---
title: Hidden in plain sight
description: The next challenge for news is now clear
---

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# Hidden in plain sight

[Alan Hunter](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/author/alan-hunter)  13 June 2025

 4 min read

**The next challenge for news is now clear**

When The Wall Street Journal shines a light on a subject, it tends to illuminate the issues more brightly than others. Just ask Joe Biden, or, rather, his aides, who were still able to deny his growing infirmity until the Journal wrote [the definitive account](https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/joe-biden-age-election-2024-8ee15246) of his declining faculties a year ago.

So I was interested this week when it turned to the decline of search traffic to publishers in an [article](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-ai-news-publishers-7e687141?utm_source=chatgpt.com) by Isabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt.

The numbers they reported were eye-catching: HuffPost’s search traffic has halved since 2021; Business Insider is down 55% over the past two years; when Dotdash merged with Meredith in 2021 search accounted for 60% of its traffic, now it’s a third; search as a share of the New York Times’s traffic was 44% three years ago, now it’s 36.5%.

Naturally, experts in this field pointed out some caveats to the WSJ’s interpretation. [Greg Piechota](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/grzegorzpiechota_news-sites-are-getting-crushed-by-google-activity-7338339874145558528-gE3y?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAtYC40B2BEzj7j7pS_ZyvqvAhDvoyokHj0) in particular said they didn’t factor in Google Discover referrals, which are still growing overall if unreliable on an individual publisher basis. Others noted that the decline in search began long before AI Overviews and AI Mode were on the horizon.

However, the core message of the piece was correct: publishers are facing a significant and ongoing decline in search traffic which needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, as it isn’t going to get any better.

None of this is exactly news to anyone paying close attention. You can’t move at some conferences for people declaring “search is dead”, or “websites are dead”, or, ahem, [“text is dead”](https://tomorrowspublisher.today/editors-picks/text-is-dead-we-live-in-an-audiovisual-age/). But most people in journalism aren’t aware of this. The average newsroom is remarkably uncurious about the business side of their profession.

They know about it now. I’ve seen more posts in the past couple of days about the WSJ’s piece than about almost any other aspect of journalism in the past couple of years. This is good – now perhaps the industry as a whole can address this issue.

We are entering an environment where news organisations must fight for attention with multiple challenges who aren’t even pretending to be their friends. My own view is that publishers need to find a way to become destinations again – not just sites optimised to catch passing traffic, but places readers actively seek out.

In some ways, it’s a return to an earlier era: when we worked to earn attention on the newsstand or through habit. Except this time, the battle will take place on individual screens and the rules are opaque. This won’t be easy, but it’s the challenge of the next half-decade at least. I’m glad it’s now more out in the open.

## Next blog post

<https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/the-case-for-optimism>

## [The case for optimism](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/the-case-for-optimism)

[Read more](https://www.hbmadvisory.com/media-hunter/the-case-for-optimism)

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