{"id":214229,"date":"2026-06-18T09:41:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T09:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/how-usa-today-co-is-trying-to-beat-ai-overviews-on-world-cup-news-digiday\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T09:41:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T09:41:24","slug":"how-usa-today-co-is-trying-to-beat-ai-overviews-on-world-cup-news-digiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/how-usa-today-co-is-trying-to-beat-ai-overviews-on-world-cup-news-digiday\/","title":{"rendered":"How USA Today Co. is trying to beat AI Overviews on World Cup news – Digiday"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the fight for visibility in an AI-powered search era, USA Today Co. is betting that speed can still beat the machines. After using AI-assisted, pre-written \u201cshell files\u201d to help boost traffic to Winter Olympics coverage, it\u2019s rolling out the same strategy for this summer\u2019s FIFA World Cup 2026.
The race to win Google search now starts before AI can get there. USA Today Co. is pre-writing articles \u2014 with the help of AI to pull related content from its archive \u2014 so it can be ready with breaking news stories the moment they happen.
\u201cWe’re trying not to be as reliant on SEO strategy. Pre-writes are huge\u2026 We do brainstorm sessions on anticipatory content, and try to pre-write as much as we can, and then time it for as soon as something happens,\u201d said Alicia DelGallo, USA Today Sports editorial director. \u201cBecause by the time everyone else or Google search trends spike, and then Google’s like, \u2018This is worth an AI Overview,\u2019 we already had it. We got the spike on the way up instead of the way down.\u201d
Determining how quickly Google can summarize breaking news in AI Overviews is something publishers have been looking at for a while. Last year, a news publishing exec told Digiday their team was testing AI Mode\u2019s ability<\/a> to ingest and summarize breaking news content, and found that 10 minutes after the news org published a breaking news story, AI Mode \u201chad everything available to it\u201d about that topic.
AI Overviews work a little slower than that. Barry Adams, founder of Polemic Digital, an SEO and audience growth consultancy for news publishers, said he has seen AI Overviews appear for news events within about four hours, and not longer than half a day, but noted that there isn\u2019t any solid data on this yet. 
The USA Today network \u2014 which includes the USA Today flagship publication and over 200 local publications \u2014 uses AI tools and editorial input to create what it calls \u201cautomated shell files\u201d for breaking news stories, DelGallo said. AI pulls subheads, photos and links from the publisher’s previously published stories, and an editor then puts it all together into these \u201cshell files.”
\u201cIf news breaks, you don’t have to start a new file, you can grab that, you can throw two sentences on, headline, edit, publish, and then keep writing,\u201d she said.
The publisher tested this format during the Winter Olympics in February. A reporter on the ground filed rapid updates on ski racer Lindsey Vonn\u2019s crash on the mountain, dropping them into shell files about Vonn’s Olympics run, and hitting publish.\u00a0
Previously, an editor would have to manually aggregate background information into a breaking news story to provide context and links to previous, related coverage, which takes longer, according to DelGallo. AI speeds up the process, which she said helped USA Today Co. \u201ccrush the competition\u201d on some of the breaking news around the Winter Olympics, DelGallo said.
USA Today\u2019s network of national and local publications generated 116 million total page views from its 2026 Winter Olympics coverage spanning January 1 to February 28, according to a company spokesperson. The flagship USA Today publication alone drew 91 million page views, up 82% from the 2022 Winter Olympics.
\u201cGoogle News rewards the publisher who breaks the story by treating them as the canonical source, and many publishers that cover it afterward tend to link back to that original. That citation pattern feeds right back into standard organic rankings, so the first mover compounds the advantage,\u201d said Michael King, founder and CEO of a content marketing and SEO agency iPullRank. AI Overviews use the underlying search results as input, so the same goes for Google\u2019s AI search feature, he added.
USA Today Co. is now applying this strategy to this year\u2019s World Cup, both to publish reported stories faster and update live blogs more frequently, DelGallo said. The newsroom has five shell files ready to go each day, she added.
While publishers have long pre-written articles to surface higher than competitors in Google\u2019s search results, the goal has shifted: now they\u2019re racing to get their links in front of readers before AI Overviews kick in and siphon off click-throughs. 
\u201cAI makes this tactic more scalable and broadly applicable,\u201d said Barry Adams, founder of Polemic Digital, an SEO and audience growth consultancy for news publishers. \u201cNow that the opportunity window for news is shorter, with AI summaries intruding on news boxes like Top Stories within half a day of a news event happening, publishing breaking news quickly is a solid approach that allows a publisher to maximise that small opportunity window.\u201d
Using AI for speed to beat AI in search isn\u2019t USA Today Co.\u2019s only World Cup strategy. The publisher is also focusing on more traditional SEO strategies: original, authoritative reporting that stands out in search results, DelGallo said. The publisher has reporters on the ground in all 16 host cities, an onsite hub for World Cup coverage, two dedicated newsletters and a podcast.
\u201c[We are] also trying to make sure that our reporters with byline authority on specific topics\u2026 [are publishing stories] that don\u2019t read as generic, but as a unique, authoritative person that’s writing a perspective that you can’t find anywhere else,\u201d DelGallo said. Instead of publishing a story with a headline like, \u201cThese are the top 10 moments in the game,\u201d it might be closer to, \u201cThese are all the ways the game has changed over the years,\u201d for example.
\u201cWe’ve been focusing on that to try to insulate us a little bit from the lack of [search] referrals,\u201d DelGallo said.
USA Today Co. has 40 million monthly unique visitors to its sports content, according to a company spokesperson. The news org expects to see a traffic bump from its World Cup coverage with this content strategy, especially with the U.S. being a co-host \u2014 even if it may not be as big as it would have been without AI Overviews.
\u201cWe do still anticipate massive audience around this, huge spikes. Just like we did for the Olympics. We saw that [on June 11], we drove 2 million page views,\u201d DelGallo said. \u201c[We\u2019re going to have more traffic] than previous World Cups, because previous World Cups were just lesser for us at USA Today in general. But I anticipate it’s much less than it potentially could have been should the World Cup [in the U.S.] have happened a year and a half ago, or even a year ago.\u201d
Germany\u2019s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses \u2013 Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt \u2013 is rolling out a commercial product that helps brands get properly surfaced and described inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants, not just on traditional search results pages.
Forbes bets on AI-generated audio with a five-minute daily news brief. Stories are selected by product, editorial and an internal AI tool.
The World Cup is no longer a guaranteed search traffic bonanza, pushing publishers to rethink SEO and audience strategies.
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In the fight for visibility in an AI-powered search era, USA Today Co. is betting that speed can still beat the machines. After using AI-assisted, pre-written \u201cshell files\u201d to help boost traffic to Winter Olympics coverage, it\u2019s rolling out the same strategy for this summer\u2019s FIFA World Cup 2026.The race to win Google search now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":214230,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}