"If trends continue, Google's ecosystem may evolve as follows: 1. Topic clusters go mainstream. To cut LLM-generated clutter, expensive features like topic clustering, once restricted to niche products like Google News (since the 2010s), will go mainstream across Search, Gemini, Discover, and YouTube. Discover's mid-2025 AI summary cards already signaled this shift. Here's how topic clusters look on YouTube. 2. On Discover, YouTube, and Gemini, traffic will go to fewer, deeper stories on a topic."
"3. On Discover, YouTube, and Gemini, most traffic will go to "best-in-topic" stories with competitively more net-new information. Google will filter by geography, then identify "best-in-topic" stories across publishers using algorithms like Information Gain (a 2022 Google patent) to reward unique data. To compete, publishers will invest in defensible news-gathering: Feet on the ground (reportage); Experts contributing knowledge, not just opinions; Data journalism; Analysis that is more sophisticated than what reasoning models can replicate."
Google rewarded volume for years, encouraging newsrooms to publish many "good enough" keyword-targeted stories. Improved retrieval represents stories as semantic concepts and uses features like AI summary cards to group and summarize topics. Topic clustering will expand across Search, Gemini, Discover, and YouTube, reducing the total click pool and favoring fewer, deeper pieces. Algorithms will filter by geography and reward net-new information using methods like Information Gain. Publishers will need defensible reporting methods—on-the-ground journalism, expert contributions, data journalism, and analysis beyond current reasoning-model replication—to retain visibility and traffic.
Read at Nieman Lab
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