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 compared each publication’s peak month with traffic in January 2026, which doesn’t account for seasonal reductions—but no one’s disputing the overall trend, or who’s to blame: AI.

At first glance, the numbers appear to reinforce the idea that the bottom is rapidly falling out from beneath the media industry. But that’s overly simplistic, and it fails to take into account that publishers have seen this trend for years, and many have been adapting around it. The Verge is actually a great example of this: Not only was it out early in questioning what AI does to content, but it also introduced a paywall in late 2024, part of a larger, four-point strategy. So traffic decline doesn’t necessarily mean business decline.

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The Verge is an example of something else that’s important in the AI era: having a strong brand with a loyal audience. The publication has been synonymous with tech news, commentary, and analysis since its debut in 2011. Many tech brands choose to break their news there. That credibility has influence in what appears in AI answers, which tend to favor journalistic content above other types—a point that a recent Gartner report on the communications industry hammered home.

So while it’s easy to see AI as a traffic destroyer, the flip side of that is it’s an audience qualifier—the people who find your brand through an AI summary are clearly deeply engaged. In other words, they’re probably the most willing to pay for your content, and The Verge has given them that opportunity.

But The Verge has had a strong brand for 15 years. The audience is clear and already engaged. For many publications, that might not be as true, and the Growtika numbers should be a wake-up call for them to better understand their brand, their audience, and even what business they’re in. With AI now fully in the picture as the ultimate information synthesizer, publishers have to understand what they’re layering on top of that information that only they—specifically, the humans that work for them—can provide.

Journalists tell stories because humans are storytellers. More importantly, they’re story listeners—audiences will seek out publications and writers with voices that resonate with them, AI or no AI. The content that doesn’t do that, by contrast, has less value and is easily substituted by AI. For most publishers, this means favoring analysis, opinion, and scoops. Aggregated news (i.e. stuff broken elsewhere, or broad announcements) is less valuable, though with a caveat: It’s difficult for a publication to appear authoritative if they don’t cover “big” news on their beat. But for that to be worthwhile, it requires that:

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