AI search isn't just changing how people find information. It's giving them fewer reasons to visit the websites that created it. When an AI summary appears in Google search results, users click a traditional result only 8% of the time, compared with 15% when no summary appears, according to Pew Research Center data.
The impact is already extending beyond individual searches. Links cited inside AI summaries are clicked just 1% of the time. Zero-click searches now account for roughly 60% of all Google queries, rising to 69% for news-related searches, according to The Next Web, while Google search traffic to publishers fell 33% globally in the year to November 2025.
For two decades, much of online content operated on a simple assumption: more articles created more opportunities to appear in search, and more visibility meant more traffic. AI is breaking that equation. The question is no longer simply how much content an organization can produce, but which content still earns attention, which existing assets can be made valuable again, and which no longer justify the investment.
The problem inside most large publishing organizations is not that they lack content. It is that they have not made decisions about the content they already own. Teams respond to declining traffic by commissioning more articles, which adds to the archive without addressing the pieces that no longer perform. The result is a growing library in which newer content competes with older content for the same keywords, and nobody has mapped how the pieces fit together.
Timothy Brophy, Chief Executive Officer, and Eli Feldblum, co-founder of Sandler Digital, work with publishers on exactly this problem. Their framing is direct.
"You're basically sitting on a very valuable resource that you're not employing," Feldblum says. "It's not that you've been doing something wrong, or you need to make a change. You haven't taken advantage of an asset at your disposal, and that asset is your existing content library."
Feldblum argues that the value of that library has increased in the AI era. "That existing content is actually very valuable now from an AI perspective, because people have this very much blind trust in LLMs, and they need to get their data from somewhere," he says. "It's either going to take your traffic, or you have to embrace it and play in its sandbox, and we can help you with the latter."
What Sandler Digital does is identify which existing pieces can perform again. The company applies light optimization to older content, helping it rank in both traditional search and AI discovery. It also works with writers and editors to integrate search thinking into the publishing process, so that new content is built with the same intelligence as the archive.
Feldblum describes what the company consistently finds inside publisher archives. "A lot of places are writing content that is accidentally evergreen," he says. "They don't intend to write the kind of content that they would expect to perform for a long time." A piece three or four years old can have the potential to drive significant traffic, and the publisher has no idea it is sitting there. The other recurring discovery is internal competition. Writers have their beats, and over time newer content starts competing with older content for the same keywords.
"Things are messy from Google's perspective," Feldblum says, "and I don't think most publishers realize that."
The distinction between content that can be revived and content that cannot is narrower than most publishers assume. Brophy's rule is that if an article never ranked to begin with, it is not going to rank again once it has been reworked. But if a piece once ranked highly and then fell off, the opportunity is real. Content sitting between the fifth and thirtieth position for a keyword, especially one the publisher never intended to rank for, is often the most valuable. It also helps if the content is evergreen or cyclical. An older article about a product or trend can become relevant again when the same topic returns to the news cycle.
Brophy argues that publishers should rethink how they allocate their search effort. The archive is not a graveyard. It is a portfolio that has to be managed, and the pieces that once performed deserve a second look before new ones are commissioned. The specific allocation depends on the publisher and the type of content they produce, but the principle holds across the board.
The payoff is not a one-time traffic spike. It is a higher baseline. "If you say, normally I get 100,000 visitors to the site if I didn't put out any content this month, and when I put out new content, I get another million," Brophy explains, "the plan here is to increase your baseline." If each month adds 50,000 visits or 20% to the floor, then within a year the publisher operates on a materially different scale. On a slow news day, the fall is not as steep because the floor is higher.
That is the argument for treating content intelligence as an operating discipline rather than a project. The work itself is not invasive. Sandler Digital does not rewrite voice or restructure editorial identity. It makes targeted changes, tests them on a small scale, and expands once the results are visible. Brophy describes it as the kind of task that sits at number 23 on a publisher's to-do list and never gets done, because the daily demands of publishing always come first. "It seems so obvious, but at the same time, it's highly overlooked," he says. "It's almost like exercise. Everybody knows they should. But are they doing it?"
For publishers, the next competitive advantage may not come from producing more. It may come from understanding what they already have. The organizations that build the discipline to audit, refresh, and prioritize their archives will be positioned to capture the traffic that AI search still sends. The ones that keep publishing into the void will find that volume alone no longer buys visibility.
