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

Publishers have been losing search traffic for years. Is everyone else next?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett (SEO Director, The Telegraph) and Jessie Willms (SEO Editor, The Guardian US) come at this from genuinely different positions: one inside a paywall, one without. But they may share an unpopular view: that AI search is getting blamed for a problem that was already well underway, and that misdiagnosis is what's actually costing publishers right now.

This isn't a conversation just for publisher SEOs. If your traffic is built on search, what's happening to news sites is a preview of what's coming for you.

What we'll cover:

• Where publisher traffic is actually going, and how to separate AI-driven losses from longer-running behavioural shifts

• Why a decade of commodity evergreen content was always going to run out of road

• What each model — paywalled and free — forces SEOs to be genuinely good at

• Which diversification channels are producing real loyalty vs which ones are theatre

• What to measure instead of clicks, and how to make that case internally

Date: May 13, 4pm GMT (11am ET)

Register via the form on the right. Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the recording.

The guests

Harry Clarkson-Bennett is 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.