Future starts to sharpen its AI search visibility playbook

"Future - which also owns U.S. titles including Tom's Guide, Who What Wear, Marie Claire, and Ideal Home in the U.K. - rolled out a proprietary AI visibility tool called Future Optic. So far, the tool, launched in beta in November, has increased the volume of mentions and citations in AI search engines like Google's AI Overviews and OpenAI's ChatGPT, improving the brand visibility of its titles, the publisher claims, without providing specific figures."

"Future's push to rank in AI search is part of a larger strategy to diversify its traffic sources and lessen its reliance on Google Search traffic, a move other publishers like People Inc. have prioritized in the past year. The company has diversified its traffic sources to now have a "pretty even mix" of referral channels, including Google Discover, email, social and direct traffic."

"Similarweb data shows unique visitors to some of Future's top sites has declined year over year, however. Tom's Guide was down 35% year over year to 16.7 million in December 2025. TechRadar was down 38% year over year to 12.8 million. But Who What Wear was up 63% to 7.6 million in that same timeframe. "Growing traffic is hard. Our traffic isn't up, but I think we're more influential than we've ever been," Collis said."

Future owns titles including Tom's Guide, Who What Wear, Marie Claire and Ideal Home. The company launched Future Optic, a proprietary AI visibility tool in beta in November, which increased mentions and citations in AI search engines such as Google's AI Overviews and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Future packages the tool into branded content offerings to boost AI summary citations. Referral channels have been diversified into a "pretty even mix" across Google Discover, email, social and direct, cutting Google Search to about 27% of sessions from over 50% in 2019. Similarweb shows declines for Tom's Guide and TechRadar while Who What Wear grew. Only 16% of total revenue is directly tied to website sessions because of branded content revenue.

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