How publishers use Intent data to reclaim
direct audience relationships

Two years ago, a publisher’s content strategy likely centered around one question: How do we rank for this keyword?

Inbound traffic was dependent upon the mercy of the search engines.

The goal was to feed a beast: write content, optimize for search algorithms, and wait for traffic to arrive from Google. The publishing industry spent years aspiring to impress a fickle algorithm. Opaque changes in search engine rules could result in the sudden spikes and declines of inbound traffic. 

But in the last 24 months, we’ve witnessed a massive pivot.

The conversation around attracting an audience has changed fundamentally. Publishers are no longer asking, “How do we maximize the traffic we get from search?” but rather, “What is our audience interested in, and what can we provide that will keep them coming back?”

Having learned the lesson of relying solely on Google search traffic, leading web publishers are refusing to leave their fate in the hands of the new wave of AI intermediaries. While many are experimenting with driving visibility across emerging platforms, they’re also hedging their bets by doubling down on direct relationships with their readers.

The impact of LLMs in content discovery

As traditional search engines have integrated artificial intelligence into their interfaces, and more consumers are using chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for research, publishers must consider a zero-click search future. 

Everyone’s been optimizing their content for search engines that typically display results in a ranked list. Now, LLMs are bypassing search results and serving up AI-generated textual responses that may or may not include citations or links to your website. 

Remarking about this shift, Jaime Schultheis, Head of Global Data Partnerships at Bombora, said, “This is not surprising. It could have been predicted. It’s the logical climax of a decades-long power struggle between Google and content creators. Publishers are preparing for zero-click since Google has dismantled the implicit ‘social contract’ that powered the open web for 25 years.”

The future will be built on audience relationships

In the era of agent-driven search and discovery, many publishers are shifting focus to deepening direct relationships. “They’re doubling down on paid subscriptions, newsletters, proprietary apps, and loyal, direct-site visitors who bypass search entirely,” says Schultheis.

As publishers have shifted from focusing on visitor volume to owned audience strategies, we’ve seen entirely new use cases for audience intelligence emerge: from event sponsorship monetization to AI-powered sales enablement.

The publishers thriving today are those who recognized this shift early. They stopped asking, “How do we get Google to send us readers?” and started asking, “How do we get readers to come directly to us?” and “How do we get the LLMs to cite us?”

As AI increasingly intermediates discovery, publishers have less control over how readers arrive, but more opportunity to deepen the relationships they have already earned.

Using audience intelligence data to improve user experience

Good journalism remains the foundation. But, increasingly, publishers are using audience intelligence data to build stronger, longer-lasting relationships with readers.

Direct relationships aren’t just safer; they are exponentially more valuable over time. A subscriber who opens your newsletter every morning, an executive who attends your annual summit, or a decision-maker who bookmarks your site directly has vastly higher lifetime value than an anonymous visitor.

Cultivating direct relationships requires meeting your readers where they are with content that’s deeply relevant to them. 

Here are key ways forward-thinking publishers are operationalizing audience intelligence data, including Intent-driven insights from the Bombora Data Co-op, across their entire business:

• Developing predictive editorial strategy: Traditional content planning relies on rear-view mirror metrics: what performed well last week. Leveraging real-time Intent data, editorial teams can identify topics that are gaining research momentum across B2B markets before competitors catch on. Editors get data-backed topics that capture immediate market attention, positioning their publications as proactive market leaders. One of our favorite examples over the past year is a publisher that deployed this strategy and saw a 213% increase in traffic against the new content. In another application of Intent data, a publisher identified topics that under-engaged segments of its audience were consuming across the larger business internet and expanded their publishing frequency to drive visibility of these subject areas.
• Producing high-yield events: Events (virtual and in-person) represent high-trust touchpoints. First-party audience intelligence combined with Intent data allows event marketers to move away from broad promotional activities and generic agendas toward targeted outreach to high-affinity audiences, customized content tracks that truly reflect current areas of interest, and robust post-event measurement that proves ROI to sponsors and advertisers.

• Personalizing newsletters dynamically: Newsletters are the ultimate direct channel, but static “one-size-fits-all” email blasts lead to audience decay. You can send case studies and sponsor placements to one subscriber, and an article and op-ed to another based on the specific business challenges the recipients’ organization is actively researching. When each newsletter feels tailored, the value of the content skyrockets.
• Boosting LLM visibility: Search isn’t disappearing, but its role has evolved. Just as publishers used to optimize for share of voice on Google SERPs, they’re now optimizing for share of model, a metric that tracks how AI-powered search results cite their content as authoritative sources. By analyzing real-time buyer research, 

Bombora’s Intent data reveals the exact semantic topics prospects are most interested in. Publishers can use these insights to develop their web content with AI models in mind, producing media around relevant subjects and themes likely to resonate with their ideal customers and with LLMs.

One Data Co-op partner deploying this strategy describes Bombora’s Intent data as, “a crystal ball for LLM sourcing.”

The last era of publishing was defined by mastering someone else’s algorithm. The next will be defined by maximizing the direct relationships with your audience—and understanding that audience better than anyone else.