Author: Sara Guaglione

Search & Affiliate Marketing Strategist since 1993

Media Briefing: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit, March 2026 edition

This week’s Media Briefing recaps what publishers had to say about the impact of search referral traffic declines on their businesses, during the Digiday Publishing Summit’s closed-door town hall sessions. Summit after summit, this continues to be the most pressing issue publishing execs say they are facing. But this time, they also focused on how that was lending more urgency to their direct reader revenue businesses like subscriptions and memberships.

  • Overheard at DPS
  • BuzzFeed’s future, The Economist Group’s restructuring, and more.

Overheard at DPS

At the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colo., this week, publishing execs couldn’t help but lament about search traffic declines, and how this was leading them to try to find new ways to connect with readers and make money.

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Marketers shift growing shares of search spending to GEO

The old search playbook is in free fall in the age of AI. Marketers aren’t cutting their search budgets — at least not yet. They’re just shifting how search dollars are spent.

As generative AI upends how people search and shop, marketers are funneling more dollars into the industry’s latest buzzword de jour: generative engine optimization, or GEO. It’s less about abandoning tried and true SEO strategies and more navigating a new, messy reality: LLM bot crawlers pull press releases, news articles and social posts to generate responses. Now, brand visibility means everything from structured website data to Reddit threads.

“We’re seeing increased testing and experimentation within search budgets — specifically allocation to GEO,” Brian Yamada, global chief innovation officer at VML, said in an email to Digiday. Client budgets are also increasing to understand where agentic AI fits into the workflow, he added. Yamada did not provide specific ad spend figures. 

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