Heading into an AI Storm: Notes from the 2025 Niche Leadership Summit

By Alisa Cromer, Community manager, NichePublisher.biz

Why do buffalo  – unlike cows – head into a storm?

Because if the storm strengthens, running straight into it is the fastest, safest path out of danger.  If buffalo run away from a fast-moving storm, it will overtake them anyway, and after they have exhausted themselves in the futile attempt to escape.

This was the case Brandon Foreman, Family Resources Group, made to publishers in the B2C media track at the 2025 Niche Media Leadership Summit.

Only in this case, the storm is AI technology.

Back in April 2025’s  Niche Media conference, only a few early adopters were actively testing new AI tools. However, by September, the hurricane had arrived, and publishers on the B2C side had seen sudden drops of 20 to 50% in search traffic, along with flattening or falling print and web ad revenues.

Foreman’s pitch, along with specific examples of how he uses AI internally, persuaded at least one publisher—Chip Davis, Publisher of Rowing News and an AI skeptic—to turn into the storm.

“I’m going to go back and talk to my team,” he said.

“Two Things Can Be True at the Same Time”

If Foreman’s metaphor was about the oncoming crisis, Colleen Holland was already living in it.

Holland, publisher and co-founder of VegNews, a 25-year-old magazine catering to passionate vegetarians, said AI has already scorched her search traffic. 

Much of the magazine’s  25 years of archived, evergreen content—20,000 pages of it—was designed for high search value, answering questions like “How do you make tofu?”

But traffic is about 50% of what it was two years ago. Gone. 

“It is really unethical,” she said. “AI companies are happily taking our content from our high authority domains.”

She is irked by seeing her scraped content continually appear in the AI overviews for common searches on vegetarian food. 

At the same time, VegNews uses AI about 10% of the time to find and refine ideas, make headlines more interesting, and streamline workflow. Almost all publishers we spoke with at the conference used AI at least for ideas, and to create first drafts and/or  copy-edit.

“I think two things can be true at the same time,” she said of the love-hate relationship with AI. 

Holland’s ambivalence was echoed by Bo Sacks, who produces what he says is the longest-running newsletter on media in the industry with 16,000 subscribers.

Today, he advises publishers to copyright their content and join the Magazine Coalition leading the charge for small publishers to prepare for and organize a class action suit.

However, Sacks also uses AI every day to produce his newsletter.

First he selects an article or topic for his newsletter to explore, an AI tool finds and extracts examples. Of course, he double-checks the results, but the process saves him hours a day and improves the end result. 

“I always check sources, but I am not seeing hallucinations,” he said.

“AI is both the best and the threat. We have to use it carefully.” 

B2B traffic is doing better

For B2B side publishers, the business, the storm clouds looked a little different.

Gillea Allison, president and publisher of D Magazine Partners—including a city magazine, events, and other high-value niches within Dallas—said that the consumer side saw a 20% fall-off in traffic this year.

But she said traffic at the B2B site, a  division of  the 13-year-old magazine group, founded by her father and now run by herself, her mother and sister, has not been affected at all. 

Other B2B publishers in unique niches, such as Parking Today, reported that stable direct traffic numbers have largely shielded them from of AI’s effects.  In short, the more niche the niche,  the tighter the community – and possibly boring to anyone else – the better off publishers are in a zero search future. 

A New Metric?

Still even B2B publishers were recalibrating what success looks like. 

The percentage of  emails to website visitors is now a core indicator. A 50% ratio is seen as an incremental step.  Top publishers agree on gating all content, so web search traffic that remains will register the audience, with a goal of 80 to 90%. 

But a new metric also emerged in discussion at the Summit: What percentage of the admin workflow is handled by AI?

One B2B publisher stated that he has automated about 50% of the workflow and is aiming for 90%.

The Bottom Line on AI

Right now, AI  is both partner and predator.

There is a huge opportunity to use AI to replace the grunt work within organizations, and develop new apps and chatbots.

But in reality, no publisher’s content on a website is safe from AI scraping tools and changing search preferences that are increasingly Google-free. 

The consensus: Every niche media should be asking how they will compete with Google’s new AI overview search results and direct AI queries. 

Part of this is engagement:  Providing a community, email-only content, private AI bot,  live events or a text-alert app. Every niche media is different, but at the end of the day it is the same problem.

We all need to have a clear funnel  to register every person that comes to  the website, communicate directly with the registered audience, and provide value that a search result does not. 

In short: Get together, lower our heads and run into the storm.

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