AI didn’t kill the click, it changed who gets paid
I’m going to start with the part that’s hardest to debate because it’s not a theory, it’s my browser analytics.
I’m a volunteer independent journalist. I’m not running a newsroom with a burn rate and a board. I don’t have to justify headcount to anyone. If I’m lucky, I get to rely on a core of returning readers who still come back out of habit, loyalty, or sheer muscle memory.
And yet: organic traffic is a fraction of what it was two years ago. Not a bit down. Not seasonal or cycling. A different reality.
If that is what it looks like when you’re small and stubborn and doing it for the love of it, imagine what it looks like when you have payroll.
The SEO era was about monetizing content, right now is about keeping the lights on
For most of the last two decades, the question that shaped editorial strategy was basically: “How can we monetize our content?”
Yes, it was messy. Yes, it created incentives we all love to hate. But it was at least a coherent exchange. You publish. You rank. People click. You monetize those clicks with ads, subscriptions, affiliates, sponsorships, whatever.
Now we’re drifting into a different question: “How can we keep monetizing our content to pay bills and wages when discovery happens inside a black box?”
Because whether you call it AI Overviews, AI Mode, agents, conversational search, or “a better user experience”, the direction is obvious: more answers are being delivered where the user already is, with less need to leave the platform.
People will talk about a panic, I’m not going to do it, I wrote an entire piece about fearmongering in AI for a reason. But the unease people feel? The stress response? The sense that the math is getting uglier by the month?
That part is rational.
Did people really stop caring?
Over the past few days, I have been trying to articulate the problem without pretending it’s a moral drama. For the time being, I have landed on: zero-click isn’t killing journalism because people stopped caring. It’s killing journalism because someone else is answering the question in the place where the money used to change hands.
When you’re the one producing reporting, writing, editing, fact-checking, and taking the reputational risk, being cited feels flattering. But citations don’t pay wages.
The click economy was flawed, but it had a simple property: attention could be converted into money. The emerging citation economy has a different property: attention can be converted into distribution and status while the revenue conversion gets weaker, murkier, or disappears.
You can win visibility and still lose the ability to fund the work.
Now, before someone jumps in with “But publishers are signing deals with LLM platforms!!1!eleven”: yes. Some are.
Paid licensing deals and revenue-share programs exist, but they’re not universal plumbing. They’re negotiated paths for a subset of publishers, usually the ones with leverage, archives, and must-have brands. For everyone else, opening their content to AI still mostly means be crawlable, be usable, and hope attribution turns into something you can pay salaries with.
And even when a deal is paid, it often behaves like a backroom replacement for lost referrals, not a clean new market where more citations equals more money. The commercial logic is “we’ll pay for access because we need legal/quality content,” not “we’ll compensate you every time we answer instead of sending a click”. The user still stays in the interface. That’s the structural shift.
If that sounds abstract, it isn’t. It shows up as hiring freezes, shrinking editorial teams, fewer original investigations, and more pressure to publish whatever pays.
Editorial houses shrinking is not even the worst of it
We work with editorial houses. We see the strain. Some of it is cyclical, some of it is self-inflicted, and a lot of it is structural, but the part I don’t see enough people talking about is what the squeeze does to decision-making.
When referral traffic becomes less reliable and ad revenue can’t cover the gap, the question stops being “how do we make great journalism and monetize it?” and starts being “how do we keep the lights on?”
And the fastest lever to do just that is rarely beautiful.
What I expect to see, what I already see in early signals, is a gravity toward opening the floodgates: more advertorials, more sponsored content dressed in editorial clothing, more “brand stories” that conveniently land on the exact pain points of the readers you used to serve with reporting, more acceptance of anything that puts a fat stack of money on the table right now, because rent is due and people want to get paid.
You can have a code of ethics. You can also have payroll. And if you work in comms, you should care about this even if you’ve never written a headline in your life. Because when the incentives push outlets toward pay-to-play content, the cost doesn’t just land on journalism. It lands on trust, and when trust erodes, the holy grail that used to be “earned media” stops meaning what it used to mean.
Everyone is trying to game a system they can’t see.
In SEO-land, we pretended the algorithm was a neutral referee, but at least you could observe the field. You could measure rankings. You could measure clicks. You could A/B headlines. You could optimize internal linking. You could buy media and see the curve.
An entire ecosystem formed around it. Tools, agencies, consultants, dashboards, playbooks.
Now the center of gravity is shifting toward GEO and being cited by LLMs. The problem is not that this is impossible. The problem is that it’s opaque. What gets cited, when, and why can change without warning. There’s no stable, universal explanation layer. There’s barely a shared vocabulary that isn’t half marketing.
That uncertainty does something predictable: it creates a market for certainty.
Not public certainty. Not the kind you can plan a budget around. The private kind—pilots, partnerships, licensing conversations, vendor stacks, and a growing layer of consultants selling “GEO readiness” to teams that are already resource-starved.
The result is an information asymmetry: a few players get negotiated pathways and privileged access, and everyone else is left optimizing in the fog.
So what do you do if you’re not a big player?
I will not pretend I have the solution for you. I don’t deal in silver bullets, I don’t sell “ten steps to” guides that taste like snake oil. But I can still see pragmatic levers that don’t depend on begging the distribution layer for mercy.
The mindset shift is this: if the web is moving toward answers without clicks, then your job is to build revenue streams and audiences that aren’t fully downstream of referral traffic.
If that’s the diagnosis, then the obvious question becomes: what survives when referral traffic no longer does?
- Direct distribution becomes a survival skill:
If you don’t own the relationship with your audience, you are renting it. That means newsletters, memberships, communities, and formats where people come back on purpose.
This isn’t romantic. It’s not “build a tribe”. It’s simply the only traffic you control.
If you’re in comms, this matters too: the outlets you’ll still be able to pitch a year from now will be the ones with an audience they can actually reach without asking a platform for permission.
- Diversified monetization isn’t a luxury anymore:
A lot of big media in Germany already took steps in that general direction years ago: events are not a side quest, they’re a revenue pillar. Think of things like eponymous conferences and industry days (I am just going to name drop Luna Days as it is the freshest example in my mental inbox).
Yes, it’s budget. Yes, it’s risk, but you can minimize risk with boring mechanics: pre-sales before committing to venues, tiered sponsorship packages, partner-led programming, and smaller recurring formats before you go for the flagship.
The point isn’t that everyone should become an event company, but that revenue that doesn’t require a click is suddenly a lot more attractive. And it doesn’t have to be events. It can be services, licensing, training, or products built around your expertise.
- Stop worshipping the wrong measurement:
If your only success metric is referral sessions, you will keep making decisions that optimize for a world that is disappearing.
You need to prove value in a way that survives black-box distribution: brand demand, repeat audience, subscriber growth, direct traffic, downstream conversions.
This is uncomfortable because it’s slower, and it can’t always be traced back to a single keyword. But it’s also closer to reality.
A grim outlook?
The platforms aren’t going back to blue links. Publishers shouldn’t build strategies that assume they will.
The organizations most likely to survive won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest SEO teams. They’ll be the ones that own their audience, diversify how they make money, and measure success beyond referral traffic.
The citation economy is already here. The question isn’t whether you like it, it’s whether your business model was built for it.
