USA TODAY is dismantling its audience organization and rebuilding it as a new team. In internal memos, executives told staff that search traffic is under pressure and that platforms are increasingly keeping users rather than sending them back to publishers. The restructuring coincided with a round of layoffs. It makes USA TODAY one of the largest publishers to name search pressure explicitly as the reason for reorganizing.
Monica Richardson, senior vice president of USA TODAY, tied the reorganization directly to changes in how audiences discover news. "Growing audience by producing more content isn't as effective as it once was," she wrote, adding that "search traffic is under pressure, and platforms are increasingly keeping user experiences to themselves instead of sending them back to us." The current audience organization, she said, "was built for a different media landscape."
The memos do not mention Google by name. But several publishers have seen declining search referrals and shifting audience behavior since AI Overviews launched in 2024, and Google has since started auto-expanding those summaries, which we covered in Google Is Auto-Expanding AI Overviews — Pushing Search Results Further Down.
The existing audience organization becomes an Audience and Digital Production Team focused on three areas:
USA TODAY plans to hire a new executive editor of Audience and Digital Production plus several audience roles, with the goal of having the team fully operational within six to eight weeks.
In a separate memo, Michael A. Anastasi, senior vice president of Local News, said the company had spent two days saying goodbye to colleagues whose positions were eliminated. The cuts were framed as aligning the cost structure with current business realities as publishers face rapid change in audience behavior, technology, advertising and revenue models.
SEO and AI search consultant Glenn Gabe read the memo as pointing to something broader than AI-generated search results: "'Search traffic is under pressure…' Or… you've been impacted by algorithm updates over time and your search visibility has tanked. USA Today can address this and recover btw. This is not just about AI Overviews eating clicks… This is a visibility drop too."
Expect more publishers to reshape audience and distribution strategies as search becomes a less reliable traffic source. Condé Nast has said it expects search to fall to a single-digit share of its traffic. In Europe, newspapers have taken the regulatory route instead; see 300 French Newspapers File a Complaint Over Google AI Overviews.
This is not only a newsroom story. Brand marketing teams that built search traffic through blogs and content hubs face the same pressure. The part of USA TODAY's new org chart worth copying is not the production desk but the Strategic Platforms Desk: a dedicated function for relationships that do not pass through search, such as newsletters, apps, social and communities.
Gabe's point stands too. Before concluding that AI ate your traffic, diagnose what actually happened to your own search visibility. For the broader traffic picture and the measurement gap underneath it, see ChatGPT Up 48%, Bing Down 50%: What a Year of U.S. Website Traffic Says About AI Search and GA4.
No. The memos do not name Google. They refer to search traffic being under pressure and platforms keeping user experiences to themselves.
It is an Audience and Digital Production Team with three desks: Central Production, Content Pillars Audience, and Strategic Platforms. A new executive editor and several audience roles are being hired, with a six-to-eight-week target to be operational.
SEO consultant Glenn Gabe argued the memo also points to a search visibility drop from algorithm updates over time, which he said is recoverable. Diagnose your own visibility before attributing losses to AI.
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