How Publishers Can Survive (and Thrive) in the Age of AI Search | Lily Ray

Lily Ray (VP SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive) addresses the publisher survival question head-on: the era of driving the same organic traffic volume from Google is over. The replacement strategy is multimodal, cross-platform content creation — not as a buzzword, but as a structural response to how LLMs consume and cite information across formats. Her most structurally important insight: individual experts with digital footprints across platforms are now disproportionately rewarded by both Google and LLMs. A plumber who does regular YouTube videos about his work will be surfaced by ChatGPT as "the best plumber in New York" simply because the LLM can verify expertise across multiple sources. This is the entity-first paradigm replacing the website-first paradigm. Being a recognized entity in Google's Knowledge Graph creates a compounding advantage — content published anywhere (LinkedIn, X, YouTube) gets captured by LLMs quickly and surfaced as expert insight. On EEAT evolution: Ray notes Google pushed EEAT heavily during the fake news era but has since introduced countervailing signals (Reddit/Quora surfacing prominently despite questionable EEAT). The concept remains valid as a mindset ("build something the algorithm is aiming for, don't aim at the algorithm") but it's not a checklist. The key operating question: "If search engines didn't exist, would I still be doing this thing?" The affiliate/publisher economy insight: product review pages on authoritative publishers are becoming MORE valuable, not less, because LLMs cite them as primary sources for product recommendations. If ChatGPT summarizes "best moisturizers for women in their 40s" by referencing Wirecutter and Good Housekeeping, then being featured ON those pages becomes a higher-leverage play than ranking independently. Digital PR shifts from link-building to citation-building. On measurement reality: Google has explicitly refused to provide separate reporting for AI Overview or AI Mode in Search Console ("not in our roadmap"). Ray's team uses Profound for cross-platform LLM visibility tracking (Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude). The approach is directional — not deterministic — but at scale, patterns in citation frequency reveal real visibility trends. AI Mode is designed to keep users inside Google's ecosystem: local business queries show Google Maps embeds inline, product queries show shopping cards, informational queries get complete answers without links. The favicon becomes the primary brand signal in AI Overview citations — companies (including Google itself) with generic globe favicons are leaving CTR on the table. On publisher strategy: Google Discover remains a strong traffic driver (now coming to desktop). The subscription/newsletter model becomes essential — convert visitors into owned audience. Ray frames the traffic decline as quality improvement: if someone has a 20-minute AI Mode conversation and then clicks through to your converting page, that's higher-quality traffic than 1,000 upper-funnel blog visits.