Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

Next steps with zero-click: From awareness to action

In MediaVoices’ recent Zero-click report, responses to Woodwing’s survey show that almost 98% of respondents had heard of the zero-click phenomenon, and 54% were very familiar. However, Managing Director John Fong points out that being aware of something and acting upon it are two different things. “You need to be aware of it, but you need to be on top of it,” he says, in this extract from the report.

A call to action

For John, the rise of zero-click is an evolution of the search landscape, and he uses a sporting analogy to illustrate. He explains that in Malaysia, where he’s based, pickleball is challenging tennis. “A lot of tennis courts have been converted to pickleball courts,” he explains. “That doesn’t mean that tennis is dead, just that people have more options.”

He says the data around the impact of zero-click searches may have been “a little blown out of proportion,” but that it is crucial for publishers to understand how the different segments of their audience are discovering and accessing their content.

“Traditional, organic search is still the highest results there, but there is a decline, especially when you look at the APAC region where internet consumption is dominated by mobile devices.”

He says when half of your phone screen is populated by agentic AI it is bound to reduce click throughs. “I don’t think it will ever go to zero, but now there is this part that we need to account for. If publishers have heard of this, seen this or experienced this, they should act on it.”

Start with your audience

Publishing’s ultimate response to the rise of zero-click search will have to include some clever technical fixes around AI optimisation and automation. However, the starting point for any effective publishing strategy has to be meeting audience needs.

John worries that some publishers, lost in an addiction to search-driven clicks, currently take their audiences for granted. He says: “They rely too much on search engines. As a publisher, a content producer, you need to own your audience. Whatever comes next, AI or AEO, you won’t have to worry because you actually know your audience. You know what they want and you can serve them directly.”

SEO Consultant Clara Soteras agrees, questioning the effort publishers expend on drive-by traffic. “We try to catch so many clicks… only for one shot. We have users that only visit us [once]. They find this news or this content on the feed, but they don’t know who the publisher is.”

For her, developing brand awareness is every bit as important as SEO. The direct traffic enjoyed by a strong brand bypasses search engines completely, but is also increasingly important in maximising AI citations and overall authority.

Clara says a brand presence on social media will have a continuing role to play; despite declining direct referrals, Google has announced greater inclusion of social media metrics in deciding content authority. Clara says: “Google is using these sources, these signals, to understand the authority of the brand or the creator.”

Brand awareness will be of vital importance if publishers are to be able to take advantage of Google’s rollout of the Preferred Sources feature, which will allow users to select trusted media brands to appear more often in the AI Overviews they are served.

Meet user needs

Clara also points to the user needs model developed by Dmitry Shishkin as a strong framework for building brand loyalty. “If we think of the user needs model, we understand that publishers and media can create a community, can offer the opportunity to be part of something, and share knowledge with people that have the same interests.”

SEO Consultant Barry Adams believes the current AI disruption should be seen as an opportunity for publishers to refocus on their audiences’ needs. He tells publishers now is the perfect time to, “re-evaluate what their purpose is, what their value as a publisher actually is, and more importantly, understand what their audience wants.”

He thinks too many publishers are confused over who their customers actually are. “They think advertisers are the customers,” he says, “which I think is the most critical strategic mistake a publisher can make. Advertisers help make you money, absolutely, but they’re not your customers. They’re enablers.”

Echoing Clara, Barry says the most successful publishers maintain a focus on what their audience needs from them. “Don’t worry about the intermediaries. Don’t worry about the channels. Make sure you deliver maximum value for the audience, and don’t be afraid to let people know what you’re doing.”

“The big news brands out there – the ones that are actually doing quite well, even the ones who went behind hard paywalls – they seem to be doing all right because they’ve never lost sight of what their purpose is for
their audience.”

Build a business beyond clicks

Barry Adams says he genuinely believes a lot of publishers don’t actually understand their business model and what they should be doing to grow their audiences. They have fallen into the trap of chasing traffic, writing content to ‘tick an algorithmic box’ rather than actually adding value.

Too many doubled down on commodity content – product reviews, lifestyle content and how-to guides – because it performed well in Google. “That’s now come tumbling down,” he explains.

Barry believes these are the publishers that are ‘terrified’ of zero-click. “They don’t realise why they got Google traffic in the first place. They don’t know why what they have been doing worked or didn’t work,” he says.

The danger is that they compound their mistakes by stopping investment in search optimisation. “Those same publishers then go and put more money into Facebook or Instagram or ChatGPT optimisations, which send fractions of a percent of the traffic to their website that Google does.”

Clara Soteras recognises the issue and says it is difficult to change the mindset of publishers who have worked for years with volume metrics as their lead KPIs.

She thinks this is driven largely by established advertising metrics – page views and unique users – and that it will be difficult for publishers to change this on their own. “We need to work together to understand the system because obviously advertisements are sold on these metrics. We need to change it.”

Clara says some of the larger companies that she works with are starting to understand that things are changing and they are starting to develop different kinds of partnerships and sponsorship deals. But, she says: “It is difficult for local publishers and the smallest publishers. This is something that we need to work on and we need to help them.”

This is an extract from our report The Zero Click Content Shift.

This report was researched and written in association with WoodWing.

WoodWing empowers publishing ecosystems by uniting technology with deep industry expertise. For 25+ years, we’ve helped teams create, manage, and deliver content across print and digital channels with greater efficiency and consistency. Our portfolio spans multi-channel production, digital assets, quality, knowledge, and information management. Founded in 2000, we operate globally from our headquarters in the Netherlands.  

Learn more about WoodWing’s publishing solutions at woodwing.com