The most important takeaways from my conversation with Jes Scholz

Person

Who is Jes Scholz?

Jes Scholz is a growth marketer and SEO expert from Sydney, specialised in enterprise SEO at billion-scale dimensions and for years a voice in the international publisher discourse.

For several years she was Group Chief Marketing Officer at Ringier, one of the largest European publishing houses. Today she advises publishers and platforms independently and writes regularly for Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Moz about the future of search.

AI Mode

How does Google's AI Mode affect publishers?

AI Mode shifts clicks away from the classic results list towards AI answers and reduces publishers' reach on simple service topics, how-tos and overview content.

What exactly is AI Mode?

AI Mode is Google's conversational search mode that generates answers directly from a language model and allows follow-up questions. Since October 2025 it has also been available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Unlike the classic SERP, AI Mode primarily shows a generated answer and displays source links only as a secondary element. Users stay longer in the Google interface and click through to publisher sites less often.

Which click and reach effects are visible in Germany?

Since the rollout in autumn 2025, publishers have reported falling click numbers above all on how-to topics, definitions and service overviews. The click-through rate from AI answers is significantly lower than from classic results lists.

Content with own research, local relevance and a strong brand remains stable. AI Mode cites there more often and sends clicks more precisely to sources that deliver unambiguous answers.

Pillar channel

Why is Google Discover the most important channel for publishers?

Google Discover remains the highest-reach channel in the Google cosmos for German publishers and delivers around seventy percent of Google traffic at many publishers.

Discover scales via news situations and republishing far beyond what classic search brings in clicks. Anyone who stays visible in the feed gains reach that AI Mode does not siphon off in the SERP.

Which Discover levers also work in the AI age?

Discover traffic arises from anticipating news situations, high-quality images, mobile-first layout and visible personal brands in the byline. Content with its own signature escapes AI summaries more often than standard texts.

The biggest operational lever in daily business is refresh and republish: newsrooms update existing articles in substance and play them out again. Individual pieces thus carry Discover traffic for weeks instead of just hours.

Why does evergreen optimisation remain the reach lever?

Evergreen content provides the stable base when news traffic breaks away through AI Overviews. It is the basis for regular republishing and for visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode.

Anyone who updates evergreen topics every six months keeps them current both in Discover and in LLM answers. Both systems prefer fresh signals on existing URLs.

LLM access

Should publishers block LLMs in robots.txt?

A complete block of LLM crawlers protects content from training, but costs visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. The better lever is usually selective access.

What are the consequences of a complete block?

Anyone who completely blocks GPTBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended hardly appears as a source in their answers any more. The brand loses branding effect and click reach, without any guarantee that the content does not end up in the model via third-party sources anyway.

The block only makes sense if a publisher actively markets its content via paid content or licensing deals and wants to secure freedom from training as a legal lever.

Where is selective access via licensing deals worthwhile?

Licensing deals with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or Perplexity shift revenue from click-driven advertising to contractual payments. They pay off especially for brands with their own research and legally sound content.

Anyone who signs licensing deals retains control via structured API access over which content an LLM sees, and which stays behind the paywall.

Losing formats

Which content loses value through AI?

Losing value are service tables, simple how-tos and overview articles, because a language model assembles them itself from several sources without effort.

This applies especially to formats that so far got a lot of click reach via search but carry no research of their own. Lists such as "the ten best X" or explainers on standard terms lose their SERP position to the AI answer itself.

Protected remains content with a local angle, own interviews, exclusive data and live research. What an AI cannot reproduce without eyewitnesses retains editorial value and click-through rate.

AI Overviews

How do publishers appear as a source in AI Overviews?

Publishers end up in AI Overviews when their content delivers unambiguous answers, structured data and citable paragraphs that Google can adopt directly into the AI answer.

Decisive is the independence of the paragraphs. Sentences such as "as already mentioned" destroy citability, because an LLM does not form a meaningful excerpt without context.

In addition, brand trust counts: Google prefers sources that are marked as reliable in its own systems (Knowledge Graph, news index). Personal brands with a maintained author schema reinforce this effect.

Trust

Why does trust become the hardest currency for publishers?

Trust becomes the hardest currency because in an AI world full of answers, users have to distinguish between a reliable source and a generic machine, and brands carry the difference.

LLMs reinforce this logic. They cite sources that signal reliability through established brands, named authors and verifiable data. Anonymous content loses visibility faster in this world than ever before.

In practice that means: author pages, source references, update dates and transparent methodology become mandatory. Publishers that disclose their research gain trust with readers and LLMs alike.

Personal brands

What role do creators and journalists play as brands?

Journalists as personal brands take on tasks that the publisher alone no longer carries: they create accountability, ensure recognition in LLMs and recover reach that AI Mode takes out of the SERP.

Jes Scholz puts it pointedly: publishers are increasingly becoming talent agencies for journalists. Anyone who builds a name, a newsletter, a profile page and occupies a topic area of their own gets cited independently of the publisher brand.

Personal brands arise via own profile pages, consistent author schemas, visible bylines and appearances in Podcasts, and at conferences. Generalists have a harder time in the AI age than sharply positioned specialist journalists.

Content types

Which content prevails in the AI age?

What will prevail is original research, investigative work, live reporting and pointed opinion, formats that a language model does not produce without human eyewitnesses.

Original data and exclusive interviews deliver the raw material that LLMs later cite. Anyone who publishes their own studies, surveys or GSC analyses creates content that machines find nowhere else.

Live formats retain their value too: on-site reportage, live tickers on news situations and audio reports create a pace that AI answers do not reach without human sourcing.

Structure for AI search

How should content be structured for AI search?

Content for AI search needs precise question headings, short answer sentences directly after each heading and chunkable paragraphs that a language model adopts without a break in context.

Which structures make citing easier for LLMs?

W-question headings match the way users formulate in chat. A short summary of twenty to twenty-five words directly after each heading makes the paragraph independently citable for LLMs.

Important is the independence of every paragraph. Anyone who avoids bridging sentences and formulates every statement self-explanatorily increases the probability of citation in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews.

Which schema markup do publishers need?

For publishers, Article, NewsArticle, FAQPage, Person and HowTo count above all. Cleanly maintained, they make content machine-readable, without manipulation becoming necessary.

Decisive is the consistency between visible text and schema data. LLMs rate discrepancies as a signal for low-quality content and reduce citability.

Scenarios

Which future scenarios are realistic for publishers?

Three scenarios are realistic: licensing deals as a new revenue path, direct channels as a reach anchor and a mixed model of both for most houses.

What does the licensing scenario look like?

In the licensing scenario, LLM providers pay publishers for training data and live access to content. Publishers become the curated source that LLMs need to deliver current and legally sound answers.

Revenue shifts from click-driven to licence-based. Reach is no longer an end in itself, but bargaining power for deals with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or Perplexity.

Which direct channels do publishers build?

Stable direct channels are newsletters, apps, audio formats and YouTube presences, reach that the publisher controls itself and does not have to collect via a platform.

Anyone who builds their own audience strategy reduces dependence on Google and creates the basis for sustainable Publisher SEO even in a world in which AI answers replace search clicks.

Conclusion

Conclusion: how do publishers secure their future in the AI age?

Publishers secure their future by distributing reach across several channels, building personal brands and making their content citable for AI answers.

Anyone who relies only on Google traffic runs into a hard wall in AI Mode. Anyone who builds reach via Discover, newsletters, audio, video and licensing deals and at the same time structures their texts consistently has the most stable basis for SEO for publishers, no matter where AI search develops.

Transparency

Sources used

• Own experience from eight years of publisher SEO at publishers such as Axel Springer, Funke, Ippen and t-online.
• Publisher SEO Podcast: "Episode with Jes Scholz: "What publishers should stop doing in the AI era"", overview of all episodes.
• Jes Scholz: "Profile and publications".
• Search Engine Land: "Articles by Jes Scholz".