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SECURE YOUR SEAT USA Today Co. is testing different ways to reformat its website content for an AI bot audience to attract AI content licensing deals.
“We recognize that we have to create and format content for humans and for machines. And while we see a change in search-driven behavior, we also see entirely new ways to license, distribute and monetize the trusted content we produce every day,” said Mike Reed, chairman and CEO of USA Today Co., in a company earnings call on August 6.
Restructuring content formats and templates can help make it easier for AI systems to access, understand and cite USA Today’s reporting, improving the discoverability of its content in AI answer engines, Kara Chiles, USA Today Co.’s svp of product management, told Digiday. It’s part of the publisher’s larger GEO strategy to optimize for these platforms, she said.
Time, The Economist and other major news publishers are already experimenting with parallel, agent-readable versions of their sites and stricter controls on which bots can crawl them. The thesis is that improving a publisher’s visibility in AI search can strengthen pitches to sell GEO products and insights to brands to help shape their messaging in AI search.
It’s unclear which approaches USA Today Co. will take to reformat content for AI. Chiles said the publisher was testing various ones, including converting webpages into markdown. The company is also gathering data on which bots are accessing USA Today Co.’s webpages to better understand who is seeking out its content and why, she added. USA Today Co. is monitoring AI impressions and referral traffic, and what content is being cited in Google AI Overviews.
“A lot of what we’re doing right now is probably not going to be recognizable to the human end user. It’s a lot of the infrastructure, the metadata, how we’re actually structuring our formats and templates to be as discoverable for AEO and GEO,” Chiles said. “We are looking for the intersection of what is good for the human is good for the machine, because the machine is ultimately trying to reach a human as well… We acknowledge we’re in a space where it’s still a moving target,” she added.
The publisher is analyzing which formats are surfaced most often — such as guides or stories made up of multiple content modules — and whether those structures perform better with crawlers than traditional standalone articles, Chiles noted.
In the company earnings call, Reed said reformatting content to be “machine-readable” was part of USA Today Co.’s efforts to prepare for “future licensing opportunities,” as well as to provide more value in current AI licensing deals.
“We do see more AI licensing deals coming this year,” Reed said. “Our objective here is not just to sign more agreements, but it’s really to build recurring, long-term relationships where we get proper recognition of the value that we bring with this trusted real time content. So we continue to block the scrapers, and we are reformatting our content. We’re working on that by the hour… We expect to be at the table with new deals as well as expanding current deals.”
USA Today Co. has adopted a bot-blocking approach used by other publishers, including The Atlantic, People Inc., Reuters and Time: blocking AI bots by default and whitelisting only those it has approved relationships with, Chiles said. The company currently blocks about 99% of self-identified AI bots.
Ameet Shah, partner and global svp of publisher operations and tech strategy at Prohaska Consulting, said he expects to see more content reformatting efforts from publishers — though adoption will be slow and focused on large and niche publishers.
“It is an investment that some publishers with unique content — especially like a USA Today, which has national and local news — it can be worthwhile. Eventually, this enhanced methodology may become more mainstream as sites go through redesigns and platform migrations. In the interim, it is an initiative that larger publishers may invest in,” Shah said.
However, all of this is not to say that USA Today Co. isn’t also looking at using visibility in AI answer engines as part of its pitch to advertisers — something more and more publishers have started including in conversations with clients.
“We’re moving on multiple fronts. So one of the things we’re actively working on within this quarter is being able to make branded and sponsored content visible to LLMs as an advertiser value,” Chiles said, declining to share more specific details on what this would look like and who the publisher is pitching this to. “We’re working on mechanisms to be able to do that distinctly for the advertiser base.”
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