The Identity Crisis Coming for News SEO

Google’s attempts to repackage news are encroaching on publishers. As a cofounder of WTF Is SEO?, an industry newsletter, has observed: “A growing sentiment is that Google is not a partner but a competitor.” 

It feels almost like all control is being taken away,” Shelby Blackley, a manager of newsroom SEO at The Athletic and a cofounder of WTF Is SEO?, an industry newsletter, told me. She was referring to an unsettling trend: Google has been taking an increasingly heavy hand in reshaping how content appears on its platform. Blackley and Jessie Willms started WTF Is SEO? in 2021, with the aim of helping journalists better understand a concept already well known in the marketing world. Lately, they have been paying close attention to the shifts in Google’s strategy—and how news organizations are starting to notice the changes.

Google’s most recent move was experimenting with rewriting headlines for search results using LLMs, as was reported by The Verge in late March. In The Verge’s case, Google changed “Microsoft is rebranding Copilot in the most Microsoft way possible” to “Copilot Changes: Marketing Teams at it Again.” The story explained that staffers at The Verge “spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are true, interesting, fun, and worthy of your attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we don’t have an inherent right to market our own work that way.” As Willms put it, when a platform changes a headline, “it’s extremely frustrating for people working in journalism, because there are already so