Case Study

Everyone’s bracing for the search apocalypse. But are we all feeling fine?

Newspaper executives share where they think the future of search is going

By David Grant

August 12, 2026

You’ve probably heard tell of the future where Google Search drops to zero — but for many newspaper executives, they’ve already swallowed the most stomach-dropping portion of the Google search decline and are at worst clear-eyed and at best may even be overly pessimistic about where things go from here.

Two-thirds of the executives in this month’s Newspaper Executive Insights Poll said Google search accounts for a third or less of their traffic today.

A similar share expect search referrals to fall by 25% or more over the next 12 months.

Not one respondent expects search traffic to grow. The rest expect it to hold steady.

This dread is not unfounded, as we know.

Even so, newspaper executives seem to have baked in this secular change already, and that means any less-than-dramatic drop may actually turn out to be a nice surprise. (Oh, and we can’t leave any of these polls without looking at the marketing angle, too).

This month’s Blue Engine Collaborative and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism Poll asked four questions: How important is Google search to you today? What do you expect over the next 12 months? What are you doing to stay sharp? And what are you spending on Google ads?

(This is the seventh poll in our series. Earlier polls covered top-to-top relationships, the industry’s philanthropic push, biggest regrets, AI wish lists, marketing channels, and live events.)

How relevant are the scariest search stats?

Whether it’s Chartbeat’s “small publishers down 60% in search referrals over two years” or

the Reuters Institute’s insight that publishers are expecting a 43% drop over three years, we haven’t yet seen a search referral breakout for American local news specifically. (The Local Media Consortium puts realized declines among its members at 25% to 50%).

What does exist is topic-level data, and it consistently points toward another interesting fact: for the content local publishers actually make, the search trends are much better.

• Index Exchange, analyzing ad slot requests across 1,200 publishers for full-year 2025, found news and politics posted a 7% decline — the smallest among the verticals it broke out, against a 14% platform average decline and drops of 40% to 50% for health and careers. Its explanation: news has “significantly lower exposure to AI overviews.”
• When Google shipped a Discover core update in February, the losses were brutal but geographically lopsided – and potentially in favor of publishers who weren’t trying to win national searches. Syracuse.com shed 36% of its article placements — with the damage concentrated in Florida and California while its New York audience held. CBS6 Albany’s audience score fell 90%, again driven by out-of-state losses. The national reach evaporated. The home market didn’t.
• Overall, news publishers have posted 18 straight months of traffic declines, according to Mather’s most recent research, “publishers continue to lose casual and infrequent readers faster than core users” – aka, search visitors! – while “depth and frequency were stable or improved across most publisher segments, reinforcing the view that loyal audiences continue to keep strong consumption habits despite softer traffic levels.”

Again, none of this means local news is Going To Be Just Fine – just to consider all discussion of Google Zero with the fact that you probably weren’t trying to still win the What Time Is the Super Bowl? lottery.

Two respondents who say search is under 10% of their traffic told us they expect it to hold steady. They may simply have already done the math.

Newspapers are already making the right moves to cope.

Ask newspaper executives what they’re doing to stay sharp, and you get a remarkably consistent answer: own the relationship. Half our respondents named email, SMS, or first-party data outright.

This is not a new signal from this group. In April’s poll, over half named email or newsletters as their single biggest growth bet — the most decisive consensus we have seen in this series. The search question just gave everyone a fresh reason to say it louder.

“Email and Organic Social have been the largest areas of growth for us, and we expect to continue to aggressively grow in those areas over the next year,” said Patrick Dorsey, publisher of The Santa Fe New Mexican, who reports search at between one-third and half of his traffic.

A southeastern newspaper executive put it as a matter of principle: “We continue to prioritize building audience on owned channels such as email and SMS.”

John Garrett , founder and CEO of Community Impact in Texas, is building for it — a “new, modernized site, new features to own the audience.” David Dunn-Rankin, president of Florida’s D-R Media, answered the question in a single word: “Newsletters.”

As the rented audience gets more expensive and less reliable, the owned one gets more valuable.

… but nobody is buying Google ads.

We asked what publishers spend per month on Google ads.

The most common answer: zero. Only one publisher spends north of $10,000 per month.

So here is an industry watching organic search referrals decline, naming search as an existential risk, and collectively buying almost none of it.

Odd, no?

Local intent is among the clearest buying signals on the Internet, but we aren’t playing in that game.

Why?

Typically, we’ve found two hang-ups: not knowing where to put your Google ad dollars effectively and the fact that a click is not a subscriber.

INMA research from 2022 across 166 publishers found a median visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate of 0.6%, which makes an article page a challenging, shall we say, destination for paid traffic if you don’t have a plan for converting them into a retained audience through site registration, email, SMS, or something else.

We’d love to see folks sending those clicks to a purpose-built offer page or to stories that show higher-than-average conversion to registration.

But $0 in Google ad spend? What’s our collective defense for that?

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This post originally appeared on Blue Engine’s LinkedIn.

We thank our partners at Lenfest Institute for Journalism for supporting this work. If you’d like to find out where your opportunities are to go Beyond Print, check out the Institute’s self-serve diagnostic here. You can find the overall Beyond Print toolkit here.

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