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The Weekly Bulletin | September 1, 2026
Catch up on your members' content, check out the community buzz, and browse through job opportunities
Vahe Arabian
September 01, 2026
Hi SODP community, happy new month!
Let's recap on what's been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.
.SODP POSTS.
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
For 30 years, the world wide web has run on a surprisingly profound social contract: most sites are free for search engines to access, but if you use their content you give credit by linking to the source.
Recently, that social contract has begun to collapse. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are crawling sites not to link to them, but to train models and generate answers (which may or may not be accurate).
When you search for something, ChatGPT’s response or Google’s AI Overviews may still include links to sources, but they’re a kind of optional extra to the main answer.
This has triggered a bad dynamic for website owners, the public, and even AI companies themselves: as websites lose traffic (and revenue), many are beginning to block AI scraping tools, meaning AI results depend more on low-quality websites (many of which are also generated by AI). As a result, good information can be harder than ever to find.
How we got here
In the early days of the world wide web, search engines and content creators came to an agreement about crawling (the practice of technologically examining a site to index it, so it can be served up in search results). Content creators would provide access to their sites for free, and even allow search engines to reproduce small snippets of text.
In return, search engines provided links to the sites owned by content creators, who benefited from that web traffic. If content creators didn’t like the deal, they could prevent search engines from crawling their site with instructions in a file called robots.txt.
💬 We want to hear from you: Has your site started blocking AI crawlers, or are you holding off? Hit reply and tell us what tipped your decision either way — we read every response, and yours might shape a future issue.
.TIP OF THE WEEK.
Do You Survive the Fan-Out? The AI Visibility Diagnostic Built for How AI Search Actually Works
Most "AI visibility" tools answer the wrong question: "Am I mentioned?"
The better question is: do you survive the fan-out — and does your content deserve to?
Here's how we built that into our AI Visibility report — two diagnostic engines and a four-part content optimizer.
1/ Query fan-out, not single queries
When someone researches a topic in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews, they don't ask one question. They narrow: broad → specify → narrow → decide. Google's AI literally expands and contracts the query set as the conversation deepens.
So instead of probing one query per topic, we simulate the journey:
An LLM designs a 4-step narrowing path per topic
We Serper-search every step in parallel, with a 15s hard cap
We track whether your domain is cited at each step, its position, top-3 presence, and AI Overview inclusion
We flag dropped (cited then vanished) and weakened (position slipped) steps as the conversation narrows
A final batched LLM call writes a concrete fix per dropped step — publish this, update that, add this schema — ranked by impact
The output isn't "you're cited 40%." It's "you win the broad question, but lose the comparison step to [competitor], and here's the exact page to fix that."
2/ Citation Regressions — what you lost since last run
A single score going up or down tells you nothing actionable. So we diff probe-by-probe between audit runs: match every probe on platform + topic, surface the ones where you were cited then but aren't now, and classify why:
Credential not corroborated off-page — you hold it, your site says so, Google's directory says so, but the AI's entity graph hasn't connected them. Off-page fix, not a content fix.
Competitor pushed you out — names who now holds the query.
Query intent drifted — the AI now maps the query to a different category.
Sampling volatility — only one probe changed; noise, not signal.
Topical authority gap — build the pillar page.
Each regression gets the actual answer text, the competitor who gained, and a recovery recommendation.
3/ The Full Content Check — does your page deserve to be cited?
Getting found is half the battle. The other half is having content the AI will actually pull. We built a four-tab optimizer that runs on any article URL:
🔸 Coverage — Enter a target query; the LLM generates the real set of sub-questions a user asks around it, then scores your page: covered / partial / missing, with the reason and a fix for each gap. This is topical completeness, not keyword density.
🔸 Clarity — Four checks AI engines penalize: vague language ("a number of" when you could say "17"), unanchored claims (statements needing proof or citation), unclear headings (H2s that don't name the answer), and dense paragraphs that should be lists or tables. Each finding comes with a suggested replacement the AI can actually quote.
🔸 Effort — Modeled on Google's leaked contentEffort signal (an Expertise dimension feeding NSR). Scores editorial depth on five signals — research evidence, structure & depth, specificity, editorial polish, topic mastery — each /10 with a verdict and fix. Flags "engaging but shallow": a clickable page that lacks depth scores low here even if it generates clicks. Crucially, it separates engagement (clicking + staying) from satisfaction (useful content).
🔸 Persona Fit — Pick a saved persona (role, goals, pain points, buying triggers, preferred formats), and the LLM evaluates whether your page actually answers that persona's needs: fit score, tone match, answered vs. unanswered needs, and content opportunities. Because "will AI cite this" and "will my reader convert" are two different questions — and a page that nails both is the goal.
Why this matters
The citation funnel is brutal: surface → mention → cite → top-3. Most publishers only see the top of it.
The fan-out shows you where in the journey you fall out.
The regressions panel shows you which queries you're quietly bleeding between audits.
The full content check tells you whether the page deserves to win once the AI finds it.
Audit your AI visibility the way the engines actually work: as a narrowing conversation, not a one-shot query. Track the deltas, not just the snapshot. And optimize the content, not just the citations.
.NEWS OF THE WEEK.
➡️ When AI Has Nothing On Your Company, It Describes Someone Else. When an AI model has nothing on your company, it does not tell anyone. It does not decline, it does not hedge, and it does not mark the spot where its evidence ran out. It reaches for the nearest well documented thing, which is usually a competitor, a category average, or a version of you from three years ago, and it delivers that substitution in the same confident register it uses when it actually knows. That much has been discussed. What has not been discussed is the part that should worry anyone running this work: you cannot find this by auditing your own content.
➡️ What’s really defensible in the age of AI? I spent last week at INMA’s CEO Roundtable in Vail, Colorado, where 40 news media CEOs from around the world spent three days on the future of the business. You can read INMA CEO Earl Wilkinson’s recap of the week here. The question I explored in Vail was blunt: Is there advertising revenue left for publishers to capture in three years? Of course there is, but it’s time to get real about what lives and what dies, and the answer differs by model, market, and trajectory. So instead of one answer, I gave the room three key questions.
➡️ Are newspaper opinion sections embracing AI-written op-eds? Any good op-ed can spark a public conversation, but most won’t start a debate over the nature of opinion writing itself. Last week, a Wall Street Journal piece by the billionaire financier Stanley Druckenmiller pulled it off. The op-ed itself is about whether the Treasury Department should continue trying to lower long-term bond yields. (Druckenmiller says no.) The piece has a few telltale signs of being produced by AI. (“This wasn’t liquidity management, it was price management.” “If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn’t a crisis. It is an invoice.”)
➡️ Local news’ new owners bring more than capital. The local news business remains under intense financial pressure, but Sara April sees reasons for optimism. As president of media merger and acquisition firm Dirks, Van Essen & April, she has a front-row view of who is buying community publications and why. The latest transactions detailed in their Q2 M&A Report suggest that a new and varied group of owners is entering the market, often because they believe local journalism remains essential.
➡️ Four Broadcasters, Four Different Visions For The Future Of Local Television. Quarterly earnings calls are designed for investors, so discussions of revenue, EBITDA, debt and guidance are unavoidable. But after listening to the second-quarter calls from E.W. Scripps, Nexstar, Gray Media and Sinclair, I thought the operational differences among the four companies were more interesting than their financial results. There is so much information shared on these calls. Looking beyond the financials, this is what I heard.
➡️ ChatGPT Is Now A “Very Large Online Search Engine” In The EU. The European Commission designated ChatGPT as a very large online search engine under the Digital Services Act, making it the first AI chatbot to receive the designation. The Commission announced its decision today, along with two other designations. Reddit and Roblox are now recognized as very large online platforms, each with at least 45 million average monthly users in the EU, meeting the threshold for the designation. The three services have four months from notification to meet the extra rules the DSA sets for its largest platforms and search engines.
.UPCOMING EVENT.
📊 Publisher Revenue Dinner Miami 2026
We are hosting a private dinner in Miami for senior revenue leaders across news, gaming, newsletter, specialist, and brand publishing.
This dinner is for publishing professionals who are actively driving revenue strategy and want a candid, peer-level conversation on how to win the biggest commercial quarter of the year. If you are a Chief Revenue Officer, CEO, Programmatic Head, or Partnerships Director making decisions around yield, inventory, first-party data, and Q4 growth, this evening is designed for you.
Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Time: 6:30 PM
Venue: Coral Room, Rusty Pelican Miami Restaurant, 3201 Rickenbacker Cwy, Key Biscayne, FL 33149, United States
What you will walk away with
Practical yield, personalisation, and first-party data moves that are lifting revenue per visit right now
A candid read on how your peers are pricing, packaging, and positioning inventory for the Q4 surge
Insight into which new formats — video, newsletters, and creator partnerships — are actually paying in 2026
An attendee-only summary of the evening's key insights and growth playbooks shared around the table
The dinner is high-trust, collaborative, and entirely off-the-record under Chatham House Rule. No panels, no pitches, no slides — just one focused evening on how to make every session, impression, and first-party signal work at full value in publishing's most important quarter.
Seats are strictly limited to 15 attendees.
A big thank you to Ezoic for co-hosting this event with us.
➡️ CNN (USA) is seeking a Growth & Subscriptions Manager who will help shape some of their most important growth and marketing decisions, sitting at the intersection of growth, marketing strategy, analytics, content, and commercial strategy.
➡️ News Corp Australia is looking for a Client Success Manager who will act as a trusted advisor to higher–tier accounts, drive data–backed campaign success in partnership with Trading and Sales teams, and actively contribute to the team’s development through the peer mentoring of junior specialists.
➡️ Newsweek (London) is looking to bring on a Head of Consumer Social to thier Social Team. The Head of Consumer Social will lead traffic and engagement strategies across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, X, and other consumer platforms.
➡️ Anastasia Kotsiubynska on LinkedIn:
I ran a batch of commercial prompts through ChatGPT last week to see the real query fan-outs and how they look right now. And I found some interesting patterns worth digging into for your AEO work.
These were mostly "best…", "recommend me…", "find…" and similar prompts (run manually; location: London), after reading recent articles by Suganthan Mohanadasan
👉 Here are some patterns:
1️⃣ The year is common (been there for a long time)
🖋️ "best ai visibility tools" → "best AI visibility tools ChatGPT AI Overviews brand visibility SEO 2026"
🖋️ "best insurance providers" → "UK insurance providers car home travel health life best 2026"
Nearly every commercial prompt gets 2026 appended. So your key content should be updated somewhere in 2026, and ideally refreshed every 3–6 months.
2️⃣ 🔥 Brands are in the query (+ "official" request)
For "best" product prompts, ChatGPT often writes a brand shortlist before it answers:
🖋️"best ai automation tools" → "best AI automation tools 2026 Zapier Make n8n Lindy Gumloop Relevance AI"
🖋️ "recommend me saas seo agency" → "SaaS SEO agency Grow and Convert Skale Powered by Search SimpleTiger"
It also adds "official" to your queries, looking for the brand's own site (e.g. "n8n AI automation official AI agents").
Being in that shortlist doesn't guarantee you make the final answer, but it's a strong confidence signal; so, worth tracking if your brand is there.
3️⃣ Location, pulled from your account even when you name no place.
🖋️ "recommend me seo consultant" → "best SEO consultants UK fractional SEO consultant 2026"
🖋️ "find me affordable home cleaning services" → "affordable home cleaning services London prices."
Worth naming your business location on relevant pages. And remember: results will differ by location.
4️⃣ 🔥 Query modifiers you never typed
🖋️ "recommend me seo consultant" → "independent SEO consultant London, technical SaaS SEO consultant"
🖋️ "find me an experienced plumber" → "plumbers with high ratings, emergency plumbers"
These show you the subtopics your website should cover, if they're relevant to you (say, that you actually do technical SEO).
💡 For local businesses specifically, a well-maintained Google Business Profile and real reviews seem to be very important. ChatGPT seems to use them often, especially the reviews (I can also spot the utm_campaign=gmb-website parameter used in GBP).
ONE MORE THING
Know an editor, revenue lead, or publisher who'd get value out of this recap? Forward this issue or send them our subscribe link — word-of-mouth is still how most of you find us, and we appreciate every share.
P.S. — Spotted a pattern in your own AI-search traffic worth flagging, or working on something publishers should know about? Hit reply. Some of the best items in "News of the Week" start life as a reply just like this one.
These are the highlights for the last week. Until next week!
Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP
If you have questions please email phil@adly.news
.JOB BOARD.