Publishers Monetize AI Visibility Skills
Major publishers are beginning to sell their proprietary "AI visibility" expertise to outside brands as a new revenue stream. This service includes optimizing content for algorithmic discoverability and using machine learning to maximize exposure. The trend reflects AI's growing importance in digital marketing and content strategy.
- The shift towards offering "AI visibility" has led to the creation of a new discipline known as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which focuses on making brands more visible in the datasets that train AI models. - Publisher Future plc has launched a service called Future Optic, which provides generative AI optimization for commercial partners. A campaign for Samsung using this service resulted in a 33% increase in visibility on ChatGPT for new phone products. - This trend is not limited to third-party services; publishers are also using AI to improve their own internal processes, such as deploying AI-enhanced recirculation to suggest related content to readers. - Dotdash Meredith has partnered with OpenAI to enhance its ad-targeting tool, D/Cipher, by using OpenAI's models to make ad targeting more granular and nuanced. This partnership also involves licensing Dotdash Meredith's content to OpenAI to train its models. - Major publishers like Condé Nast have entered into multi-year partnerships with OpenAI to feature content from publications such as Vogue and The New Yorker in OpenAI's products, including ChatGPT. - The rise of AI-generated summaries in search results has been a significant motivator for this new revenue stream, with one analysis finding that these summaries led to a nearly 80% decrease in website clickthroughs. - For some publishers, this new service is a way to offset declining revenue from traditional sources. Future plc, for example, is facing challenges with Google AI Overviews impacting traffic, with 50% of its top keywords now triggering an AI summary instead of a standard results page. - The expertise being sold is an evolution of traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO), adapting techniques for how large language models (LLMs) source and rank information. This includes a focus on being cited in publications that have AI licensing deals.
