Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker, is preparing for a future in which Google search is “no longer a meaningful driver” of its business, in a striking acknowledgment of how AI is upending the news industry.
Google accounted for a majority of visits to Condé Nast’s websites just a few years ago but only about a quarter last year, according to chief executive Roger Lynch. He described Google’s introduction of AI summaries as “another sort of death blow” in search traffic.
“We assume very dramatic continued declines in search traffic, to the point where in a couple of years it’s just not a meaningful driver of our traffic,” Lynch told the FT.
The shift underscores how quickly the economics of digital publishing are changing as generative AI tools alter how people find information online.
Condé Nast has struck licensing agreements with AI groups including OpenAI and Amazon, but has yet to reach a deal with Google. Lynch criticised what he described as a “pernicious” arrangement under which publishers must opt out of Google search in order to prevent their content from being scraped for AI-generated summaries.
Long synonymous with glossy magazines, Condé Nast has spent much of the past several years overhauling its structure under Lynch, who was hired by the billionaire Newhouse family in 2019 to revive the publisher after years of losses.
Lynch said Condé Nast increased revenue in 2025, despite search traffic declining more than expected, thanks to strong growth in subscriptions and other areas.
Revenue in 2025 was similar to 2021 levels, but the company is “far more profitable now”, he said. The Wall Street Journal reported that 2021 revenue was nearly $2bn. Gross margins have climbed about three percentage points in the past two to three years, according to Lynch.
An internal memo viewed by the FT said both revenue and profit increased last year. Condé Nast is privately held and does not report financial results publicly.
Despite its long history with print, the publisher now derived the majority of its revenue from digital operations, Lynch said, describing the past five years as a “culture shift” after a period of restructuring.
While Condé Nast has undergone several rounds of lay-offs in recent years, Lynch says last year’s profit growth was not driven by cost-cutting. “Operating expenses were relatively flat,” he said.
After dominating the pre-internet era with culture-defining magazines that made celebrities out of editors such as Anna Wintour, Condé Nast has faced a tougher landscape as entertainment has moved online.
Lynch has spent the past several years merging Condé Nast’s US and international operations. He has replaced some traditional editor-in-chief roles — including at US Vogue and Vanity Fair — with a “head of editorial content”.
Other titles were folded into larger groups, such as Pitchfork, which became part of GQ, and Teen Vogue, whose content appears on Vogue.com.
In a memo to staff on Friday, Lynch said the company would “concentrate resources” on “areas where we have clear competitive advantages”.
Seven of Condé Nast’s largest brands — Vogue, GQ, The New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and Condé Nast Traveler — now account for 85 per cent of the company’s revenue. The New Yorker reached record revenue, profits and subscribers last year, according to Lynch.
As part of that strategy, the group is selling LGBT+ title Them to Equalpride, the owner of Out, and exploring partnership or licensing models for Glamour and Self.
Lynch also argued that Condé Nast’s private ownership and lack of exposure to federal broadcast regulations insulated it from political pressures facing other US media groups, as US President Donald Trump has waged billion-dollar lawsuits against several major news organisations in his second term.
“If you’re a really good journalist who wants to do your best work and not worry about what [FCC commissioner] Brendan Carr is going to say or the administration is going to do, the list is short,” he said.
“When you look at what’s happening specifically here in the US, there are fewer and fewer journalistic organisations that are not being subject to political interference,” Lynch said, adding that he views it as a “competitive advantage” for Condé Nast.
The company’s restructuring, however, has brought job cuts and unrest. The company cut about 5 per cent of staff in 2023 and has faced union protests over lay-offs, while senior editors have left posts at Vogue China and Vogue UK.
Lynch said that after years of “really hard slogging”, the company was “kind of past that part now”.
“It was hard, it was years, it was painful. But now . . . it’s much more about investing in new ideas,” he said, adding that the Newhouses were “very, very supportive”.