BoSacks Speaks Out: In the Age of Answers, Are You the Source or Just the Scrap?

For years, we trained ourselves to worship the click.

We chased rankings, pampered Google, tweaked headlines, hoarded backlinks, and built entire editorial strategies around an algorithm’s temperament. Search was the digital newsstand: show up, get the click, sell the ad, convert the subscriber, repeat.

It worked, until it didn’t.

That era is ending fast. According to recent INMA analysis by Anntao Diaz, U.S. search referrals to news publishers are already down 38 percent, with global declines close behind. Media executives expect much worse ahead, driven largely by AI Overviews that intercept questions before users ever reach a publisher’s site. When they appear, click-through rates can drop by more than half.

And here’s the real insult: AI systems crawl publisher sites at massive scale while sending back a fraction of the traffic they once did.

Translation?
The machines read everything.
They pay you in exposure.

This isn’t a tweak. It’s a structural shift. And the familiar framework, diversify, defend, dive in, is no longer strategic advice. For magazine publishers, it’s a survival checklist.

Diversify or Drown

If search was your primary distribution rail, you’re now standing on a narrowing bridge.

Being “good at SEO” is no longer a growth strategy. It’s table stakes. Necessary. Insufficient.

The new mandate is simple: be present wherever your audience looks for answers, whether or not they ever click back to you. That requires treating content as systems, not one-off stories.

A retirement-planning feature can’t just be a 1,500-word article optimized for a keyword. That same expertise must show up as a short video, a newsletter with a calculator, a structured FAQ, a podcast segment with a transcript, and an infographic that actually explains trade-offs.

AI doesn’t privilege text. It ingests text, audio, video, and images with equal enthusiasm. Your chart isn’t decoration anymore, it’s source material.

Wirecutter didn’t win by gaming algorithms. They won by building a defensible knowledge ecosystem, guides, testing methodology, tools, and depth. That’s why they show up when AI systems synthesize answers.

But diversification without retention is just vanity.

A million impressions mean nothing if you don’t convert attention into something you own: newsletters, registrations, alerts, apps, memberships. Morning Brew built an empire by owning the relationship. Discovery is fragmenting. Control is concentrating. If you don’t own the relationship, someone else does.

Defend What Still Converts

With fewer clicks to go around, every visit matters more.

Technical discipline, site speed, structured data, clear summaries, strong internal linking, is no longer an engineering concern. It’s a revenue issue.

Just as important, your authority must be legible to machines. AI doesn’t infer credibility; it looks for signals. Who wrote this? Why are they qualified? What standards govern the work? How are errors corrected? What expertise do you actually own?

An article by “Editorial Staff” with no methodology will always lose to one by a named expert with visible credentials and transparent standards.

Think of your site as a brand passport. It should clearly state who you are, what you cover, and why you deserve to be referenced. Health, finance, travel, and consumer brands should publish their methodologies in clean, crawlable HTML. Consumer Reports has done this for decades. What used to be good journalism is now competitive advantage in AI discovery.

If you don’t declare experience, expertise, authority, and trust, you’re interchangeable with the nearest content mill.

Dive In, Eyes Open

Stop treating AI visibility like folklore. Measure it.

Being cited in AI-generated answers won’t restore the old traffic volumes. But not being cited at all means you’ve vanished from the top of the funnel.

Serious publishers should audit themselves: define core audience questions and ask them regularly across major AI platforms. Do you appear? Are you cited? Are you linked, or missing entirely?

Track patterns by topic clusters, not keywords. Large language models break questions into sub-queries, then synthesize. Chasing fragments is a hamster wheel. Owning the topic is the play.

If your magazine claims “first-time home buying,” you need the full ecosystem: mortgages, credit, inspections, closing costs, neighborhoods, negotiation. NerdWallet owns credit cards this way, tools, explainers, calculators, constantly updated data. In an answer-driven web, that depth sticks.

The Real Shift

Strip away the tactics and the shift is philosophical.

Growth no longer depends on being the destination.
It depends on being the source.

The link is no longer the primary interface. The answer is.

The irony is that magazine brands are built for this moment. You have named editors, recognizable voices, institutional memory, and editorial discipline. Bylines still matter. Trust still compounds.

The threat isn’t AI.
It’s nostalgia.

If you’re still chasing lost traffic with yesterday’s tactics, you’re not adapting, you’re rearranging deck chairs. The opportunity is to treat your archive as a reference library, your standards as strategic assets, and your storytelling as fuel for the systems now mediating discovery.

Search isn’t dead.
It’s different.

And the synthesized web rewards authority that is structured, diversified, and visible inside the answers themselves.

In the age of answer engines, you have two choices:

Complain about fewer clicks.
Or become indispensable as the source every answer engine trusts.

Only one of those pays the bills.