Google AI search shift leaves website makers feeling ‘betrayed’ ...0

(Bloomberg / Davey Alba and Julia Love) — In March 2024, website owner Morgan McBride was posing for photos in her half-renovated kitchen for a Google ad celebrating the ways the search giant had helped her family’s business grow.

But by the time the ad ran about a month later, traffic from Google had fallen more than 70%, McBride said. Charleston Crafted, which features guides on do-it-yourself home improvement projects, had weathered algorithm changes and updates in the past; this time, it didn’t recover. McBride suspected people were getting more of their renovation advice from the artificial intelligence answers at the top of Google search.

The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them. That’s disrupting a delicate symbiotic relationship that’s existed for years: if businesses create good content, Google sends them traffic.

Many of the publishers said they have to either shut down or reinvent their distribution strategy, a cycle experts say could eventually degrade the quality of information Google can access for its search results — and to feed its AI answers, which have still at times contained inaccuracies that have made them a poor substitute for publishers’ content. For home-renovation questions, Google’s AI may give advice that’s unsafe or simply inaccurate, such as recommending specific products that don’t exist, McBride said.

Google denied that the rollout of AI Overviews had harmed websites’ traffic, saying it was “misleading to make generalizations about the causes” of declining traffic “based on individual examples.” A spokesperson added that traffic can fluctuate for a number of reasons, including seasonal demand, users’ interests and regular algorithmic updates to search.

But the traffic drops have been widely felt across the web and have spanned topics — fashion and lifestyle, travel, DIY and home design, and cooking, according to Bloomberg’s interviews and data from web-analytics firm Similarweb, which analyzed traffic to a sampling of small- to mid-sized websites in each of these categories over the past two years. It’s possible that AI Overviews were a factor, said Similarweb, which carried out the research at Bloomberg’s request.

For McBride, the episode made her rethink her identity as a writer and a teacher, she said. Some days, it was hard to even get out of bed. Though she hopes Google can help bring some traffic back, she said the long-term damage to her business is done. “You can’t just sit around waiting for things to turn around,” she said in an interview. In the year since Charleston Crafted’s traffic plummeted, she said display advertising revenue on her site dropped 65% — amounting to tens of thousands of dollars in lost income.

Evolving Search

Google is changing search in response to new ways people consume information, a spokesperson said. The company is trying to give quicker answers, as well as options for digging deeper, this person said.

But behind closed doors, the company has acknowledged the toll on publishers, even inviting a group of about 20 website creators to its Mountain View, California, headquarters for conversations with employees in the search division last October.

Google representatives apologized to the web creators and said their sites represented exactly the kind of helpful content that the company wanted to surface in search, according to creators who were in attendance. But Googlers also said they couldn’t give any guarantees that their websites would recover, because the search product had fundamentally changed in the AI era, multiple attendees said.

Some creators say Google has recently made so many changes to search, coinciding with its testing of AI-powered features and an effort to rid its results of AI-generated spam, that it has choked traffic to independent websites in favor of forums like Reddit and Quora, as well as larger media brands.

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“I don’t understand how Google thinks this is sustainable,” said Jake Boly, founder of the That Fit Friend, which reviews training shoes. “If you drive away all enthusiasts and small publishers, then we’re going to be overrun by spam and the few players who can afford to pay to play.”

A Google spokesperson said the company’s research has shown that users who come to Google looking for authentic, first-hand experiences often prefer forum discussions and video content in addition to blogs.

The addition of AI Overviews, in which Google summarizes content from the web to deliver answers in its own voice, has coincided with a series of other changes to search and ranking algorithms that have left creators struggling to adjust.

The company has long emphasized that website owners should focus on making content driven by experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, or “EEAT,” as the set of guidelines is known to publishers. This means creators should expect that Google would prioritize travel sites where the writers had actually visited the destinations they featured.

But traffic has bottomed out even for sites that have followed Google’s advice, creators say. “For years, Google has had the audacity to gaslight us, saying, ‘Don’t write for search,’” said Mike Hardaker, the founder of Mountain Weekly News, which reviews outdoor gear. “Well, then, who am I writing for?”

It’s an increasingly familiar story for small businesses worldwide navigating their relationships with Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, Google’s YouTube or Amazon.com Inc. While the technology giants all rely on a healthy ecosystem of creators, merchants and influencers to generate content for their sites, changes to their revenue-sharing agreements or algorithms can be devastating.

No Guarantees

At the October 2024 web creator meeting, Hardaker told Google’s chief search scientist, Pandu Nayak, that most of the group had struggled with little to no web traffic for more than a year, according to detailed notes of the event that were reviewed by Bloomberg. Hardaker himself had made $250,000 in gross revenue in 2023. But by the time of the meeting, he said he was relying on a food bank. “I need to know as a business owner, and personally, if you think there’s a chance that some of our sites have the ability to recover,” he said at the event.

Nayak apologized, according to attendees. Then he said it wouldn’t be reasonable for him to make any guarantees to the publishers, because he couldn’t predict what would happen.

A Google spokesperson said the creators invited to this event aren’t representative of the whole web creator ecosystem. But a larger analysis conducted by Similarweb of 67 small publisher sites, which included at least a dozen sites each across four topics — fashion and lifestyle, travel, DIY and home design, and cooking — found declines in web traffic in every category. Travel, which Google has recently rolled out robust AI features for, saw the most pronounced declines, according to the data.

Google disputed Similarweb’s findings, saying the web traffic of this larger sample still doesn’t capture search traffic overall.

Part of the problem is that low-quality sites that Google does want to root out through its search algorithm updates — including AI-generated spam sites that have seen a meteoric rise in recent years — can have a similar look and feel to indie websites, said Lily Ray, senior vice president for search engine optimization strategy at marketing agency Amsive LLC.

Creators have documented examples of Google’s algorithms seemingly prioritizing content from low-quality sources, which they say is bad for users. “Right now, Google is suggesting that some of the best advice about where to go to the beach near Philadelphia comes from a luggage storage company and a driving school,” said Laura Longwell of the blog Travel Addicts. “The idea that any of that is based on experience or expertise is laughable.” Other times, once-popular sites whose domains were sold and repurposed by clickbait farms have been highlighted by Google.

AI Overviews

Many publishers and creators are most worried about AI Overviews. Raptive, a media company that represents 5,700 creators, estimates that sites will ultimately lose 25% of their traffic to the product, though the initial impact across its clients has been less pronounced as Google ramps up the proportion of queries that trigger AI summaries.

Google has said AI Overviews is driving more traffic to a diverse mix of publishers, but the company hasn’t provided data to back up that assertion. According to the data firm BrightEdge, the sites receiving the most referral traffic from AI Overviews are primarily big players, like TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, Mayo Clinic and Google’s own YouTube, rather than smaller publishers.

In the absence of clear answers from the company, creators have struggled to discern how much of their pain is due to AI Overviews and how much is due to other changes in search.

“They don’t have any way of saying, ‘Oh, this is my content that has been queried and is being used to answer this particular search result,’” said Brooke Hartley Moy, chief executive officer of Infactory, an AI startup that works with publishers.

Gisele Navarro, managing editor for the air purifier review site HouseFresh, said that based on internal web analytics, which she shared with Bloomberg, it appears more people are seeing her content via AI Overviews. But it’s happening at the expense of them clicking the link to visit her site. Sites don’t make money unless users click through and see ads or buy products.

This same trend — more views of a website owner’s content on Google, but fewer clicks through to their sites — is occurring broadly, according to Nick Eubanks, a vice president at the digital marketing company Semrush Holdings Inc. He said AI Overviews is one of several factors that have contributed to this, and the trend would likely continue as summaries are shown for more queries.

‘Betrayed, That’s the Word’

Google is making other changes to get its users answers without having to click through to a website. The company has begun testing a new recipe feature that summarizes food bloggers’ content directly in Google search. Creators who are participating in a pilot with Google are being directly compensated, but not nearly enough to offset declines in their advertising revenue, according to Marc McCollum, Raptive’s chief innovation officer. If the feature is implemented in full, Raptive estimates that traffic to food blogs would fall by half.

The power dynamic between Google and individual creators is so lopsided that many publishers who were invited to participate in the recipe pilot felt they didn’t have much of a choice, said Lisa Bryan, the author of health-food site Downshiftology, who is not involved but is close with creators who are.

“The big fear,” Bryan said, is that “Google is severing the relationship that we have with our communities and our audiences.”

Google said the feature is an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a site.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stressed in a recent interview that Google is focused on sending publishers high-quality clicks, or readers who genuinely want to visit their sites.

But Danielle Coffey, president of the News Media Alliance, questioned whether Google is in a position to know what’s useful to publishers.

“Why are they unilaterally deciding what is a high-quality click and how we should engage our readers when we’re the ones creating the content?” she said.

Pressure is mounting on Google to reassess its compact with publishers. Raptive has struck an agreement with several hundred of its largest creators to negotiate with Google and other big tech companies on their behalf.

But it’s too late for some. At least three of the sites whose publishers were invited to Google’s creator summit have had to shut down their operations. Others have been testing new distribution routes.

Dave Bouskill and Debra Corbeil, a Toronto-based couple, launched travel blog The Planet D in 2008. For the first few years, the pair relied on TV appearances and newspaper features to find readers, but in 2015 they woke up to the potential of Google Search, which eventually drove 90% of their traffic.

Their luck ran out in 2024, when Google launched AI Overviews. In the first few months after the product’s introduction, Planet D’s traffic fell by half, and the pair watched their fellow travel bloggers go out of business one by one. Bouskill and Corbeil at first thought they’d be able to survive with a smaller business, but their readership continued to crater, forcing them to lay off staff. Finally, when traffic fell by 90% of prior levels and revenue almost as much, they decided to stop updating their blog.

It’s been painful for them to watch Google’s AI Overviews parrot travel tips they once offered — especially when the chatbot borrows their Canadian slang.

“I do feel betrayed by Google,” Bouskill said, as Corbeil interjected: “Betrayed, that’s the word.”

To rebuild their livelihood, the couple has pivoted their efforts to YouTube, another Google-owned property.

(Updates to add summary takeaway from Similarweb research in sixth paragraph.)

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