Why audience questions may be a publisher’s most valuable metric

For decades, publishers have measured success through familiar metrics: page views, unique visitors, time spent on site and subscription conversions. These indicators reveal what audiences did.

 

Increasingly, however, media organisations are asking whether they reveal enough about why audiences engage in the first place. The rise of generative AI is making that question more urgent.

 

As consumers become accustomed to conversational interfaces, from ChatGPT to AI-powered search experiences, they are seeking answers rather than links. For publishers, this shift presents both a challenge and an opportunity. If readers ask questions through third-party AI platforms, news organisations risk losing valuable audience relationships and insights. But if those conversations can happen within publisher-owned environments, they may unlock a new understanding of audience needs.

 

Understanding reader intent

 

At WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress 2026, Joey Marburger, Vice President of Content Intelligence at Arc XP, argued that audience questions may represent one of the most valuable signals available to publishers today.

 

"Page views tell you who walked in,” Marburger told attendees. “Questions tell you why.”

 

Traditional analytics explain what happened after a story was published. Questions reveal what audiences are actively seeking, struggling to understand or expecting a news organisation to cover. In many ways, they offer a more direct view into reader intent than any dashboard metric.

 

As publishers face growing pressure to deepen engagement and strengthen subscription strategies, understanding intent may become just as important as measuring traffic.

 

What The Washington Post learned

 

Some of these insights emerged from an experiment inside The Washington Post. In 2024, the Post launched Ask The Post, an AI-powered experience that allowed readers to explore the publication’s journalism through natural-language questions.

 

The goal was not simply to build another chatbot. Instead, the project sought to create a more direct conversation between readers and the newsroom’s reporting. The initiative was developed over multiple years with collaboration across product, engineering and editorial teams.

 

"We’ve had the luxury of working with The Post. Two years of development with Ask The Post. We’ve learned all the problems, all the ways we can improve it,” Marburger said.

 

What emerged was something larger than a reader-facing feature. Every question generated a signal. Patterns began to emerge around audience interests, information gaps and topics readers expected the newsroom to cover. Rather than relying solely on historical traffic data, teams could observe curiosity in real time.

 

The lessons learned from Ask The Post ultimately informed Ask the News, a standalone product now available through Arc XP. But the broader takeaway extends beyond any single product. It suggests that conversational interfaces can create an entirely new feedback loop between publishers and their audiences.

 

When no answer is the right answer

 

One of the more surprising discoveries was that unanswered questions could be just as valuable as answered ones. Many AI systems are designed to provide a response to nearly every query. News organisations operate under different expectations. Accuracy matters more than completion.

 

“We pride ourselves on the metric of not having an answer,” Marburger said.

 

If there is insufficient reporting to answer a question confidently, the system simply does not generate a response. That approach reflects a core journalistic principle, but it also creates a valuable business signal. If readers repeatedly ask questions that can’t be answered, publishers gain insight into topics their audience expects them to cover.

 

As Marburger noted, readers are effectively telling publishers what they want to know. Those signals can help identify coverage gaps, guide editorial planning and uncover emerging areas of audience demand.

 

Listening as a competitive advantage

 

The media industry has spent years discussing trust, audience loyalty and subscriber retention. Yet many publishers still struggle to establish meaningful feedback loops with readers beyond surveys, comments or occasional focus groups. Conversational experiences offer a different approach.

 

“Journalism used to be a two-way thing,” Marburger said. “The paper printed the front page. The town wrote back.” Today, readers are still asking questions. The difference is that many of those questions are being directed to AI assistants instead of publishers themselves.

 

That shift has implications far beyond technology. When those conversations happen elsewhere, publishers lose visibility of what their audiences care about most. When they happen within publisher-owned environments, they become a source of insight, engagement and trust.

 

As Marburger put it, “Trust is downstream of listening.”

 

In a media landscape increasingly shaped by AI, algorithms and fragmented attention, listening may become one of the most important competitive advantages a publisher can develop.

 

The lesson from The Washington Post’s experience is not simply that AI can answer questions. It’s that audience questions themselves may be among the most valuable forms of editorial and business intelligence available to publishers today.

---

To learn more about Ask the News and other emerging AI opportunities for publishers, visit www.arcxp.com

---

Julie Jochims, Media Industry Analyst, Arc XP at The Washington Post