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“The advertising opportunity on Gemini is way bigger”
The open web’s decline is not new. Back in July of 2023, I wrote about the “twilight of the open web,” arguing that the defining features of open web publishing – the webpage, search and display advertising – were being compressed. That’s only accelerated.
In our conversation in a new episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke with Taboola CEO Adam Singolda about his confidence in the future of the open web that's underpinned Taboola's business model. I've known Adam since Taboola's early days, when it was battling with Outbrain to own the bottom of the page with content recommendation links. Some see these ad carousels as a blight on webpages, others recognize that they were critical tools for funding open web publishing. Taboola now pays roughly $1.5 billion a year to publishers. Adam has every incentive to be bullish on the open web, which makes it notable when he isn't.
“Search traffic will change dramatically,” he said. “And it's going to be very hard to be dependent on search in the future, like we were in the past, because Google will not be motivated as they used to be to drive that traffic around the web."
Adam sees the open web bifurcating. The long tail of publishers built on search arbitrage is compressing, and he doesn't think it's coming back. But publishers with real brands and direct audience relationships have an opportunity to grow — if they're willing to rethink the product entirely. The question now is what version of the open web emerges from these shifts.
Consumer expectations are shifting quickly. 700 million people now use an LLM every day. Taboola's Deeper Dive, an AI chat layer on publisher sites where readers can ask questions and get responses drawn from the publisher's content, is seeing double-digit percentage adoption among users, and the usage goes up over time, not down.
I’m still skeptical that publishers can reinvent site search after a generation of training people to never use it. Confining it to one brand – USA Today has a far larger content repository than 99% of publishers – would seem untenable. That would require publishers to collaborate on a trusted alternative to block box generative AI that often relies on unverified Reddit posts and other user-generated content.
The bigger problem is what surrounds it. I landed on a publisher page recently with a floating video player, a skin ad in a language I don't speak, eight ad units on a 400-word story, and three promotional modules before I ever reached a content recommendation carousel. This is a losing product. The clock is ticking on the approach of cramming every available pixel with monetization while consumer expectations are being reset by clean, conversational AI interfaces. Publishers have to be willing to ship a fundamentally different experience, and the ones who move first will capture a disproportionate share of what comes next.
The traffic-revenue uncoupling. Most publishers I speak to talk about 30-40% declines in traditional search referrals, offset in many cases at news publishers with robust Google Discover traffic. A search traffic decline chart bounced around SEO X this week to drive home the point.
This isn’t confined to tech publishing. Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch expects Google search will continue to decline to the point where Google Zero is effectively reached.
The implication in the pageview economy is that revenue tracks pageviews, only publishers have replaced search traffic with other sources that tend to be more valuable. For instance, traffic from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini is far higher quality, meaning visitors spend more time and convert to subscriptions or newsletters at a higher rate.
"The people coming from search tend to be the least money-making people,” Adam said. “If you compare a homepage [visitor] to a search [visitor], a homepage [visitor] could be worth 2-3x a search [visitor] because they read more."
This fits with what I’ve heard from publishers. Traffic declines are leading to a focus on models with smaller, more durable audiences, and publisher strategies are shifting to focus on the lifetime value or average revenue per user rather than RPM, or revenue per thousand impressions.
A new long tail. The long tail was in large part a response to these incentives to fill the millions of niches that exist in Google’s “database of intentions.” They sprang up as a decentralized version of service journalism, with varying degrees of quality, always subjective, of course.
“We'll see the open web evolving in a way that smaller sites, which enjoyed SEO and social traffic for a decade or two, are at risk,” Adam told me. “I'm concerned about smaller sites. They will probably be reborn in a creator economy."
The creator economy continues to grow as traditional long tail publishing compresses. YouTube fills every possible niche with personalities. I stumbled across a math creator this week. This area will be challenged by AI-created content that floods these platforms. Rachel Karten pointed out that an AI-generated “DIY and crafts” Instagram account racks up millions of views. The attention economy is a zero-sum game.
GEO is the new SEO. Google got grief for a period of time for blowing the lead it had in AI with the emergence of ChatGPT. That narrative has shifted, as ChatGPT has lost ground to Anthropic’s Claude and Gemini has continued to grow.
Adam makes a provocative claim: Google wants traditional search to die so Gemini can take over, because Gemini performs better for advertisers than any ad Google has ever served on search or YouTube.
“The advertising opportunity on Gemini for Google is way bigger and better than Google’s traditional blue link that we know,” Adam said. “So they're going to push Gemini as fast and as much as they can."
It was telling that a GEO firm, Profound, nabbed a $96 million round of funding at a $1 billion valuation for a GEO platform. The battle for attention has shifted from getting people to click on a link to a webpage to elbowing into answers on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others.
The open question is whether people will trust these engines, particularly as they become commercialized. Anthropic’s ad campaign warning of ads coming to AI played on concerns that advertising will taint the veracity of AI responses.
A collapsed funnel. Taboola is focused squarely on performance advertising. Its rival Outbrain merged with Teads, taking a different path to offer both brand and performance in one platform. Taboola instead has doubled down on performance while diversifying from its traditional recommendations units.
Taboola is placing search-like ads within the chat response pages generated by its Deeper Dive AI-search product.
Adam's future scenario: a Knicks fan regularly asking Deeper Dive about game results and team news eventually gets prompted to check ticket prices. The AI notices prices are lower than usual for an upcoming game, suggests taking the train to Philadelphia to catch the Knicks playing the 76ers since Madison Square Garden prices are obscene, and offers to lock in seats within a budget. The fan pays Ticketmaster through the publisher site via Apple Pay without ever clicking out to an advertiser's page. The transaction happens inside the conversation.
"The funnel could be dead in the future," he said. "I'm just gonna make the decision."
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