, which is a bit of a disaster for everybody. They obviously couldn't find a good algorithmic way of doing this, and I think it's pretty unlikely they wanted to run that risk again. So they went pretty heavy-handed with manual actions.

Just across the board, that kind of what we now call commodity content — standard evergreen stuff — if you're creating anything purely with SEO in mind, if that's your only reason for doing it, it's probably a bad idea. You could kill that and just say "we're not doing this anymore," and you'd probably be better off as a business.

Jessie Wilms

Yeah. I think Harry's point about taking a scalpel to your content is a useful lesson that this sort of change has taught us. Like, you know, big publishers could kind of write and rank on anything even without earning that visibility or earning the right to have access to that audience. So I think staying in your lane a little bit more is a good lesson.

Patrick Hathaway

Mhmm. Okay, cool. You sort of mentioned it there, Harry — the sort of lack of direct traffic. There was some research published recently through Reuters Institute showing under-35s mostly encounter news incidentally, so through feeds rather than through search or direct navigation. I'll put the link in. What do you make of that as a concept? Do you agree?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Yeah, spot on. I think this all ties together. Over the last few years, most people have seen a degradation of search. I'm pretty confident that if we look into that in more detail, most of that is from younger audiences. I'm pretty confident a part of that is not only did they not seek out publishers as much as they did — they don't use search as much as older generations did, because they have more options and they discover things algorithmically.

So what we've got pretty used to — what most people do — is click-based attribution. Last click, last click wins. That is search, all the time. And that's great for us, but it's pretty bad for your actual business and your actual way of thinking about where you generate customers from, where you generate value from.

A hundred percent, I think people use Google less — younger audiences literally just discover everything passively, and then they might check your website out if they see something they like. Or, like Jessie said, from somebody they like, they'll come back to that. So I think all of this is pretty interconnected. And like I said earlier, the options people have and their priorities are different. Google's not cool. It just isn't. And they have other, more interesting ways to find things out, and then they might use Google afterwards.

Patrick Hathaway

Yeah. TikTok's cool, right? I think.

Jessie Wilms

Yeah. And it is like — the main difference, though, between these two things is active versus passive. If you're on TikTok, you're making decisions about who you follow for sure, but so much of the scroll behaviour — they call it doom scrolling for a reason. You're not actually engaged. You're just consuming whatever content comes into your feed. You make some decisions about who you follow, and the algorithm learns from that. But you're not actively seeking out new information.

I think it's worrying on a number of levels — like, what happens if people are only ever passively getting news information? Like, local news, local politics, what's happening in your area. That's worrying because people are just going to have these huge information gaps.

And I think some of it too is: as you get a little bit older, you do tend to need news a little bit more. You need to know how to save adequately so you can get a mortgage, so you can buy a house, so you can save for retirement. I think there's a little bit of: perhaps you age into that search behaviour. And so the question is just — are these younger audiences going to exclusively do that searching on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok? Or will they, as they get older, use search a little bit? Like, Harry's point: Google isn't cool. And if you're trained to always just be in that passive "I get the information that comes to me" mode, is there a switch that's going to flip and suddenly you're actively searching with really high intent? I don't know. I think probably it's unrealistic to hope for that, but I'm going to kind of hope for that.

Patrick Hathaway

Yeah. The active versus passive is the worrying one, isn't it? Because it can lead to manipulation, algorithmic or otherwise, in terms of where you get the source of the news. Because you're not choosing it.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Which is — to be fair, one of the interesting things I found — I think it's from that report, it might also be from another one that came out around that time — was around the length of time. I think it's like: over-55s use websites nearly twenty minutes a day on average. And then under-25s use them for like four minutes a day. But there's obviously a difference in how they're using the websites and what they're using them for. The older audience are just like, "I'm going to read the paper." But the younger audiences are like, "I want to check something that somebody said — is that true?" and they go to a reputable source.

So there's still a trust element there in some capacity. So I think a lot of what we have to figure out is how we can — I was going to say "weaponise it," I don't mean that in a bad way — there's still an advantage there for news brands, it's just harder. There's just more competition.

Patrick Hathaway

Mhmm. Yeah. And whether or not younger people even want to read at all, or whether it's just video.

So, Harry, earlier you mentioned evergreen content as a kind of dying SEO play. For a long time, that's been what publishing SEO was about — pairing the evergreen content with the breaking news. Is this no longer the case?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

I think it's definitely less valuable. And I think, again, all of this pretty much comes back to: are we driving value for the business? Maybe it used to be — well, it wasn't that difficult, right, beforehand, to map out how many monthly searches there are and the rough click-through rate you're going to get, and broadly map how much value you think you're going to get from this stuff. For affiliate content or subscriptions, you could sort of map it out.

But that's much harder to do now. It's much harder because it just generates less value.

So you've got to be more wary about what you do. Everyone wants their content to be fresh and up to date — great, but that's not free. That costs money and time. The more you have, the more you have to think about maintaining it. And publishers in places where you don't control things, being able to prune or trim content — or ask, "Is this really the right idea?" — you don't have the control that you have on other websites and in other areas. And that's a real challenge.

So my broad rule of thumb is: if the content has been done to death and you can't add anything to it, don't do it. If you're only doing it for SEO purposes because you've seen it has 50,000 searches a month, don't do it. It just won't end well. Your audience better want it. You better have something new to add to what's already out there. And again, that comes back to the cost of creating this stuff: more expensive, less back from it. So you've got to be really wary. For big publishers, you normally have access to big audiences, data, subscriber bases, research teams — you can pull stuff together that makes your content stand out and be interesting. But it just takes time and effort, and it has to be worthwhile.

Jessie Wilms

I think that speaks to the idea of: if you're going to do evergreen, like Harry said, it's got to be something your audience wants. And then also, I think you should really have a plan for it and around it. Like, what is the update strategy for three, six, nine, twelve months from now? If you don't have an update strategy for twelve months from now, that's perhaps an indication that this is something you actually don't want to invest in.

But I also think, within the structure of the page, you should be thinking about — Harry's point — how do you make the page and the piece exceptional? Does that mean you should have a table with original data in it that you can then clip for a post on Instagram? Or do you have experts you can interview and clip for Instagram videos or TikToks, or use as part of a podcast episode? So thinking about content more holistically.

Where five years ago, ten years ago, you could write "what is magnesium, why do you need it" and just have that piece of content live on your website and bring in traffic every month — now maybe you need to think about, like, "magnesium for anxiety" because there was a TikTok trend. So you can piece out little parts of it that are useful for other parts of your audience.

To Harry's point, this is all one of those things where you've got to do more and get less back. But that kind of just feels like a reality right now. I would say: if you're going to do evergreen, make sure it's really something people want, and then also put an audience plan around your SEO efforts. So you're thinking about what parts of this piece can be used on other platforms, and also: can you use this as a launching-off point? Maybe you do an evergreen piece and you have a callout at the bottom for questions that you then fold back into the piece. Or you do an AMA on-site or on Reddit that answers questions around that particular topic.

Patrick Hathaway

Yeah. Set and forget is just gone. Like, if it's going to be evergreen, you have to make sure it's evergreen by constantly watering it. The grass analogy, if that's where I was going. Alright. Anyway, moving on.

So, Jessie — I've seen you describing loyalty as the long-term path for publishers. What does building that look like for an SEO team, and how would you know that it's actually working?

Jessie Wilms

Yeah. I would start by thinking about what are our signals of audience loyalty. So, for example, if in Google Search Console you see consistently that a particular search term — when I was at the Globe and Mail, we would always have lots of consistent interest in TSX news, stock market news. That was pretty consistent every day and brought people to our site, and that's a good habit.

There was a couple of times where we saw a particular author was being searched consistently because they had a weekly or biweekly column. So that's a good pathway between readers and the publication — like, "oh, we know that Rob Carrick is publishing, and I want to know what Rob Carrick's latest is." So searching for that author. So authors and topics are a good place to start. Plus also any branded query that includes the publication's search terms — like "Guardian Trump" would be an example, or "Globe investing" — that's brand plus topic. So people want investing news from the Globe and Mail.

I would look for those three things to get an understanding of what are people already associating with your brand. And then look at what is the experience. Like, actually go incognito and Google those terms and see: do you get a good landing page for that result? Is it a good experience? If someone searches "horoscopes today" and they have to click through a million ads and pop-ups to get one piece of content that's going to take them twelve seconds to read — is that a good experience? Are you over-monetising that page for you? Whereas if you search "Rob Carrick" and you get a really nice author page that makes it really clear what his expertise is and what his latest post is, plus the newsletter that he writes or the podcast that he does — make all that really easy and accessible for readers. That's a much better experience.

So I would start maybe there. And then — sorry, what was the second half of your question?

Patrick Hathaway

It was: what does it look like, and how do you know it's working?

Jessie Wilms

Yeah. How do you know it's working? I think maybe Harry can talk to metrics of what success actually looks like. Because loyalty is kind of tricky. But like — is your branded search rising, falling, staying the same? That's a good indication of loyalty. Are people who come to your site from search having higher page views per session than other referral sources? Those are easy things to look at and measure.

And I would also say: another thing to always be thinking about in terms of audience loyalty is you can actually talk to your audience. You can do surveys, questionnaires. This is an SEO thing, this is an audience thing. But if you actually ask your readers "what do you value most about our website?" they can tell you and give you those signals. I would also say there's sometimes a little bit of difference between what people say they want and what they actually read. So gut-check the data, and don't take any single data point from your audience as a strategy overhaul, but it is a good thing to do and make a part of your overall audience practice.

Patrick Hathaway

Awesome. So, Harry — Jessie was just setting you up there to talk about metrics. Have you got thoughts on that?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Yes. I think super well described on branded search and topics. You need people to be searching for your brand. You want to see that stuff going up over time. You want to know that you're building — particularly if you work for big brands with brands within brands — and that you work with authors that people care about. If you do, then prioritise them and make sure they're easy to find. Ensure the experience when people come to the site to find them is good.

And again — less of an SEO thing, but: the more you know about your audience, the better. This is where it comes into the loyalty aspect. If you're a subscription business, loyalty is different to a non-subscription business, and it's more important. And how we know things are going in the right direction is: are people spending more money and sticking around longer with their subscriptions?

In SEO, we are not the people who are going to be able to get you to stick around forever — that really is a much bigger undertaking. From our end, it's the nuts and bolts of: are we getting the right people in? We know that by subscriptions, the average spend per customer per year, or the lifetime customer value. If we're seeing that through search go up, that's great. But once we get people through the door, it's very difficult for us to keep them, outside of internal linking and the stuff we have access to.

Outside of that — your onboarding programme. If you know somebody really always reads articles from a certain author, are you sending them push notifications when that author publishes? How much data do you have about your audience that will allow you to set up things that make their consumption of you easy? And I think that's the key bit here: what we know about people. And why AI overviews are theoretically successful is just: make people's life easy and they don't have to do another thing. If people don't have to do another thing, they're willing to sacrifice quality and accuracy. That's me included. That's all of us.

Patrick Hathaway

Shame, but I think you're right.

So, keeping on the content question — you've both sort of mentioned publishing on platforms you don't own. Newsletters and podcasts have been mentioned. I just want to dig into why this is particularly important for publishing, and what does that look like in practice when you're working with one of these big brands? Harry, do you want to lead that one?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Yes. So I think this is — I think [Rand] would always call this "building on rented land," right, which is twenty years ago you got taught that was a really bad idea, and you want people to come to your website so you can monetise them. Now you kind of don't have that choice.

So now what this is is just marketing. This is just touchpoints. Being where your customer is, at the right time. Jessie said earlier: are they on Reddit? Are they on Instagram? Are they on TikTok? What subreddits are they in? Who do they care about? Are you engaging with them in the comments? This is the full customer ecosystem that extends beyond traditional search, which we might not have control over or access to. But it's like an audience team — a group of people who should be interested in and care about the audience, developing it and cultivating it over time.

Then really what this is is just being there. Because if we're not there, somebody else will be. And in a kind of passive, incidental world where the news just flies past as you're doom scrolling on the sofa — you've got to be there, and you've got to cut through the noise somehow. You don't really have a choice anymore. For most people, it's: you have to embrace this. You have to create stuff that cuts through, and you have to be where your audiences are, even if that means sacrificing getting people coming onto your site. Because you need them to see you enough that by the time they get to your site, they should be ready to convert. Whether you're selling a product or it's a subscription. People need to come to your site with: "I really like this stuff. It's really interesting." That's where we need to get to.

Jessie Wilms

And I really also — just from a journalism perspective — the thing that Harry said about "if you're not there, someone else is." If it's not your competitors, it's going to be some influencer who doesn't have the rigour that you have, the editorial workflows and fact-checking processes in place. Not that that's true across the board for influencers, and not that that's even true of all publishers writ large. But the idea of "if you're not there, someone else will be" is a good reminder of the urgency of building these audiences in different platforms and places. Someone will fill this void. Someone will get that visibility.

And even if it's less valuable, it still is visibility. And if you're seeing search declines and you're not doing anything about it, it is a question of "well, what are we all doing here, sort of thing?"

But I also wanted to say — this is a little bit of a tangent, but I was at ONA, and there was a really great session about younger audiences and engaging with them on platform. One interesting thing: on Instagram, a lot of young people hop into the comments and use the comments as feedback to decide whether they're going to watch the video in full and engage with that brand further. So you probably should be in the comments. I know for years you've been told "don't read the comments — it's toxic sludge" — but it doesn't have to be. Understanding how people actually engage with the content, and then making sure that you're doing that — being there to show up in people's lives, to get enough touch points that eventually, when they're ready to convert, like Harry just said, you're the brand they think of. That work is sort of really essential.

Even if it's not got as much return on investment as the old model did — audiences are super fragmented, and we do kind of have to put more effort behind showing up in a bunch of different places, whereas we used to have it a little bit easier. Although, the thought that we had it easy ten years ago is just hindsight.

So the thing I was trying to point out about the comments piece on Instagram: if that's the behaviour, can you do something about it to your advantage? Can you have your authors be in the comments fact-checking, replying, engaging in conversation, bringing users back to that piece of content? It gives you a second crack at those eyeballs and another opportunity to engage with people, which again, hopefully means they'll eventually get off Instagram, go to your website, sign up for a newsletter, subscribe, open your app — all those kinds of things. But you do need those multiple touch points before you've earned someone's trust.

Patrick Hathaway

And is that the role of the SEO to — where does SEO fit in?

Jessie Wilms

I think it isn't necessarily SEO, but it's definitely audience. And SEO sits within audience, so it's just: understanding, for example, if I Google "Jason Collins," what does the search results page look like? I've got an Instagram post, a link on Reddit, the top stories box, Wikipedia, Basketball Reference, and one or two publisher links. So the search results for Jason Collins should be informative about what your plan for covering his passing looks like from an editorial perspective, because it's not just publisher content. And I think SEOs can say: here are the platforms that show up most often, and here's the content we see, or here are the creators doing well on these search results. So it's SEO working with audience to make these things happen, but it definitely isn't an SEO person doing this stuff.

I certainly am not posting on Instagram. I'm not creating short-form video content — even though I see that content all the time on search results. I'm definitely not out there shooting thirty-second Instagram videos.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

No. That's not our bag. But that's sort of underselling us as an industry, I think. What we've always been really good at is being super structured, analytical, clear — creating plans. Other departments are not particularly good at this in lots of cases. Not naming any names or companies. But not everybody is that structured in this way. So the amount of value you can add is to set up audience planning meetings where you try and bring people together. This is the event, this is whatever it is — you can sit there and say: this is what we're seeing. So you can open dialogue. Our job can't just be everything. Nobody wants us to do that. We wouldn't do good thirty-second videos, certainly not to begin with — you need someone different for that in lots of cases. But that is a part of our job and the audience team's job, as Jessie said: structure, planning, figuring out what we do and when. You need to alleviate as much of the stress as you can in trying to put plans in place where you will reach people where they are.

Jessie Wilms

That editorial planning — I think editors and commissioning editors and assigning editors know what reporters and editors think is going to be really useful and valuable from an audience perspective. But I think SEO and audience people have had the data and the analysis and the guidance to know that in this moment, people are going to be searching for X. And bringing that to the table.

I can't tell you the number of times in edit meetings where we're covering a protest and no one has thought to ask: are we going to have a photo gallery component to this? Because look at Google Trends — I see people looking for "no kings protest signs." That is obviously an indication of search interest for a visual element to the coverage. I mean, it's also like: people want to know what the funny signs are. But that's fine — that's something people are actively seeking out. So bringing that to the table.

Or the Met Gala — people always want to see the photo gallery, and that's something that's potentially overlooked by editors who are always thinking about the story first. So I think the main thing that SEO and audience editors can do is bring that audience-first perspective.

Patrick Hathaway

Yep. That makes sense. Okay. So I want to remind folks — if you have questions, put them in the Q&A box. But I want to talk for a little bit now about paywalls.

I'm assuming pretty much everyone in the audience knows this, but just in case: the two companies our guests work for operate a slightly different commercial model. The Telegraph has a paywall for a lot of its content — you have to be a paying subscriber to access it. Whereas the Guardian doesn't have a paywall, so the content is free and ungated — it just endlessly nags you instead. These are different commercial environments. I'm kind of fascinated to dig into how that changes your perspective.

And again, it doesn't mean one is better than the other — you just happen to work in businesses that have chosen that commercial approach. So, Harry — as an SEO working inside the paywall environment, what does that force you to be exceptional at? Primarily thinking about Google Search, so leave AI to one side for a second. What skills matter more at the Telegraph than they would perhaps at the Guardian?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Well, I suppose you've got to really understand the value of each article in the chain from somebody reading something for the first time, all the way through to actually subscribing. You've got to have a pretty clear idea about how all of your content works together.

You've got to be pretty good at accepting that you won't rank brilliantly over time in lots of cases. Obviously, the best paywalls now — very few people have a very hard paywall. Most people give enough away. So companies like Piano will have a graded system where as you come in as a fresh user, you might be scored as zero on a scale, which means we don't know anything about you other than your location, so you have a very low propensity to subscribe. All the way up to nine, where you've maybe read thirty articles in the last four days, and the system goes: this person is super likely to subscribe — let's hard-paywall them until they do.

So you have to be okay with the fact that over time, you aren't going to generate the engagement signals that somebody like the Guardian might do, or somebody that's completely free might do. You have to understand where you sit in the playing field. You have to be really good at reporting. You have to be good at documenting this and describing this to people, because you aren't going to be able to generate as much as somebody who's free to air is over time. It's just not feasible. So you've got to be good at managing stakeholders on that front.

You've also got to be pretty good at testing stuff and knowing the value of different channels and different pieces of content. Like, lots of companies will have sport. You can get really good sports coverage in lots of different places — it might not be a big subscription play for you. It might be a really good retention play. So you have to understand what each channel is doing, what types of content in the channel does. You've got to be pretty analytical with how this works. The recommendations you make to a specific channel — what you suggest to sport might be quite different from what you suggest to travel, as an example.

So your understanding of the wider ecosystem and you as a publisher has to be really good. And then something like Google Discover — huge volume play, not many huge volume plays left, but a terrible play for subscriptions. And although you can't really accurately identify everyone that comes through Google Discover, do you want to open that channel as much as possible? Like, look — we do need people in the system. So that's quite a good summary of how to understand the different moving parts.

Patrick Hathaway

Yeah, that's great. So essentially the same question to you, Jessie, but in reverse. When every article's free, what's important for you in terms of the search landscape?

Jessie Wilms

Yeah. For the Guardian — I'm going to put a link in the chat; Steve Sachs, our managing director, had a piece about rebooting, and I think it gets at what has worked so far for Guardian US. I would just say: search or not, one thing that is really important for us as a publication — and I don't think this is giving away state secrets — is that the Guardian is distinctive. It is very distinctive. Our journalism is not like anyone else's, and that is very much intentional and on purpose. We don't cover stories in the same way that Politico might, or the New York Times might, or CNN might.

"Distinctive" is a word that's used often in our newsroom, because it really matters. It matters that we are different from our competitors, different from other things on offer — because even though we don't have a paywall, it's core to the Guardian's values and brand that we're free and open to all. And we advertise that — the language on the pop-up when we ask for money is "not owned by a billionaire." And that's accurate. We can't take too much credit for that because the Guardian Trust is set up in a way that gives us a very unique operating model. But a core value for us as SEO and audience at the Guardian is making sure our distinctiveness is clear. We don't cover everything, but the things we do, we cover very, very well, and from a very distinctive Guardian point of view.

So I would say: picking your lane and sticking to it, and making that clear at every level, is really, really important. Because ultimately we do ask for money, and we have to give people a reason to give us money when they can get all of our content for free. And I think part of that is being really distinctive, picking a lane, and making it a values proposition more than a utility proposition.

For a publisher like the Globe and Mail, for example, one of the main core reasons people subscribed was business and investing news — the everyday person who wants to know whether they're saving enough for retirement, but also at the tier above that, people who need business and investing news for their jobs and are willing to pay for it. That's a very high-utility, business-focused proposition. Whereas for the Guardian, it's more of a values proposition.

Does that answer your question? I know I didn't really talk about SEO — because the SEO work we do just reflects that broader distinctiveness for us.

Patrick Hathaway

Mhmm. Yeah. I guess the part I'm interested in is: do you have the same sort of value metrics that Harry was talking about within your ecosystem? Or do you not think about it in that way?

Jessie Wilms

We do think about loyalty a lot, and engagement time — those two together. Like, are people coming back to a particular type of journalism that we do? For example, if we have a big-name brand author, are people coming to that from search? Are people actively seeking out this content, or are they consuming it passively when they get to our homepage? Yeah, we definitely use depth of reading as a metric for how much people value the content. But that's not specific to the Guardian — I think that's true as a metric across publications.

Patrick Hathaway

Okay, cool. Right. So then — let's now think about the inevitable AI bit.

Does a paywall protect you from AI summarisation? Or expose you to more? Does being free make you more visible to AI? Or more disposable? I'm really interested to know how you think about AI in relation to paywalls specifically. Harry, you start.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Does anything help? I'm not sure the paywall's been particularly helpful. I think for most publishers over the last ten years, what do you do? You work with different people who syndicate your content. Your content is just out there. We know they've used the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive, to get everything. I'm not sure it does help in that way.

It does in the manner of: will people still pay for your content? I don't think anybody was paying for your content just for information anyway. People were paying because they think it's good and it adds value to their lives, and they care about it and the people writing it. Which I really hope — and I think Barry's talked about this before — I really hope that in the near future people become more comfortable paying for news. Obviously in the UK we pay for the BBC anyway — you don't think of it as that, but we do. And we are, as a country, I think, relatively low on the percentage of people who actively pay for news.

But people are willing to pay. And I think people will have to become more comfortable paying for news. Paywalls will only increase because there just isn't another particularly viable business model. And a pound of subscriber revenue is so much better than a pound of any other revenue because it's repeatable. If you're being audited or trying to sell a company, a pound of advertising revenue just pales in comparison.

So the subscription paywall does protect you. I don't think it really protects you from your content being eaten by machines, to be honest. I think they're just too greedy. You block everything as best you can — particularly training data stuff if you have deals, and it's different. But yeah — it does and it doesn't, is my way of describing it.

Patrick Hathaway

What's your thoughts, Jessie?

Jessie Wilms

Yeah. I think for us it's sort of the same but in reverse. Being totally free doesn't necessarily make you — like, nothing is actually going to protect you from Google changing what they want to show in search results. That's the truth.

Having a paywall, or having a really strong revenue model, is the thing that'll actually sustain your business long term. And I think audience and SEO editors need to be separate from the business in that we're not going to cover something because commercial wants to run an ad against it — that sort of church-and-state principle is age-old and still applies. But we do also need to recognise that part of our jobs is making sure the organisation is putting resourcing behind things that are going to sustain the business.

Demonstrating value to readers is something that audience and SEO editors are instrumental for. Because if we're not doing something that's better than the AI overview, why would people support us? Give us their time, energy, or attention? So I think: I don't know that any revenue model is going to protect publishers from AI overviews or AI mode. But having that strategic thinking is really important.

Patrick Hathaway

Yeah. It's also, obviously, you want Googlebot to consume your content for search and Discover. But when Google becomes mostly AI as well, it's going to be very, very difficult. So I do actually want to dig into that — you just mentioned it, and Barry had put it as a comment earlier, so I'm going to turn it into a question.

So Barry's words — [from his LinkedIn post approximately a month ago]: "It's become absolutely necessary for publishers to block all bots by default, ideally at the CDN layer, and only allow access to specified bots that deliver a positive value exchange (like Googlebot). Having an open, crawlable website is the same as having a store without walls, without security of any sort, and with no repercussions for theft. Because that's what this is — theft."

So I just want to talk about the technical side of that. Is this feasible?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

It's exactly what the Telegraph does. Give or take. I think it's the only option available to you, really. You have to own your stuff. You have to protect what you have. If you're a publisher who's creating commodity content that you can find elsewhere, you've got bigger problems anyway. Unless you can figure out a route to becoming valuable — either way, this is what you have to do. You have to protect yourself. Again, the problem is doing all of this costs more money and time. But it is the only answer as far as I'm concerned, to survive through this period until people will actually pay for stuff.

Jessie Wilms

Yeah. And I think — just to re-up Harry's point about finding the path to value — figuring out what makes you really valuable to readers is the challenge for all of us. If search traffic continues to fall off a cliff, specifically that commodity traffic that people relied on, what are you actually doing and how are you actually showing up for people in their lives?

Barry — in his "Google Zero" post, I think — alluded to the fact that a lot of publications are really going to struggle, and probably some publications are going to die. Obviously, that's sad from a journalism perspective. Having fewer journalists writing and publishing content is bad. Having fewer journalists employed at sites — whether you're doing commodity content or not — is net negative.

That said, having newsrooms that are really clear on what value they deliver to readers, I think, is a net positive. So it's the balance between those two things. Everything is just getting harder. Reaching people is just getting harder. But it's sort of the reality that we face.

And then Barry's comment about subscriptions being popular — yeah. The path to value is the thing to take away and go from there.

Patrick Hathaway

Awesome. I think we've got time for one more question. So — back on paywalls. By paywalling, don't you sacrifice reference links from AI conversations? When you spend time in AI conversations and click through to resources — does the paywall remove that channel? Do you care?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

These things are just not built to send referral traffic. They are designed — think about what made Google a good value exchange. There was an obvious one: we will organise the world's information, and we will make it easier for you to find the good stuff. That broadly worked. What these guys have done is organised the world's information in a different way so they don't have to send you anywhere. So they can answer it.

So no. What paywalling does is it does reduce the amount of engagement, shares, and links you get. It does reduce your reach. It gives you more value as a business. None of this stuff matters outside of making money for your business broadly.

I wouldn't frame it in that way. And we don't really know that much about how each of these individual LLMs use this stuff. So yeah — I almost wouldn't worry about it. I would really focus on how you create something that people will pay for, and kind of don't worry about the rest.

Jessie Wilms

Mhmm. Yeah. [Note to Jojo: Jessie referenced a survey piece here about prompting the same query a thousand times and getting different answers — something like "we asked the same prompt a thousand times and got a thousand different answers." She was going to link it in the chat. Please verify authors — possibly Kevin Indig?]

I think — to Harry's earlier point — the money that you get from reader revenue (which is what we call it at the Guardian), the money that you get from a paywall, is just more valuable. It's more consistent. It's a sign of loyalty. It's people putting up their hand and saying: I value what you do and I want to support it. And that is an active interest, in comparison to getting a million page views on a story and getting advertising revenue trickle in. So your reader revenue model is going to drive more sustainable revenue that's going to keep the lights on long term.

Patrick Hathaway

Amazing. Okay, well that's all we've got time for today. Thanks everyone for watching, and huge thanks of course to Jessie and Harry for generously giving their time and expertise today. We will be emailing out the recording tomorrow to everyone who registered — so if you missed the start, don't worry, you can catch up. And we'll be back in June for our next webinar, which is about building websites so they are accessible to AI agents. So keep an eye on your inboxes for details of that one. Thanks again for watching, and we'll see you on the next one.

Jessie Wilms

Bye! Have a good day.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

Thank you, guys. Bye.

The guests

Harry Clarkson-Bennett is former SEO Director at The Telegraph and writes the Leadership in SEO Substack. His work focuses on commercial SEO thinking, micro-conversions, the long-term decline of evergreen content as a strategy, and what it means to run search inside a paywalled environment.

Jessie Willms is SEO Editor at The Guardian US and co-writes WTF is SEO?, a newsletter for news publishers. She covers audience loyalty, the subscriptions economy, Preferred Sources, and what SEO looks like when every article is free.

Hosted by Patrick Hathaway, co-founder of Sitebulb.