Egmont lost 25% of search traffic to AI, here's how they got it back
After losing a quarter of its organic traffic to Google’s AI Overviews, Egmont used a unified CMS, stronger niche authority and structured metadata to restore search reach across its Nordic magazine brands.
Published
Modified
Annonse
Google's AI Overviews wiped out a quarter of Story House Egmont's organic search traffic between June and September 2025. They run magazine titles across Denmark, Norway, and Sweden — lifestyle brands that had built their digital audience on search.
Gaute Tyssebotn, Story House Egmont's chief digital officer, recently told Swedish trade publication Sveriges Tidskrifter that traffic has since climbed back toward pre-AI levels. The recovery wasn't accidental.
One CMS, three countries
Egmont calls their approach "One Media." The idea is simple: run every digital title on the same publishing infrastructure. Denmark and Norway already migrated. Sweden is launching now in march 2026 — onto Labrador CMS.
Spread risk across distribution channels, write long reads about real people with authentic images, and invest in newsletters as a loyalty channel.
The relationship between Egmont and Labrador goes back to the very beginning. Labrador CMS was born as a joint venture between Dagbladet and TV 2, Norway's largest commercial broadcaster — both owned by the Egmont Group.
The Norwegian magazine portal klikk.no was an early adopter. Combining all group brands into one strong onlie metabrand. In Denmark, alt.dk and euroman.dk followed. Egmont's Swedish titles — including hemtrevligt.se, husohem.se, tidningennara.se, tidningenhalsa.se, and scandinavianretro.com — are now migrated into hemtrevlig.se. The results after the first two countries spoke for themselves.
What does this mean in practice? When a single platform serves the entire portfolio, an SEO fix or a new feature ships to all titles at once. Content flows between publications without friction. Tyssebotn pointed to author pages as an example — making bylines clickable and linking to writer profiles appears to improve visibility in AI-generated search results.
Tyssebotn's logic: consolidated domains carry more weight in search rankings, and shared audiences make a subscription proposition stronger. He compared it to a magazine version of Spotify.
What works in AI search
Tyssebotn shared a few observations worth noting. Niche authority matters — Egmont titles Svensk Golf and Auto Motor & Sport get picked up frequently by AI search because they're established brands in well-defined categories.
Strong photojournalism and long-form storytelling perform better in Google Discover and on Meta than repackaged commodity content.
That tracks with what Labrador CMS see across our customer base. Publishers with a clear editorial identity and structured metadata — proper bylines, schema markup, author profiles — tend to hold up better when algorithms change. Some even increase their search traffic.
Tyssebotn's advice to smaller publishers losing traffic: spread risk across distribution channels, write long reads about real people with authentic images, and invest in newsletters as a loyalty channel.
