In the battle for visibility in the age of AI-powered search, USA Today Co. is betting that speed still trumps machines. After using AI-powered pre-built “shell files” to drive traffic to its Winter Olympics coverage, it is deploying the same strategy for the 2026 FIFA World Cup this summer.
The race to win Google search is on before AI gets there. USA Today Co. leverages AI to extract relevant content from our archives and pre-write articles so you can receive news stories the moment they happen.
“We try to be less reliant on SEO strategies. There’s a ton of prewriting…We have brainstorming sessions on anticipatory content and try to prewrite as much as possible and time things as soon as they happen,” said Alicia Delgaro, editorial director at USA Today Sports. “Because by the time other people’s or Google’s search trends spiked, and then Google said, ‘This deserves an AI overview,’ we already had it. The spike happened on the way up, not down.”
How quickly Google can summarize breaking news with AI summaries is something publishers have been watching for a while. Last year, a news publishing executive told Digiday that his team was testing AI Mode’s ability to ingest and summarize breaking news content and found that 10 minutes after a news organization published a breaking story, AI Mode “had everything available” on the topic.
AI Overview works a little slower. Barry Adams, founder of Polemic Digital, an SEO and audience growth consulting firm for news publishers, said he has seen AI summaries appear for news events that are around four hours long, or at most half a day, but noted there is no hard data on this yet.
The USA Today network, which includes USA Today’s flagship publication and more than 200 local publications, uses AI tools and editor input to create what it calls “automated shell files” for breaking news, Delgaro said. The AI extracts subheadings, photos, and links from previously published articles by publishers, and editors compile them all into these “shell files.”
“When news breaks, you don’t have to start a new file. You can take the file, add two sentences, put a headline, edit, publish, and then keep writing,” she said.
The publisher tested the format during the Winter Olympics in February. Reporters on the ground quickly filed updates on ski racer Lindsey Vonn’s crash on the mountain, dropped them into a shell file on Vonn’s Olympic run, and pressed publish.
Previously, editors had to manually aggregate background information into breaking news stories and provide context and links to previous related coverage, which was time-consuming, DelGallo said. Del Gallo said AI sped up the process and helped USA Today “beat the competition” on some of the latest news related to the Winter Olympics.
USA Today’s national and local publication network generated a total of 116 million page views for its 2026 Winter Olympics coverage from Jan. 1 to Feb. 28, a company spokesperson announced. Its flagship publication USA Today alone had 91 million page views, an 82% increase over the 2022 Winter Olympics.
“Google News rewards publishers who break stories by treating them as legitimate sources. Many publishers who then feature them tend to link back to the original article. That citation pattern feeds directly into standard organic rankings, giving first movers an advantage,” said Michael King, founder and CEO of iPullRank, a content marketing and SEO agency. The same is true for Google’s AI Search feature, he added, as AI Overview uses the underlying search results as input.
USA Today Co. is now applying the strategy to this year’s World Cup, with the goal of publishing coverage more quickly and updating its live blog more frequently, Del Gallo said. The newsroom has five shell files each day, she added.
Publishers have long prewritten articles to rank higher in Google search results than their competitors, but the goal has changed. Publishers are now competing to get links in front of readers before AI summaries come into play 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 consulting firm for news publishers. “The window of opportunity for news is now shorter, with AI summaries invading news boxes such as Top Stories within half a day after a news event occurs. Publishing breaking news quickly is a sure-fire approach that allows publishers to make the most of that small window of opportunity.”
Using AI for speed to beat AI in search isn’t USA Today Co.’s only World Cup strategy. DelGallo said the company also focuses on more traditional SEO strategies: original, authoritative reporting that stands out in search results. The company has local reporters in all 16 host cities, an on-site hub for World Cup coverage, two dedicated newsletters, and a podcast.
“[We are] We’re also trying to secure reporters with sign-on authority on certain topics… [are publishing stories] “Rather than read it as something generic, read it as a unique and authoritative person writing a perspective that you won’t find anywhere else,” Delgaro said.Rather than publishing an article with a headline like “These are the top 10 moments in gaming,” it might be more like, for example, “These are all ways the game has changed over the years.”
“We’ve been focusing on that to protect ourselves a little bit from energy shortages. [search] It’s an introduction,” DelGallo said.
A spokesperson for USA Today Co. says the company receives 40 million unique monthly visitors to its sports content. The news organization expects this content strategy to result in increased traffic from World Cup coverage, especially with the U.S. as a co-host, even if it won’t be as large as it would have been without AI Overviews.
“We still expect a large crowd to be in this venue, just like we did at the Olympics. We saw that. [on June 11]which achieved 2 million page views,” DelGallo said.[We’re going to have more traffic] Because the previous World Cup was less for us overall for USA Today than the previous World Cup. But we expect it to be much less than what we would expect if the World Cup were to take place. [in the U.S.] This happened a year and a half ago, maybe even a year ago. ”
