As publishers ourselves, SHE Media (and Penske Media Corporation, our parent company) are very aware that October 2025 brought some new developments and changes in the industry that have caused publishers to be on edge.
AI Search - Google Overviews
As more browsers incorporate AI into Search, we've seen a drop in referral traffic from search engines to publisher websites. Now more than ever, audiences can find quick answers to their Search queries right on the landing page of Google. This has led to a rise in zero-click searches where the user does not click through and navigate to publishers’ sites. Across the internet, we've seen a drop in web traffic for both small, medium, and large publishers across every vertical. Penske Media (our parent company) has sued Google about their AI Overview, as it's negatively impacted web traffic and publisher earnings.
At SHE Media, we recently hosted a webinar about Google's AI Overviews, where we shared updates, best practices, and tools that can help our publishers navigate the new AI Search landscape and retain their traffic and audience.
Watch the webinar here: https://www.shemedia.com/audience-development/the-increasing-role-of-ai-in-seo-and-publishers-what-publishers-need-to-know
Our industry is always changing and evolving, and publishers who can adapt to trends while staying authentic to their audiences will survive and thrive. Right now, it is important to learn how to optimize your site and content for the emerging AI Search Engine landscape.
Drop in Pinterest Traffic Quality
One of the other shifts that we've noticed is that Pinterest referral traffic is becoming deprioritized due to a drop in the traffic quality. Years ago, when Facebook began to boom with paid promotion, we saw CPMs decrease for Facebook as a traffic source, as they could no longer guarantee that traffic coming from Facebook was high-quality. Pinterest has begun to show this same trend of low-value traffic. This could be due to a proliferation of paid promotions, unreliable and unengaged audiences, and a decrease in attached CPM for traffic driven by Pinterest.
This is why we recommend promoting your content across multiple platforms and diversifying your traffic sources, so that as trends shift with the quality of referral traffic from different platforms fluctuates, it does not significantly impact your earning potential.
What Can You Do?
Optimize your site for AI Search engines. Watch the latest SHE Media Collective Webinar on Navigating AI Search and follow the steps and apply the tools that our Director of Publisher Engagement, Jiji Ugboma, lays out.
Post Consistently. Don't worry about posting daily, or multiple times a day - just make sure that if you post on Fridays, you always post on Fridays. Stay consistent. Avoid lists. Tell your story!
Do Not Use AI to Generate Content. Why not AI? Sure, AI creates posts that look to be high quality, but in doing so, you are taking away what makes your content unique. If you create content with AI, search engines and monetization platforms will catch on eventually, and you will lose both the trust of your readers and your advertisers. Google's helpful content updates were designed to prioritize unique content - so be yourself!
Also, avoid AI-generated images: Depending on your site's vertical, using AI-generated images can hurt your site's growth. Visitors don't want to see AI-generated food images. They want to see what a dish will actually look like when made. So if you're in the food blog business, for example, make sure you do your own photography.
Diversify your Traffic Sources/Promote through a variety of platforms- including using video content to direct people to your website for things like recipes, reviews, etc. And find ways to cross-promote your content on your platform. Share popular posts in a sidebar, prioritize internal linking, and use content recommendation widgets. (SHE Media can offer you the use of Hindsight, which will promote your own content, or you can use our partnership with PubExchange, which can recommend your content across other sites in the Collective).
Don't be afraid to try new ad products - SHE Media now offers high-impact ad units through Kargo. They're interstitial ads that pop up as people navigate away, as well as some larger billboard ads. We have enabled this across the network
What Should You Avoid?
Don't try to appeal to everyone. It's tempting to try to make your content more general or to follow search trends constantly to create content multiple times a day. But your site's identity is still the most important thing.
Focus on your voice, your niche. Write the posts that you would want to read, and like-minded audiences will find you.
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