{"id":635975,"date":"2026-10-20T05:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T05:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/635975\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T05:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T05:32:11","slug":"inside-the-post-google-playbook-subscriptions-ai-and-team-reorgs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/635975\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the post-Google playbook: Subscriptions, AI and team reorgs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Publishers\u2019 hemming and hawing over the Google Zero post-search era has reached a fever pitch. Now, they\u2019re finally doing something about it.<\/p>\n

Companies like Axios, The Verge and Time have started rewriting their playbooks to prepare for a future in which Google isn\u2019t providing meaningful traffic.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re revamping subscription offerings, selling AI visibility products and restructuring their internal teams to survive in what could best be described as a search-pocalypse.<\/p>\n

Related Insights<\/p>\n

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Senior media reporter at Digiday Sara Guaglione and senior media editor Jessica Davies joined a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast to discuss the publisher investments that seem the most promising \u2014\u00a0as they were discussed at this year\u2019s Digiday Publishing Summit and the Digiday Media Strategies in London.<\/p>\n

Here are three ways publishers are trying to survive a post-Google world:\u00a0<\/p>\n

LLM subscriptions<\/p>\n

At the Digiday Publishing Summit (DPS) in September, Axios\u2019 chief revenue officer Jacquelyn Cameron shared a subscriber-first AI integration. The integration allows Axios subscribers to connect their subscription to AI tools and query Axios content through the chatbots rather than visiting the publisher\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

Subscription publishers have been scrambling to figure out how to monetize agentic audiences, said Davies. She added, \u201cAxios is the best example in terms of the detail that publishers have been willing to give on that so far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Team reorganizations\u00a0<\/p>\n

Also at DPS, Esther Cohen, director of audience and subscriptions at The Verge told Digiday that audience teams are being reorganized around specialists. Specialist areas include newsletters, platform engagement and audience analytics. The Verge has managed to expand the team over the past two years and avoided layoffs through the changes.<\/p>\n

The Verge isn\u2019t alone in its team restructuring. Politico\u2019s Francesca Barber stepped into a new role that combines product, audience and AI under one person. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal\u2019s head of digital Taneth Evans detailed new roles in the newsroom, including a new head of multimedia and head of shows.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPublishers, when they do these kind of things, it\u2019s like \u2018OK, this is a new era. This is real disruption. We can\u2019t just wish it away. It\u2019s here to stay and we need to figure out what the heck we\u2019re going to do about it. That requires new titles, new job responsibilities to really reflect on the moment that we\u2019re in,\u201d Guaglione said.<\/p>\n

AI visibility products<\/p>\n

Time is seemingly taking the approach of \u201cif you can\u2019t beat them, join them.\u201d The publisher has begun serving ads<\/a> to AI agents to squeeze revenue out of its growing bot traffic. (AI-powered search engine Perplexity blocked those ads<\/a> from influencing its own search index last than two weeks after Digiday\u2019s initial report.) In the same vein, Future is offering GEO service while Ziff Davis is offering AI visibility services.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a real divide, really, between publishers who\u2019ve chosen to block everything [regarding AI web crawlers], and the publishers who haven\u2019t been quite as hard on blocking,\u201d said Davies, \u201cbut as a result have said that they\u2019ve had really strong AI visibility as a result. Now, they\u2019re benefiting from that when it comes to now selling that with clients because they\u2019ve got so much data on that.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Publishers\u2019 hemming and hawing over the Google Zero post-search era has reached a fever pitch. Now, they\u2019re finally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[111,139,69,145,114070],"class_list":["post-635975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology","tag-zero-click-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}