How to keep audiences coming back in a world of infinite content

In the winter of 2024, strategic minds from across the business were packed into Immediate Media’s war room.

Thankfully, we weren’t saving or risking lives. Our war room was a simulation, an opportunity to prepare for the unexpected. “What happens if we lose 50% of organic traffic overnight?” This big question still felt a hypothetical one. With pageviews growing year on year for as long as we could remember, we spent the afternoon contingency-planning — without the sirens yet sounding.

We could, like many, already smell the smoke. Back in spring 2023, Google announced it would “supercharge search with generative AI” and we knew position one in Google (the status already eroding because of ever-more stacked SERPs) would soon mean even fewer guaranteed eyeballs.

By May 2024, AI Overviews were rolling into results at scale, and by the end of the year, some estimates suggested around 60% of Google searches ended without a click. Early analysis in 2025 suggested zero-click behaviours were growing further as AI answers expanded across query types.

It has always been a risky business relying too heavily on Google for audience acquisition. Audience attention has long been dwindling, digital revenues are under intense pressure and discovery is fragmenting towards social video, individual creators and new AI-powered tools and browsers. However, with such hefty search numbers to celebrate — and defend — the focus on organic pageview building across the industry has remained dominant.

In our war room, the mood wasn’t sombre. Teams were excited and motivated to plan for a future that many believe can be more audience-first than Google-first. In that room we realised that our future success depended on shifting our focus in six key ways. Here are the shifts we are pursuing:

1. Structure content for machines as well as humans

To build a user-first future, we paradoxically have to embrace the machines first.

Audiences already expect content to be available in their format of choice. It’s no longer enough to deliver your USP only in text. You must be readily available in text, image, audio and video. Those formats need to be the right length, tone and style for each platform where audiences discover and engage with your brand. It is increasingly impossible to manually structure content for all scenarios.

Adding to the mêlée, new devices are coming that will demand new delivery experiences. The Jony Ive / Sam Altman partnership touts a screenless, contextually aware “iPhone killer” by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, Meta and others are ramping up the mass-market roll-out of wearables, and some predict VR will become mainstream by end of 2027. With such rapid change, no one can predict with certainty what first-class content consumption and delivery will look like even two years from now.

Our best defence is preparation. At Immediate, we are focused on creating content ecosystems that are flexible and easy to curate — enabling content to be reshaped quickly and giving audiences genuine control over how they consume it.

To break that down: for some of our brands, we have 100+ years of expert, trusted content in our archives, with more produced each month for print, live events and multiple digital channels cross format. We are building the foundations to structure that content, connect it and make it accessible to machines and human curators alike, to power the features, tools, workflows and products of the future.

2. Focus content strategies on the defensible

Audiences are increasingly getting their answers from AI. It is still imperfect — hallucinations abound — but is improving rapidly. Meanwhile, the ROI of quickly curated listicles and top-level explainers is diminishing fast.

There is, rightly, a lot of nervousness about what AI means for junior roles in publishing, and we are in for a bumpy ride while that shakes out. The optimistic view is that once publishers understand more about their value in the new world, human-made content will become premium and in demand. What remains defensible is the truly human stuff — lived experience, original voices and novel ideas. This is the content that will be in increasingly short supply on an AI-saturated internet.

It is often overlooked that for the past ten years, many junior editorial roles have largely been focused on servicing algorithmic demand. Digital content planning has been dictated by Google, from the subject and title to the form and format. Successful future applicants will need a comprehensive understanding of search and AI. The former is still a powerful indicator of market demand, but editorial roles will need to be more human-focused, producing the original, novel content that AI cannot.

3. Experiment enthusiastically, implement cautiously

At Immediate, we are simultaneously considering where it makes sense for AI to be a productionised part of certain creative processes (always with humans in the loop). At the same time, we are encouraging our creatives to develop their individual use of AI, enhancing their output when it is suitable, responsible and impactful.

Everyone creates differently. Some are creatively charged with an initial draft to mould or a slew of generated ideas to spark new inspiration. Others love the blank page, and AI will be more useful to them in the final stages as a creative partner, helping identify blind spots in their writing or opportunities to be more inclusive of different demographics. Encouraging this exploration of AI supports the creativity of our business while future-proofing the career prospects of our creators. Most future digital roles will require a strong comprehension of AI, its opportunities and challenges.

When you are in the business of integrating AI into your workflows, transparency and verification matter. Audience trust is hard-won and easily lost, so it is crucial for consumer publishers to be up front about how they implement AI.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is an open standard that lets you attach secure, tamper-evident provenance data to digital assets — a universal way to show where content came from and what edits or AI involvement have taken place. It already has heavyweight industry backing, with a steering committee that includes Adobe, Amazon, BBC, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Sony and OpenAI. As synthetic media scales, this is likely to become a baseline trust signal for platforms, advertisers and users.

4. Nurture communities and amplify talent

Increasingly, audiences are turning to individual creators and communities as their trusted sources of information, validation and sense of belonging. The Verge’s ‘Future of the Internet’ report gives a comprehensive summary of audience fragmentation and the risks facing brands, namely a rapidly spreading degradation of trust and confidence in what is being presented online.

The report highlights that meaningful communities are most often built around niche topics, are smaller (typically no more than 200 people) and are interactive. 60% of respondents say social media now feels negative with many feeling reduced to a number in a giant algorithmic machine. Crucially, nearly half would rather be part of a community that does not allow AI-generated content and feel, “AI should serve as a facilitator, not the focal point of connection”.

Creating these spaces via seamless products and experiences is key — but just as important is spotlighting individual talent, giving those creators a platform to bring audiences together around niches that big brands struggle to adequately serve, and where they can appear disingenuous if they try to enter. Done well, these communities and the personalities at their centre become one of the strongest forms of defensibility a publisher can build.

Immediate’s ‘faces and voices’ programme is designed precisely for this moment — giving a platform for experts who can connect with audiences in more specific, high-intent ways. Emphasising human talent, personalities and individual voices is becoming a key point of differentiation for our brands.

5. Build habitual experiences and products audiences love

The diversification of revenue and acquisition streams is well established, but the urgency to implement it has shifted up a gear. Building out publishing moats that allow brands a deeper relationship with audiences is crucial — and that cannot be achieved by great content alone.

Products are central to success and need to be a joy to use. This includes tools that make life easier, provide endless inspiration and deliver experiences that enable audiences to learn something new or achieve a goal. These ecosystems will keep audiences loyal to brands and coming back. In a world where organic and referral acquisition is squeezed, building direct relationships is non-negotiable.

AI will help here too, enabling more meaningful personalisation and helping audiences find what they want through natural language, curated search and more dynamic content discovery experiences. At Immediate, we have set ourselves up to reliably understand our audiences — how they discover us, what keeps them coming back and where we are falling short — so we can design better products and content journeys in response.

6. Know your audiences — metrics that matter

Pageviews have reigned supreme as the measurement of success for many publishers, in large part because the cause and effect are easy to track and act on. When pageviews are high on a page or for a content group, you can check your search position, acquisition channel performance and market demand — then make more of that type of content.

Shifting to measure something less simple than raw pageviews, such as engagement or propensity to return, can make monthly tracking feel less linear, mainly because engagement success will mean something different depending on the type of content and user mission. The way we measure internal success will shift, and with it the incentives that shape what teams make and prioritise. Registration rate, activation rate (first meaningful action), return frequency, completion of multi-step journeys and repeat interactions are the numbers that correlate with building lasting brand-audience relationships.

Lean in to prepare for an unknown future

Not much is certain yet. We do not know who will win the new browser and search battles. OpenAI and others are launching AI-first browsers, assistants and devices that will fragment the landscape further. Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps evolving Edge and Copilot, and Google’s AI Overviews are still finding their product-market fit under regulatory scrutiny and publisher pushback.

We believe our best bets are to lean into the change. That means fully understanding the challenges and opportunities of AI, so we have a chance to shape the direction of travel; doubling down on creativity by investing in talent and quality editorial to defend our USP; and building the experiences and products of the future to keep audiences coming back in a world of infinite choice.

We have to do all this while maintaining the status quo — but if we get it right, the next time we’re in the war room, we won’t be planning for survival. We’ll be deciding how boldly we can grow.