It’s an open secret, a muffled whisper that we’ve been hearing for months from our publishers. Let’s take a closer look at the number 1 issue of the moment in the publishing world: the rise of LLMs and the related drop in traffic, for a publisher website that lives… off this traffic!
The impact of LLMs on publisher website traffic
The rise of large language models (or LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence tools is profoundly changing the way things are done, especially on the Web.
- Zero-click: as the user obtains his answer directly via his AI tool, or even in the SERP via Google AI, there’s no need to visit the source site. This phenomenon now accounts for 69% of searches, compared with 56% last year!
- Unprecedented declines in traffic: publishers are recording a 34% drop in clicks on their organic links. A worrying trend, reported by several studies. And on the other side of the Atlantic, U.S. sites are reporting traffic declines of between 40% and 70%! Cloudflare shares equally alarming figures: bots from Google, OpenAI and other LLMs extract thousands of pages of content to answer users’ queries… But at the same time, send less than one visitor back to publishers.
- Lack of value: according to a Minted article, generative AI weakens the audience. Publishers no longer control the point of access to their content, which is now filtered, summarized, mixed with other, perhaps less qualitative sources, redistributed… All without recognition of the full value contributed by the journalist, who has taken the time to investigate and write his or her article.
The consequences are clear: loss of visibility and traffic, erosion of advertising revenues, uncertainty about engagement and lack of control over the relationship with the audience.
Adapting: the only way to keep your traffic as a publisher website
Faced with this challenge, a number of levers are making a comeback or emerging to restore the direct link between publishers and audiences and preserve monetization.
1. Newsletter & closed community
Creating exclusive content and spaces (newsletters, private groups, paid subscriptions) enables you to address a qualified, loyal audience, outside of third-party algorithms. This creates trust and a direct link.
2. Subscriptions & paywalls
Offering premium content, accessible only via subscription, enables you to monetize your audience directly, and provide content that AI cannot transcribe: exclusive analyses, long formats, surveys…
3. Paid AI partnerships
Some AI platforms, such as Perplexity, are now committed to paying back a share of their revenues to publishers. At the same time, Condé Nast and Universal Music are experimenting with the Pay-Per-Crawl model, charging AI robots for access to their content. Last May, Le Monde signed a (paid) agreement with Perplexity, enabling the engine to feed its responses with the daily’s content. A far-from-final agreement for Perplexity, which had already signed in January with Humanoid and in June with Maddyness.
And to complement this third lever, on September 5, Louis Dreyfus (Chairman of the Executive Board of the Le Monde group) said on France Culture:
“One year after signing with OpenAI, we’ve seen that a citation of Le Monde in a ChatGPT article allows us to convert, into paid subscriptions, 20 times more than a Le Monde article on Facebook and 50 times more than a Le Monde article featured on Google Discover.”
A promising opportunity, then, for our fellow publishers…
4. Web Push Notifications
Creating a direct communication channel between publishers and their audience is the promise of Web Push. Thanks to Web Push Notifications, publishers can send their content in real time to their subscribed audience, and continue to generate direct and indirect recurring traffic (content visibility and clicks on Web Pushes enable content to be promoted in Google Discover, for example). No more dependence on clicks from SERP results or AI.
5. Differentiating and original content
This is the sinews of war: offering analyses, surveys, user experiences or interactive formats that the AI can’t (well) summarize. High-value-added content reinforces citation and source preference.
What’s in it for us?
| Publisher challenge | AI effect | Editorial response |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic generation | Zero-click | Newsletter, subscription, Web Push |
| Value creation | AI summarization | Expert content, long formats, originality |
| Monetization | AI scraping | Pay-Per-Crawl, licenses, partnerships |
| Direct connection | Audience captured by AI | Email, Web Push, community |
Conclusion
Publishers are facing a transformation of the web ecosystem: falling traffic, ubiquitous AI summaries, LLMs consuming content without redistributing value. They must therefore reinvent their relationship with their readers. To preserve their audience, revenues and differentiation, solutions exist: channel diversification, technical monetization (pay-per-crawl), differentiating formats, crawl control, and above all, direct engagement – email, community, push notifications. Publishers need to regain control of their audience. This means winning back the direct link.
At Adrenalead, our expertise in Web Push Notification enables us to reactivate audiences proactively, without depending on algorithms or external clicks. It’s a strategic way to stay as chosen as it is inescapable.
