Generative AI significantly impacts news media companies in every department, and news publishers are looking at how to leverage the changing technology to stay competitive and relevant.

As platforms like Google and Bing harness GenAI, they’re changing the search experience, which means publishers must pivot, too.

During the Webinar Future-proofing news in the GenAI era, INMA members heard from Edward Hyatt, director of newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal, who shared how publishers can build strategies around GenAI that will take them into the future.

Understanding SGE

One of the most disruptive advancements in search technology is Google’s search generative experience (SGE). Hyatt explained that SGE “is the next step in the road to zero-click search.” However, he clarified that SGE is still an experiment at this point, and users have to opt in through their Google experiments page.

SGE lives within the search results and uses GenAI to provide an overview of search topics without clicking on individual pages. It provides a block of text and then offers links at the bottom. That’s different from Bing’s Copilot, which provides lines of text with citations.

“In some ways, [Copilot] could be a more effective funnel back to your publications. But ultimately, from what I can see in the data, I’m not really seeing an increase in clicks from this type of experience via Bing,” he said.

Hyatt focused most of his presentation on Google, he said, because it still has more than 90% of the search engine market despite competition from Copilot, ChatGPT, Waldo, and others.

What SGE means for publishers

Becoming more discoverable in search depends upon creating content that is “more closely aligned to how people think, write, and search,” he said. “This becomes more and more important as we get deeper and deeper into the world of generative AI.”

It’s also the key to becoming more discoverable in search, regardless of the publication size: “The goal is to connect with an audience that is engaged in the topics that they’re interested in, that they care about, and that aligns with your business. And this is how you can take advantage of SGE and avoid its pitfalls.”

One of GenAI’s big pitfalls is that it pushes down news publishers in rankings because it paraphrases the answers to questions. It uses information from multiple sources to give users a response “so that they don’t have to click through.”

The challenge for publishers, Hyatt said, is to find ways to distinguish themselves from others in this ever-widening ocean of information. The answer, he said, lies in search intent.

“Search intent is the reason why someone is searching for something, and understanding what your audience and the potential audience in search cares about is tantamount to your success as a subscription business,” he said. “Finding those engaged readers where they are looking for news is key.”

Today, publishers must spend more time thinking about intent optimisation and creating strategies for GenAI search: “The key thing here is that quality news publishers need to lean into quality news content.”

Focus on depth, not breadth 

He pointed out that Google does a great job of summarising news content and Google wants high-quality content, so publishers should focus on creating the kind of content that will get noticed.

In recent years, Google has been clear about wanting to prioritise what it calls “helpful, reliable, people-first content” for search and has asked publishers to focus on topics they are experts in and have experience with. Its 2024 Core Algorithm and spam updates were designed to reduce low-quality content, such as content created to attract search engines rather than people.  

This means sticking with what they know instead of covering a broader range of topics: “If you’re a financial news organisation, then you should really try to focus on financial news. Whereas if I was a financial news organisation that decided I really want to get into health news or health advice content, Google doesn’t know you for that type of content.”

Hyatt recommended publishers focus on their brand and the type of content that their audience — present and future — will find invaluable. While commodity news is easy for GenAI to summarise and for other publishers to mirror, exclusive and high-quality content is not.

“Focus on core journalism investigations, scoops, exclusives, and deep, well-reported analysis is the answer to generative AI and building relationships with your readers,” he said. While jumping on the “trend of the day” might provide short-term boosts in readership, it doesn’t provide the kind of long-term gains and relationships publishers need.

Working with GenAI

Publishers who use GenAI to produce content must be diligent about ensuring readers know where the article came from.

“It’s really important to focus on the EEAT: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness,” Hyatt said.

Also essential is the knowledge that this is a long game, not a strategy of quick wins. SEO should be treated like a product that solves for SGE and AI-generated content, he said: “Tie your SEO practises back to your business goals, and that’s how you get things done.”

Then, Hyatt said, think about how to risk assess your business. This can be done in several ways, but he encouraged looking at SGE inclusion and how it is creeping into the types of queries or searches that each publisher is focused on.

“Research queries where SGE exists and analyse successful content,” Hyatt recommended. If you’re trying to get into a new area of coverage or looking to dive deeper into coverage areas that you focus on, focus and analyse the content that is already successful there and see what the differences are between their content and your content.”

Conducting keyword research and monitoring search traffic can help guide news content, he said. “I think the good news for you is that people really do care about news and they hunger for it. The question is, how can you provide more value?”

One way to provide value is to offer context about how a story will affect the user and what they care about, whether that’s their business or their route to work. And being consistently accurate and trustworthy is becoming more critical at a time when AI-generated content can provide misinformation or leave out important information.

“You really want to focus on building trust with your audience. If you’re in the business of providing content and news that can impact folks’ lives, you really want to hone in on those trust signals,” he said. “It’s really important to note that AI is so confidently incorrect. It’s more important than ever for you to be accurate.”

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