Publishers who have moved away from AI-generated content are outperforming a broader industry in decline, according to a panel of Australian publishing executives at IAB Australia's Discovery AI and Search Summit yesterday.
Scott Purcell, co-founder of Man of Many, said the publication had seen 49% search growth since February, a period in which newspaper traffic globally had fallen 33% year-on-year, with further declines expected.
“We've seen a 49% growth now getting searched since February, which is pretty rare,” said Purcell.
"For the broader industry, it's not as positive."
Purcell attributed Man of Many's growth to a decision to ban AI-generated content from publication.
"I think one of the key things is that we've banned the publishing of AI content,” he said.
“We make sure everything published is human-written. We use AI in the preparation of our content and research, but we make sure everything comes from our expert journalists."
Man of Many's article on the best Australian boot brands was up 600% year-on-year, a result Purcell credited to the kind of first-hand experience AI could not replicate.
"We've actually researched it. That's the valuable information that AI can't produce itself. It can't wear the product. Can't try it. Also, AI can't break news. You need a real journalist on the ground to do that."
Despite the growth, Purcell cautioned against over-relying on any single traffic channel.
AI referrals currently made up less than 1% of Man of Many's overall traffic, while Google retained a 90% share of online search against AI models.
"Google still has a 90% market share of overall online search. AI models are about 3% to 5%. So, putting that into perspective, it's really important to still focus on the core fundamentals of SEO and marketing.
“For us, our AI referrals make up about 0.08 of a percent, so less than 1% of our overall traffic."
A shift Purcell attributed to a deliberate focus on first-party data and subscriptions.
"We're really focused on building that first-party data and getting people subscribed."
The other panellists agreed that human-generated, experience-driven content was the clearest differentiator publishers had against LLMs, but each diverged in their experience of traffic fluctuations.
For the Guardian, the impact has been less about volume and more about predictability.
Zoe Featherstone, head of product, strategic projects and platform partnerships, said the reliable traffic channels publishers had spent years optimising for, were now fragmenting across multiple touch points.
"I would say, from the perspective of Guardian Australia, that change has been less about traffic and more about predictability,” said Featherstone.
“We obviously used to have a pretty reliable highway. We optimised for that specific gateway, and now search discovery is happening across so many different touch points. We’ve got AI platforms, social algorithms, search in multiple different contexts."
The Guardian's response has been to deepen its direct relationship with readers, not just as an audience retention strategy, but as a way of creating consented advertising environments.
Featherstone said registered experiences, newsletters, apps and podcasts were central to that approach.
"I think for the Guardian, we have trusted, fact-based, original journalism that people, when a specific news moment hits, will invariably come to the source, a trusted source, to validate information they're seeing, whether that's on socials, in a summary, wherever it might be,” she said.
"We reach 35% of all online Australians, and we still kind of need that top-of-funnel flow of users coming through, that is really important to us.
“Having a direct relationship, having registered experiences with our app, with newsletters, with podcasts — we're learning more about them so that we can personalise our marketing at scale, and we're also creating consented environments for advertisers."
Are Media has taken a similar approach, increasing it’s investment in human first community initiatives.
Clare Morton, head of product and strategy, said the publication had noticed that a long-running article on how often to change bed sheets, an evergreen traffic performer, had suddenly dipped with the rise of LLMs.
Rather than rewriting it for SEO, Are Media engaged its human audience directly.
“An article that performs month after month, year after year, forever, is how often should I change my bed sheets? It constantly works, right?” she said.
“But this is kind of the point of it, right? It stopped, and we were sort of wondering why this quality information suddenly stopped performing.
“So, we really leant into that strategy of what we wanted to do and place the community at the centre of the content that we're creating, so we went to social and we're like, guys, ‘how often should you change your bed sheets?’ and we aggregated that information.”
“Instead of rewriting the article for search, we looked at pulling the feedback from the users and from our community back into the article, and that really gave that article a more useful lens and a distinctive approach.
“Obviously, the traffic started increasing and the performance of the article started working again.”
Morton said the lesson extended beyond a single article.
The content LLMs were favouring was precisely what publishers had always produced, trusted, authoritative, niche content, rather than brand-owned messages.
"That's all the type of content that LLMs are favouring over the brand-owned messages, which, as Scott said, are a minority signal. The biggest brand doesn't necessarily mean you're going to show up in LLMs,” said Morton.
Nick Splitter, general manager at Zero Digital Sports, said the audience for publisher content was not shrinking, rather it was dispersing.
"I don't think the audience is shrinking at all. In fact, it's probably getting bigger,” said Splitter.
“The difference now is that the audience is in different places, and you've got to find those different places to talk to the different segments of your audience.
“You can't just rely on social to deliver 100% traffic. You can't rely on search to deliver 100% traffic. You've got to be in all these different environments."
Splitter said the same logic applied to the content itself.
Breaking news, exclusive reporting and timely coverage remained the core of what publishers offered, and it was the one category AI could not enter.
"Our bread and butter is news, breaking news, exclusive news. That's stuff that can't be created by AI and LLMs,” he said.
“It can't be taken over in that environment. People still come to us for that really timely, relevant content."
Across the panel, measurement was also evolving to reflect the new reality. away from raw traffic volume and toward engagement quality.
Purcell said Man of Many had moved its focus to percentage of signed-in users, revenue per signed-in user and time on site, while still tracking headline numbers.
“It's evolved a little bit,” said Purcell.
“We're more focused on things like percentage of signed-in users, revenue per sign-in user, time on site, those sorts of numbers.
“But still, the top-line ones for us are still really important. There are headline numbers, so it hasn't changed too much.”
Splitter said Zero Digital Sports measurement tended to gravitate towards engagement rather than eyeballs.
“Today, it's more around you know average of average time video view or podcast listened to, open rates, click through rates,” he said.
“So it's more about the value of the audience and the value of their interaction or engagement rather than the pure volume play, and I think that will just continue from a brand perspective, brand measuring perspective.”
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