Inside the post-Google playbook: Subscriptions, AI and team reorgs

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Publishers’ hemming and hawing over the Google Zero post-search era has reached a fever pitch. Now, they’re finally doing something about it.

Companies like Axios, The Verge and Time have started rewriting their playbooks to prepare for a future in which Google isn’t providing meaningful traffic.

They’re revamping subscription offerings, selling AI visibility products and restructuring their internal teams to survive in what could best be described as a search-pocalypse.

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 — as they were discussed at this year’s Digiday Publishing Summit and the Digiday Media Strategies in London.

Here are three ways publishers are trying to survive a post-Google world:

LLM subscriptions

At the Digiday Publishing Summit (DPS) in September, Axios’ 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’s website.

Subscription publishers have been scrambling to figure out how to monetize agentic audiences, said Davies. She added, “Axios is the best example in terms of the detail that publishers have been willing to give on that so far.”

Team reorganizations

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.

The Verge isn’t alone in its team restructuring. Politico’s Francesca Barber stepped into a new role that combines product, audience and AI under one person. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s head of digital Taneth Evans detailed new roles in the newsroom, including a new head of multimedia and head of shows.

“Publishers, when they do these kind of things, it’s like ‘OK, this is a new era. This is real disruption. We can’t just wish it away. It’s here to stay and we need to figure out what the heck we’re going to do about it. That requires new titles, new job responsibilities to really reflect on the moment that we’re in,” Guaglione said.

AI visibility products

Time is seemingly taking the approach of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” The publisher has begun serving ads to AI agents to squeeze revenue out of its growing bot traffic. (AI-powered search engine Perplexity blocked those ads from influencing its own search index last than two weeks after Digiday’s initial report.) In the same vein, Future is offering GEO service while Ziff Davis is offering AI visibility services.

“There was a real divide, really, between publishers who’ve chosen to block everything [regarding AI web crawlers], and the publishers who haven’t been quite as hard on blocking,” said Davies, “but as a result have said that they’ve had really strong AI visibility as a result. Now, they’re benefiting from that when it comes to now selling that with clients because they’ve got so much data on that.”

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