If you’re a regular to linknky.com, you may have noticed that we recently started adding bulleted summaries to the top of our stories.
You’ll see these summaries at the top of our byline stories (as opposed to briefs – if you’re unfamiliar with the difference, click here) before the story itself actually starts.
If you only have a few seconds to learn the most important information about a story, this will help you get that information quickly.
It’s also helpful for reasons more selfish for us here at LINK nky: As people are using AI more often to find information, they are using traditional search less and less. Roughly 60% of searches now yield no clicks at all, according to an April Forbes article.
I was at a conference about using AI in newsrooms in May, and the brilliant minds there told us that news organizations need to begin preparing now for the death of search. This is a certain eventuality, they told us. According to that same Forbes article I referenced above, search will have dropped 25% by 2026.
In light of that, we started researching how to make our stories be more likely to come up in answers on AI platforms like ChatGPT. It turns out that there is a name for this: Generative engine optimization, or GEO. Working to get stories to appear up high on Google or other search engines, on the other hand, is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
While we are still making sure our content is SEO optimized (we do this by getting relevant keywords into headlines, URLs, etc), we are also now working to make sure that our content is GEO optimized. That is, we are creating an internal process to boost the visibility of linknky.com content in AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and others.
So what does all this have to do with bullet point summaries at the top of our stories?
One thing that ChatGPT and others do when finding relevant content for attribution in its answers is by looking for context or summaries written in a way that is easy to understand and comprehend quickly.
So while those bullet summaries are intended to help you, as the reader, get information quickly, it’s also intended to make sure that as our traditional search traffic drops, our generative search traffic is rising (at least, that’s the goal).
I will say that I was slightly hesitant to include these bullet summaries at first. I thought, why make it so a person doesn’t actually have to read the story? What’s the point in writing a whole story if you’re just going to summarize it in bullet points anyway?
At the end of the day, LINK nky is here to get information to the community. If summarizing stories in bullets will help more people who may not otherwise take the time to find that information learn something new, we’ve done our job.
But let’s be clear: You in no way will completely understand the context, importance and community relevance of a story by just reading the bullet points. You won’t learn how much the community means to someone who dedicated their life to planting flowers along Main Street. You won’t understand why a certain decision at a council meeting is relevant, or what it means in the broader perspective. You won’t understand what something means to you or how you can use that information to go out and take action.
These bullet summaries are not intended to get you not to read. In fact, we hope they have the effect of getting people more interested in a certain topic than they might have been otherwise.
We’re going to experiment with the bulleted summaries for a few weeks and then see if we think we should keep going with them.
What do you think? Email me your feedback or questions at mgoth@linknky.com.
Meghan Goth is LINK nky’s executive editor. Click here to read more Inside LINK columns from Meghan and LINK nky President and CEO Lacy Starling.