Data gathered by Chartbeat and shared by Axios reveals that, over the past year, Google Search traffic to publishers across the broader web have fallen drastically, and proportionally more so for smaller websites. Referral traffic from Google apparently fell by 60% for “small publishers,” while “medium publishers” (those with between 10,000-100,000 daily pageviews) saw a drop of 47%. “Large publishers,” meanwhile, saw a 22% drop. That last category would be any site getting over 100,000 daily pageviews.
It’s not just Google Search either. While Search traffic dropped by 34%, traffic from Google Discover has also fallen by 15% over the past year, the report found.
Search engines are pretty much redundant because they don’t return what we are looking for.
They cooked themselves.
But what if what your are looking for is AI generated articles that don’t provide any trustworthy answers or top 10 lists of products that their manufacturers paid the site to figure on the list? Google is still the best for that.
What if what I’m looking for is an article I can’t read without subscribing, removing my adblock, and/or accepting a bunch of cookies? Or one that sends me away entirely because that’s easier than being GDPR-compliant? Surely you’d click on those results.
Do we have to read the whole article? I just sort of want to peruse the AI generated headlines and come to my own conclusions.
You don’t want 8 pages of the same 4 media conglomerates telling you why you should totally buy the thing they reviewed and totally don’t have investments in/own everything they’re serving up, while they make a commission off their clickbait?
Funny how Google couldn’t defeat seo spammers and yet claim they can keep AI safe. We are so fucked
I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
God reddit is horrible with all the deleted posts or the gibberish. Followed by thanks for fixing my problem comment.
I hate reddits new UI. Shows a few comments, hides sub-comments, then a block of ads, then a useless automoderator comment and finally a ‘click for more comments’ button.