Why click-driven media failed—and what we're building instead Here's a fun thought experiment: If a tree falls in the forest and a Google AI Overview summarizes it, did anyone actually click? For those of us running local newsrooms, the question isn't rhetorical—it's existential. Google's new AI summaries, which now appear above links in many search results, have decimated referral traffic for publishers. Click-throughs are disappearing into the ether. Users click just 1% of the time when AI Overviews are present. That's not a dip. That's an extinction event. And yet, the dashboards still look beautiful. Engagement metrics gleam. "Time on page" sparkles. Impressions balloon like dollar-store parade floats. But the revenue? The readership? The civic impact? Vapor. ### The Illusion of Precision The digital advertising economy has long been built on shaky math, faith-based metrics, and a lot of very confident PowerPoint decks. Take Nico Neumann, an academic who stood up at Programmatic I/O and calmly explained that most of the consumer targeting data in the industry is laughably inaccurate. Some datasets were wrong about 85% of the time. His conclusion? Old-school mass marketing was more effective. No one in the audience asked a question. They just moved on to the next panel about "AI-enhanced emotional resonance optimization." ### If You Build It (and Let Google Scrape It), They Won't Come At The Charlotte Mercury, we've seen the same pattern firsthand: Google gets smarter, our traffic gets thinner, and the analytics tools politely ask if we'd like to spend more on "discovery campaigns." So what happens when those ads are based on garbage data? When the AI-generated summary cannibalizes the reporting it's based on? You get a lot of beautifully formatted reports showing "record reach" and "strong Q2 engagement." And a newsroom with no money. ### Building Something That Can't Be Summarized Our answer isn't louder headlines or faster SEO pivots. It's a slower, deeper, more honest conversation with readers—rooted in first-party relationships, not drive-by impressions. No third-party trackers. No pop-ups begging you to enable notifications. No clickbait headlines about traffic crashes unless the street is actually closed. We're not anti-technology. We're just anti-bullshit. And if the attention economy has to collapse before something better can be built, then let it burn.