Traffic is dying as a media metric. What comes next is more important

In the AI era, the winners won’t be the publishers with the most clicks. They’ll be the ones that give audiences something algorithms can’t replace.

[Images: Adobe Stock]

Pete Pachal is a journalist and the creator of Media Copilot, a newsletter and podcast that examines how AI is changing media, journalism, and the news.

Day by day there’s more evidence that AI is eating up the media world. A recent report from Growtika, a self-described SEO and AI search agency, analyzed data from the search analytics platform Ahrefs to show that traffic to many tech media sites is way down over the past couple of years.

Hardest hit were Digital Trends (down 97%), ZDNet (down 90%), and The Verge (down 85%). Even the most seemingly resilient publications (Mashable was down only 30% and CNET 47%, both Ziff-Davis properties) took significant hits. Some of these reductions are no doubt exaggerated—Growtika........

© Fast Company