The slow and painful decline of search
Yeah, its gonna take awhile
Good morning.
I’m going to keep it short today.
My fiancee is going out of town for a week so that means two things:
I’m going to watch long movies she doesn’t like
I’m going to try to write as many pages in my novel as I can with the rest of alone time. Probably going to be a lighter week of sends next week.
Hope you all enjoy Final Four weekend (if you care). I went to the last “all chalk” Final Four in 2008 in San Antonio and saw Kansas beat Memphis in one of the all-time classic title games (thanks, Dad). We’ll see if this year ends up the same.
See you next time.
The story that caught my eye the most this week was this item from Sara Fischer at Axios looking at the decline of search referrals to the top 500 news and media websites over the last year while looking at the rise of referrals from AI chatbots.
From Fischer herself: “Traditional search traffic to the top 500 media and news websites in the U.S. dropped by more than 15% from an average of 5.3 million page referrals per publisher in May 2024 to an average of 4.5 million in February 2025.”
Referrals from AI chatbots increased by 2,100% over that same period according to Fischer’s data.
This is all a bit misleading because organic search still accounts for a total volume of over 2.3 billion referrals across those sites while AI chatbot referrals are about 6 million.
That’s the tricky thing to square right now: Organic search traffic is definitely declining, but it's a slow painful decline. It’s not a sudden drop like what’s happened on Social over the past 18-24 months.
I’m pretty confident Google is going to be a big thing for at least a little while longer. Just a hunch. Verbs tend to stick around.
Organic Search still makes up the bulk of traffic for so many places and you still kind of have to play the Google game—even though longer term it may not pay off.
The idea is to create and update content so that it is of unique service to audiences but also does what it needs to in order to rank highly in Google or to be cited in AI overviews.
Guess the moral of the story is you have to balance your SEO with your GEO and also create AI-proof content and experiences that people will want to pay for even as accessing information and services becomes easier than it already is.
Totally simple. Very straightforward and easy to do.
One hungry for context quote
“According to ‘explainer’ newsbrand Vox the rate of increase for new paying members grew 350% in the two months following Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in January. Although Vox declined to share an exact number of paying members, editor-in-chief and publisher Swati Sharma told Press Gazette ‘people are really hungry for the context’ amid the high rate of actions taken by Trump in the early weeks of his second presidency. The title invites readers to support it with payments of between $5 and $50 per month. Members benefit from exclusive perks and unlimited online access. Sharma said: ‘I think they really want clarity in this moment, because there’s just so much noise and so much going on, it’s kind of hard to keep up with what’s happening.’”
This one is from a Press Gazette story on Vox’s subscription strategy. There’s not a ton of enlightening information in the piece but it's a good example of some nuts and bolts talk around how resource and revenue strategy at a more established digital media company.
More links for you
Speaking of revenue models, Charlotte Klein had a good piece in New York magazine about how The Guardian is finding success without a paywall through the donations of readers.
Brian Morrissey talked to Rachel Oppenheim, the chief revenue officer of Semafor, about their business strategy and thinking of their audience as “stakeholders.” Interesting conversation.
More “broadcasts of the 20th century shall pass” links
The New York Times ran a profile of former Meet The Press host Chuck Todd timed to the launch of his new podcast network.
Jim Acosta spoke to co-founder and CEO of Substack Chris Best about his move to Substack.
AdWeek has a list of who has explored buying TikTok. And The Information reported Donald Trump is trying to make a deal with ByteDance to allow them to keep their stake in TikTok ahead of the maybe but not likely ban on Saturday. Hmmm, he seems to have a lot of other things on his plate right now.
The People vs. Algorithms guys talked about the idea of “taste” on the podcast. This was a little shaggy and meandering but thinking about where the arbiters of taste are right now is an interesting exercise. Brian Morrissey expanded on his thoughts in their newsletter. I thought this was good: “Magazines were tastemakers in a world of scarcity. That tastemaking function has been outsourced to the influencer/creator class and more broadly to algorithms. It used to take work to have taste. My friend Brian Braiker has great taste in music. He’s a Brooklyn DJ dad. He has a point of view on what makes great music and worked at it through trips to record stores. Spotify’s algorithmic playlists have mostly replaced that function for most people, although I still trust Braiker’s suggestions.” For the record: Over time I’ve learned that I have absolutely no taste. I just like the things that I like.
"Verbs tend to stick around" is a good line.