The Weekly Bulletin | April 29, 2025

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

Fresh analysis confirms what many in publishing suspected: AI Overviews are cutting into traffic, not boosting it.

Ahrefs found that across a sample of 300,000 informational keywords, top-ranking pages saw a 34.5% drop in CTR when AI Overviews were present.

While Google suggests AI Overviews drive more clicks to sites, independent research tells a different story: when users find answers directly in the SERP, publishers lose traffic.

Key Insights:

• 34.5% CTR Drop: Top results for informational queries get a third fewer clicks with AI Overviews.

• Zero-Click Search Surge: AI Overviews behave like supercharged Featured Snippets, answering queries instantly.

• Opaque Metrics: Google Search Console blends AI Overview clicks with organic, masking real impact.

• Content Saturation: Multiple sources cited in Overviews dilute individual publisher visibility.

The takeaway?

Publishers relying heavily on informational topics face long-term traffic erosion, and ad and affiliate revenue models are at risk.

Action Plan for Publishers:

1. Diversify cluster focus – Shift toward commercial, transactional, and brand-driven queries that are less prone to AI Overviews. You can even leverage programmatic SEO to publish more high-quality pages that can help balance the CTR drop, such as calculators and name information pages.

2. Strengthen branded search – Grow direct audiences through newsletters, communities, and partnerships.

3. Use jump-to links/table of contents – Trigger sitelinks to gain more SERP real estate.

4. Boost credibility signals – Outbound links to primary research make your content 40% more likely to be cited.

5. Optimize CTR hooks – Add your brand ("State of Digital Publishing") into titles, and use cues like "2025" or "Free Tool" to recover lost clicks.

6. Expand discovery channels – Invest in Google Discover strategies, newsletters, and syndication (Apple News, MSN, Yahoo).

If AI Overviews stay, publishers must reset organic benchmarks and future-proof their traffic and expectations for the role of search, making it brand consideration-based.

Waiting for the novelty to fade isn’t a strategy. Decisive action is.

SODP POSTS

Even experts disagree over whether social media is bad for kids. We examined why

Disagreement and uncertainty are common features of everyday life. They’re also common and expected features of scientific research.

Despite this, disagreement among experts has the potential to undermine people’s engagement with information. It can also lead to confusion and a rejection of scientific messaging in general, with a tendency to explain disagreement as relating to incompetence or nefarious motivations.

To help, we recently developed a tool to help people navigate uncertainty and disagreement.

To illustrate its usefulness, we applied it to a recent topic which has attracted much disagreement (including among experts): whether social media is harmful for kids, and whether they should be banned from it.

A structured way to understand disagreement

We research how people navigate disagreement and uncertainty. The tool we developed is a framework of disagreements. It provides a structured way to understand expert disagreement, to assess evidence and navigate the issues for decision making.

It identifies ten types of disagreement, and groups them into three categories:

1. Informant-related (who is making the claim?)

2. Information-related (what evidence is available and what is it about?)

3. Uncertainty-related (how does the evidence help us understand the issue?)

READ MORE

JOB BOARD

➡️ MailOnline is looking for a talented News SEO Editor who has a strong background in search engine optimisation tailored specifically for news articles and experience of working in a newsroom environment to join its team. (London). SEE MORE

➡️DealBook is seeking for a Senior U.S. Editor to play a pivotal role in shaping and executing their DealBook newsletter and helping expand their franchise. (New York). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️Google is an illegal profiteer three-times over that deliberately sank publishing, the open web, and its rivals for profit, but its hungry pirates just keep bagging the gold. Alphabet’s first quarter revenues are just out and reveal a 12 per cent rise to top $90 billion. That influx of gold was a welcome relief as Google’s lost 17 per cent in value since the start of the year amid antitrust break-ups, tariffs, and fierce AI competition. READ MORE 

➡️Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a big part of how we work here in Australia. Companies are jumping on board, hoping AI will make things run smoother, spark new ideas, and boost the bottom line. The numbers show it: two-thirds (65%) of Aussie employers are now using AI, and almost half (49%) of us are using it regularly on the job. READ MORE 

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Pete Pachal on LinkedIn:

I've had a little time to browse the Ziff Davis lawsuit vs. OpenAI, and it's a good snapshot of where we're at right not with respect to legal actions between media companies and AI companies. There's now a more comprehensive understanding of all the stages of building an LLM-based service: the training vs. the operation. And Ziff goes after all of it:

🔪 Scraping the content in the first place

📄 Substituting it through either regurgitation or summarization ("derivative works")

🖨️ How RAG takes the problem to a whole new level since there's no cutoff date on what the LLM is processing

🥴 Reputation damage because of hallucinations

Though many parts rhyme with The New York Times lawsuit, Ziff's complaint comes nearly a year and a half afterward, so there are some important differences. Plus Ziff's properties are mostly digital-native.

CONTINUE READING

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP