Two publishers lost half their Google traffic in two years. Both are profitable. Both have ~40 brands. Both acquired creator-first companies in the past year. Both built proprietary ad products to replace what Google took away.
They made opposite bets.
The Fork
People Inc's Google search sessions fell from 54% of traffic to 24%. Future plc's search-dependent revenue fell 8% in the first half of fiscal 2026, with e-commerce affiliate revenue down 24% and UK programmatic down 19%. Both companies saw it coming. Both decided that waiting for Google to reverse course was not a strategy.
What they did next reveals two fundamentally different theories of what a publisher is.
The Pipe Builder
People Inc's response to the Google collapse was to build infrastructure. D/Cipher, its contextual ad platform built with OpenAI technology, now handles over half of direct digital ad revenue. It doesn't need cookies. It doesn't need Google. It reads the page, understands the context, targets the ad. The performance guarantee — 15-20% of campaign spend re-run if it underperforms — has never been triggered.
Then they expanded. D/Cipher+ opens that technology to third-party publishers. Jim Lawson was hired as president in March 2025, via Axios. The M&I print agency was folded under D/Cipher's management and pivoted to digital. Vogel expects 2-3% of overall revenue growth from D/Cipher+ in 2026 — modest, but the point isn't the revenue yet. It's the architecture.
The Feedfeed acquisition in October 2025 extended the model differently: not technology, but distribution. A thousand influencer partners, 600 million social views a year, zero Google dependency. Vogel called it "a blueprint for other categories." The bet is that creator networks can be plugged into D/Cipher's targeting — first food, then beauty, style, travel, home.
The result: digital revenue grew 8% in Q1 2026 to $253 million. Non-session revenue — licensing, affiliate, performance marketing, off-platform — is 41% of digital and growing 24% annually. Ten consecutive quarters of digital growth. The numbers work.
The Signal Seller
Future plc's response was different. Instead of building pipes between advertisers and audiences, Future decided to sell something new: visibility inside AI systems.
Future Optic is a generative engine optimization product. It leverages a striking fact: Future's TechRadar is the most-cited publisher domain on ChatGPT globally, according to Ahrefs. Future leads in 6 of 13 subverticals and is second in 5 more. So they sell that influence. Brands pay Future to optimize their presence in AI-generated responses — what the industry calls GEO.
A Samsung campaign drove 4,754 LLM citations with a 23-33% uplift in brand mentions. Future Optic has booked £10 million for the full fiscal year. Marie Claire US now bundles it into branded content deals. The product was shortlisted for Campaign Media's innovation award.
The SheerLuxe acquisition in January 2026 — £39.9 million upfront, potentially £80 million with earnout — is the creator-network parallel. Six million audience members, 900,000 email subscribers, 2.4 million social followers, and only 10% of traffic from Google. A 40% EBITDA margin. Future's CEO calls it a "Google Zero" proof of concept.
The result: revenue fell 8% in H1 to £349 million. Profit collapsed 67%. E-commerce affiliate revenue dropped 24%. Shares fell 30% in a single day after the results. Future has lost 90% of its market value since 2021 — from nearly £4 billion to £300 million. It has spent more on acquisitions (£1.5 billion) than the entire company is now worth.
The Fragility Question
Both bets have structural weaknesses. The question is which weakness is more fatal.
D/Cipher's problem is scale. It works on People Inc's owned-and-operated sites — 175 million monthly consumers, 40 brands, deep contextual data. But the buy side wants reach. Agency executives have been blunt: "reach and frequency plays favor large platforms," and "value must justify the added work of learning the publisher's platform." Every publisher ad platform — D/Cipher, Zeus Prime, Spire, AURA — adds fragmentation that pushes advertisers back toward the simplicity of Google, Meta, and Amazon. People Inc's bet is that quality will overcome convenience. That is always a hard bet.
Future Optic's problem is control. Its core asset — being the most-cited publisher on ChatGPT — is an algorithm's decision, not Future's. Recent research is sobering: only 15% of webpages retrieved by ChatGPT are ultimately cited in final responses. LLM citations follow a long-tail distribution where even the top domain rarely exceeds 5% of total citations — fundamentally different from SEO's winner-take-all dynamic. And the academic consensus on GEO is clear: platform-specific tactics are fragile; principles are durable. Future is selling something it does not fully control.
"ChatGPT is a visibility channel, not a traffic source."
— Simon Glanville, Future plc SEO Director
That quote is revealing. Future isn't promising traffic — it's promising mentions. Brand visibility inside a response that may or may not link back. The Samsung campaign generated 4,754 LLM citations, but citations in AI responses don't work like search results. There's no click-through rate. There's no measurable conversion path. Future is selling brand awareness inside a black box, and £10 million in bookings is a rounding error against their £349 million in revenue.
The Valuation Paradox
Here is the part that doesn't compute. People Inc — growing, profitable, building real infrastructure — is valued by the market at approximately zero. Future plc — shrinking, profit-hammered, 90% down from peak — has a market cap of £300 million.
The explanation is structural, not rational. People Inc is trapped inside IAC's sum-of-the-parts math: IAC's market cap ($3.4 billion) roughly equals its MGM Resorts stake ($2.6 billion) plus cash. The publishing business is an appendage. Future trades independently on the London Stock Exchange. At 3.3x trailing earnings, it's priced as a value trap or a turnaround play. Analysts see a stock with 20% free cash flow yield and wonder if the Google problem is already in the price.
Both valuations are lies of a kind. People Inc is not worth zero — it generates $330 million in adjusted EBITDA. Future is not worth £300 million if its highest-margin businesses (affiliate, programmatic) keep declining at 20%+ annually. The market is pricing the container, not the contents.
Which Bet Ages Better
D/Cipher is a pipe. Pipes are boring, hard to build, and hard to replace. If People Inc gets third-party scale for D/Cipher+, it becomes a genuine alternative to programmatic exchanges — a publisher-owned ad network that doesn't leak data to intermediaries. The timeline is long. The investment is real. But pipes, once laid, tend to stay.
Future Optic is a signal. Signals are exciting, first-mover, and dependent on the medium that carries them. If ChatGPT changes how it cites sources — or stops citing them — Future Optic's value proposition evaporates. If a dozen other publishers build their own GEO services (and they will — the tools cost $4,000 to $10,000 a month from any competent agency), the differentiation narrows. Future is selling first-mover advantage in a market that hasn't decided if it exists yet.
The pipe builder is making a capital bet. The signal seller is making a timing bet.
One of them is right about what publishers become when Google stops sending traffic. The uncomfortable possibility is that neither of them is.
Sources: AdExchanger, Press Gazette, Digiday, ADVFN, Ekamoira, SimilarWeb. This is post 19 in an ongoing series covering People Inc and the media publishing business.