Cuttings #1

Why Cuttings?

In my long-ago days as features editor of Estates Gazette, when we came into the office in the morning, there was a stapled bundle of A3 sheets, photocopies of all the real estate-related stories from the national and trade press that day. Initially it was done by the librarian, when the magazine had one, and later by the new desk on a rotating basis. It was all very analogue.

Obviously, Cuttings is a digital aggregation version of that, a living example of Jeff Jarvis's old maxim:

do what you do best, link to the rest.

Welcome to the first Cuttings newsletter, exclusively for paying subscribers to One Man & His Blog.

The AI/SEO doom is upon us

Barry Adams shares his thoughts of the likely impact on search traffic of Google's new AI mode. It's not good news:

As an educated guess, the clickthrough rate from AI Mode answers to their cited sources is expected to be at least as low, and probably lower, as the CTR from AI Overviews. This means publishers could potentially see their traffic from Google search decline by 50% or more.

This is a clear emerging pattern. AI isn't going to kill search traffic, but it is going to decrease it. It's just accelerating the trend towards “zero click” searches - ones that never leave Google.

If you've been reading me long enough, you know what I'm going to say next.