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 “shell files” to help boost traffic to Winter Olympics coverage, it’s rolling out the same strategy for this summer’s FIFA World Cup 2026.
The race to win Google search now starts before AI can get there. USA Today Co. is pre-writing articles — with the help of AI to pull related content from its archive — so it can be ready with breaking news stories the moment they happen.
“We’re trying not to be as reliant on SEO strategy. Pre-writes are huge… 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,” said Alicia DelGallo, USA Today Sports editorial director. “Because by the time everyone else or Google search trends spike, and then Google’s like, ‘This is worth an AI Overview,’ we already had it. We got the spike on the way up instead of the way down.”
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’s ability to ingest and summarize breaking news content, and found that 10 minutes after the news org published a breaking news story, AI Mode “had everything available to it” 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’t any solid data on this yet.
The USA Today network — which includes the USA Today flagship publication and over 200 local publications — uses AI tools and editorial input to create what it calls “automated shell files” 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 “shell files.”
“If 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,” 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’s crash on the mountain, dropping them into shell files about Vonn’s Olympics run, and hitting publish.
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. “crush the competition” on some of the breaking news around the Winter Olympics, DelGallo said.
USA Today’s 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.
“Google 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,” 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’s AI search feature, he added.
USA Today Co. is now applying this strategy to this year’s 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’s search results, the goal has shifted: now they’re racing to get their links in front of readers before AI Overviews kick in and siphon off click-throughs.
“AI makes this tactic more scalable and broadly applicable,” said Barry Adams, founder of Polemic Digital, an SEO and audience growth consultancy for news publishers. “Now 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.”
Using AI for speed to beat AI in search isn’t USA Today Co.’s 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.
“[We are] also trying to make sure that our reporters with byline authority on specific topics… [are publishing stories] that don’t read as generic, but as a unique, authoritative person that’s writing a perspective that you can’t find anywhere else,” DelGallo said. Instead of publishing a story with a headline like, “These are the top 10 moments in the game,” it might be closer to, “These are all the ways the game has changed over the years,” for example.
“We’ve been focusing on that to try to insulate us a little bit from the lack of [search] referrals,” 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 — even if it may not be as big as it would have been without AI Overviews.
“We 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,” DelGallo said. “[We’re 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.”
Germany’s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses – Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt – 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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