However, Raptive does not consider SGE results displayed above or instead of the traditional organic link as “new opportunities for content to be discovered,” said McCollum.

Diversifying traffic and content expertise

Publishers are increasingly looking into managing their intellectual property, either by legally defending or monetizing their content, said Steven Read, adMarketplace’s chief product officer.

A growing number of publishers, such as The Associated Press, have arranged licensing deals with OpenAI for its data in exchange for compensation. Meanwhile, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over AI use of copyrighted content.   

“Other publishers are also exploring options to sell [their] content via deals to OpenAI or other large language models,” Read said.

Elsewhere, publishers are taking a pragmatic approach to their editorial strategy, diversifying traffic from newsletters and subscriptions and, in some cases, investing in their own generative AI chatbots to attract traffic.

Money.com gets 40% of its traffic from Google Search, according to CEO Greg Powel, a former Google employee. The publisher is reworking its website format by including snippets of content deployed in a question-and-answer format, answering people’s questions related to a product or service, ultimately, to increase traffic from SGE.

“The idea is that Google would crawl and incorporate that into SGE potentially,” said Powel.

Meanwhile, publishers with less editorial flexibility are exploring paid search and social ads to grab traffic, said McCollum.

Publisher clients at Collective Measures are gearing up for mid-funnel SGE queries, which include comparison questions for products and services. They aim to rank for questions that SGE has not yet answered, as traffic for top-level queries is expected to shrink.

“It’s important to try to get into the SGE result, as well as to rank for those things that SGE isn’t showing,” said Katie Tweedy, associate director of SEO and content marketing at Collective Measures.

Ultimately, it’s all contingent on people’s behavior. In the SGE environment, ads are displayed toward the bottom of the AI-generated response, unlike the current experience, where sponsored ads typically appear at the top.

“Potentially, people won’t click on ads as much, and that cannibalizes revenue for Google in a big way,” said Powel. “If Google makes a lot less money when they show SGE, I will hypothesize that they might not show [SGE] for that query.”