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If you've been listening to Decoder or reading the Verge recently, you know we've been covering the changes to Google and Google Search very closely. There's a reason for that. The entire business of the modern web is built around Google. Websites get traffic from Google Search, things get built to work in Google Chrome, and Google dominates the stack of advertising technologies that turn all of that into money.
It's honestly been a hard thing to explain to people. Google has just been part of the web quietly dominant for decades now, and its influence is so pervasive, and it's almost invisible. But if you think about the relationship that YouTubers have to YouTube or TikTokers have to the TikTok algorithm, it kind of clicks into place.
Google's turned the web into its platform, and creators in the web are building their businesses on that platform, just like any other. I was thinking about Decoder as a show for people who are trying to build things, and the number one question I have for people who build things on any platform is, what are you going to do when that platform changes the rules? And right now, Google's changing the rules.
Hi, my name is Mike. I'm the creator and publisher of the Mountain Weekly News, a 20-year-old outdoor gear review site that has been completely wiped off the map in the latest Google updates. We've lost 91% of our traffic have gone from outdoor industry leaders in both summer and winter sports to essentially not existing. The thing is, if you head over to Bing, all of our reviews are still number one and number two, but in Google we no longer exist.
Hello, my name is Ani, and I'm an editor at Televisionist.org, an independent entertainment website. Traffic had been in a growth pattern since I joined the site in 2017, and we were seeing steady growth from month to month until 2023. Since the March 9th Google update, our traffic has slowly collapsed, about 75% at this point, and falling.
And I run e-readhero.com, which is a micro mobility website where I test products based on cold heart performance data. I spent the last half decade building e-read hero from scratch on my own. And until the September update last year, I was serving around 100,000 visitors per month. Overnight that halved, it's been on a steady decline ever since. Today I'm getting around 4,000 visitors a month, so more than a 95% drop.
I've seen a lot of changes to how Google search works every year, and it's made some pretty significant changes in the last 12 months. In many cases, Google has been actively trying to address the elephant in the room, the fact that search results have gotten bloated and filled with overly optimized junk, spam, way too many ads, all fighting for space at the top of the page.
Google's solution has been to update the search ranking algorithms to cut down on what it considers to be low quality spammy content. It's pushed out a few of these updates recently. Before that, there was the so-called helpful content update, which attempted to cut down on obvious clickbait. But it's these very same changes, and small website owners say have been catastrophic to their businesses.
My name is Jake Bowley, and I run the workout shoe and a parallel review website that fit friend. Since September of 2023, my traffic has been on a steady decline. It was relatively stable and growing slowly over the last three years, but since September it has been straight crashing. In March 2024, my traffic is now down over 95%. And again, there hasn't really been an explanation as to why.
These web-based businesses were all in a somewhat stable relationship with Google for years. But across the media right now, there's an almost apocalyptic fear setting in. If referral traffic from Google goes to zero, there's really not anything else to replace it with.
Other big platforms like Facebook have long since turned into wall gardens that don't want users to go anywhere else. When Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, he said that X would deprioritize posts that contained links. So Google's all that's left. And the fear that Google traffic will go to zero is of course being amplified by AI. Google just rolled out what it calls AI overviews and search, which attempt to summarize search results for you.
Google says that users click on the link shown in AI overviews more frequently, but there's no public data to support that claim and no way for website owners to measure it themselves. Instead, they're just seeing their work show up in those AI summaries. What's ironic about all of this is that despite my organic traffic pretty much being nuke and tanked, a lot of my content is still being used and populated and summarized in Google's AI search results.
So while you're not seeing me organically, you are still seeing that fit for content being summarized above the fold. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Earlier this year, a small site called HouseFresh, which is dedicated to reviewing air purifiers, published a blog post that really crystallized a lot of what was happening with Google in these smaller sites.
Managing editor, Giselle Navarro, cut right to the chase. She titled the post how Google is killing independent sites like ours. And she brought receipts. A post contained a whole lot of clear data showing what specifically had happened to HouseFresh's search traffic and how big publishers were ruthlessly gaming SEO to benefit at HouseFresh's expense. We talked about that post in the games that SEO farms play with a verge reporter Miyasato on decoder in March, if you want to dive deeper.
But I really wanted to talk to Giselle herself about all this, especially after she recently published a follow-up post with even more details about the shady world of SEO spam. And how Google's attempts to fight it have ended up crushing her business. Today I got an email from a tool that we used to keep track of traffic and things like that. And it said, you know, warning in the last six months you've lost 96% of your traffic. And I'm like, thanks for letting me know. I know that.
Which is L and everyone else is describing is something that I've been calling Google zero. My name for the moment when Google search simply stops sending traffic to your website. Like I keep saying, building on platforms is risky and Google search is a platform. If you can't describe what remains of your business when your Google traffic goes to zero, I'm not sure you have much of a business at all.
If you're a regular decoder listener, you've heard me talk about Google zero a lot in this past year or so. I asked Google CEO Sundar Pachai about it directly last month. I've also asked big media executives like the New York Times mayor of the Copa, Levian and fandoms Perkins Miller, how it would affect their companies. I got to say, no one's really giving me a good answer. And it seems like the media industry thinks it can just deal with it when it happens.
But for a lot of small businesses in the web like House, fresh and the others that you've heard from, Google zero is now. It's here. It's happening. And it feels insurmountable. And the thing that's really shaken up a lot of people is until recently maneuvering the sometimes cryptic ever shifting whims of web search felt like a thing you could make core assumptions about.
We knew that Google was an existential threat. Whenever we had done like a SWOT analysis and what are the threats and the threats are Google turns around tomorrow and changes completely or, you know, something terrible happens with Google. That was always on our board as something terrible could happen to Google in six months, losing 96% of the traffic.
We thought it could happen that something bad might be in their horizon with Google. We didn't think it would be this bad and we didn't think it would be this fast. The way I see it is like it's a road that you know you'll be able to get on your car and go on the road and go somewhere. And the road is there. It's been there for 15 years, 20 years.
It just seems to get better at least. It seems to be somebody taking care of it, making sure it's better. And then you wake up one day and the road is gone. The follow-up post is all to this month highlighted a lot of the problems House Fresh is having with Google. One of them is a big publishers are turning into SEO spam farms themselves using aggressive tactics like swarming to game search and climb the rankings.
Swarming is a strategy that publishers like dot dash, my life used to outrank small publications within their specialist spaces. And the way they go about it is they just create a lot of content within that specific space on an arcades, for example, it would be air purifiers or their quality. And they use all the publications they own to quickly take over spaces in the results.
So one day they never wrote about air purifiers the next day they selected five sites that they're going to write ten articles each about our purifiers. And they likely hold off those five sites or one of those ten articles showing up in the top 10 results are quite high because these are big, big publishers. That's how they can spread way far outside the there is of expertise and start taking spaces by pushing down smaller sites that don't have the authority to do that.
And they have the authority or the brand or the old domain that they have. SEO spam is a familiar problem, but it wasn't just that house fresh had fallen in the rankings. It was also the Google had crammed so much extra stuff on top of the search results page before anyone could even get to the links that no one was ever getting to house fresh at all.
So you are still number six number five, but now people have to scroll five times to get that because first there is a huge block of reddit threads. That's a big place where the traffic went. They want to show first hand experience from real people so they created like a block that sits as soon as people get their results as well as they search that is called discussions and forums where they round up to threats from reddit and quora.
What we have noticed personally in our space is an incredible amount of Google shopping results just makes no sense as in blocks of eight rows with you know four products for four columns eight rows of just apifiers.
And then one result and then another block of six rows you know just madness people are still trying to find things or they're landing on reddit threads that are being incredibly manipulated right now there's been spammed they're landing on quora threads from 2016 when people used to use quora.
And just an incredible amount of just shopping results I imagine lots of people might be frustrated we get emails from readers who have bought the wrong product and just email us to say I can't believe I bought this but I was I just didn't know. So how do we get here with so much of the web built on some big assumptions of Google that's a big question and we'll get to it in a second but first we have to take a quick break will be back.
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The only way to get 20% off is to go to join delete me dot com slash decoder and enter code decoder at checkout. That's join delete me dot com slash decoder code decoder. Welcome back I'm talking with Giselle Navarrell managing editor of house fresh about Google search in the state of the web. For small sites like house fresh Google search has all but evaporated over the course last year and Google is an overwhelmingly large driver of search traffic.
For now at least its position is unbeatable and undeniable. Obviously there are other side engines we do get traffic from other side engines but it's negligible because still Google is you know 80% 87% used to be for us. Now it's 70% still and we are getting you know 200 300 people a day which is nothing but the other side turns is have even less people using them.
So even though we run that the talk there's very few users that use I don't know a colsia or you know the other the braids of the world. Those numbers are important because when you get right down to it it's what market dominance really looks like. When we launched the 90s search was a pretty competitive field search engines like all to vista like us Yahoo and others were already popular and companies like ask jeeps were launching natural language search.
We can just type in a question instead of a bunch of keywords something we all take for granted today. Google beat all of that early competition by frankly being better in a crowded market it had to develop the best product to attract and retain users and its initial search engine was very good at getting users the answers they were looking for and it kept improving from there. By the time the company went public in 2004.
Googleing was already a common verb for using a search engine any search engine to find something since that IPO 20 years ago the company got big and bigger and once Google rocket its dominance it stayed there. Yahoo still around and there are other competitors like being in duck.co but even so 90% of all internet searches in any given year are through Google.
And it's worth pointing out that dominance is caught up with Google in various ways the company is facing multiple antitrust investigations and lawsuits alleging that it abuses its power in search advertising and other businesses to lock consumers in and keep competitors out. But from Google's point of view nobody's entitled to all the traffic that can come from search a lot of times when I talk to folks at Google they ask me this question and I think it's a fair one.
Why do people feel entitled to Google traffic? And I got to say I definitely don't the whole reason I keep talking about Google zero is that I've been completely paranoid about it for such a long time. Referers on the internet come and go that's just the way it works.
The verges first big refer when we launched in 2011 was a Yahoo watching our Yahoo traffic slowly disappear taught me to never trust any of these platforms ever again and to think much more deeply about building an audience instead of just trying to traffic. When I talk to other media people they are deeply skeptical of platforms like Facebook which has burned all of us in the past but until recently they've all trusted Google because it's been so stable for so long it felt safe.
About me I think felt like we were doing what Google said right I don't think we felt entitled we felt safe we felt that Google is looking for sites to actually care and we care and we were slowly growing we knew we couldn't just skyrocket. But we were slowly consistently growing we didn't feel entitled but we we felt that it made sense Google was seeing the value in our content readers come to our site and they spend five six minutes on average on the site and they end the search in the site.
And we have been brought to believe that was the point provide value and good content and human as well and listen to your interview with good CEO and he say all these things and I could be knowing along and saying yeah they mean all these things and it's all about the future and it's all about search and searches and content and good experience and because they've been saying the same thing that consistent in there it's all about the experience and you know the user and so maybe there was 11.
Maybe there was a level of entitlement thinking we're doing good work we are following their main advice people who come on our website they're happy they email us about it they messages about it they're obviously finding what they need so of course this is going to continue and also looking around the scene everybody else and thinking yeah that's not good enough.
Disconnect between what Google has said just make great content don't worry about search and what it's doing is really starting to get too big to ignore. As search itself feels like it's getting significantly worse because it's over on the spam Google's added features like AI overviews that are supposed to fix it there's was to streamline the experience and make it faster and more efficient.
But that means the creator relationship with the platform is changing not only our website owners no longer getting traffic is Google tweaks is ranking algorithms and hangs on to all those views for itself. A lot of folks feel like they're having a harder time finding the real information they want to read amid the sea of sludge.
That bias towards Reddit and real people that just all mentioned earlier is also causing Google's AI overviews to return some questionable results because I can't tell the difference between good advice and frankly shit posts when AI overviews first launch you can ask
how many rocks you should eat and it would give you an answer dry on a twenty twenty one article in the onion if you asked it how to keep cheese from sliding off pizza it would draw its answer from an 11 year old Reddit post and suggest adding a quarter cup of glue. Google is changing how search worked with AI been in some cases it was just getting dumber.
When I talked to Google CEO Senator Poshayev at AI and search earlier this month he said a few really key things one of those was to call AI hallucinations not a bug. An inherent feature that elements need in order to be creative. He also repeated Google's plan that AI overviews will lead to more users clicking through to read source websites. But he wouldn't commit to releasing that data which basically everyone wants to see.
I would love to see some data for this which we keep hearing about and how this internal metrics show and this data they have show because at least in the experience that I have and just based on talking to side donors who content is being used. For this AI overviews the whole intent of it seems to be just to keep people in search which it's something that Google has been doing systematically for a decade.
I don't believe that people are going to just jump out into the open web from something that gives them the answer. I just don't think that's the case and if it were to be the case they are just showing you two three like if you're a mobile in the space that you would before perhaps be able to see from the beginning. Perhaps be able to see five different results to assess in your mind before you click.
You are now giving one to something that you have to click and maybe there's something that opens up but you don't even know what it is and I find the how to believe. We have to take another quick break when we come back. We'll get into the biggest question about all this. If the Google zero error of the internet is here what comes next?
Hi this is Scott Callaway. I'm Ed Ellison. And we're the host, the co-host. It's kind of unfair to call us co-host. I'm really the host. He's my Robin Givens. Let's just be clear on what this is. But anyways we're the host of ProbGymarkets, your go-to podcast for all things money. Every Monday we provide brush unfiltered analysis on market moving news, high flying socks growing sectors, stupid boardroom decisions and master of the university eos.
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That's right. The good news is we know how to get checking on security. The bad news is the answer is slowly. We'll tell you how on ProbGymarkets. Hey, it's Tom Warren, senior editor at The Verge here. Microsoft is in an era defining moment. It's betting on AI as the future of work. Its expats business is going through transformational changes and the Mac versus PC War is about to be back on.
So I'm launching a newsletter called Notepad. It will be your inside guide to all those changes and beyond from details on the next Xbox to that one time every Microsoft employee named Michael appeared on a mysterious email list. Whatever is happening at Microsoft, you'll be able to read about it first in notepad every Thursday. Go subscribe now at the Verge.com for slash notepad. Welcome back. I'm talking with House fresh managing editor Giselle Navarro about what feels like the end of an era.
Decoder listeners know that I often joke the Verge's last website on earth because so many of our peers have gone on a business. But there's a kernel of truth in there building an audience in the web right now is harder than ever. If you were a creator starting a meet a business today, you would almost certainly start on a social video platform like TikTok or Instagram. And for the businesses that have relied on the web and Google search, things are now harder than ever before.
So that really leaves us with one big question. What's next? People at Giselle and the other folks we've talked to for this episode, they have new plans. And in a way, they look a lot like the old plans because the best way to build a real audience, one that doesn't depend on the goodwill of a platform is to do good work, engage with the people who care about you and make something that users want to spend their time and importantly, their money on.
It's just all points out in one sense Google zero might actually be a blessing in disguise. We are engaging a lot more publicly with our community, which we have. But I think we didn't put enough time into, for example, growing our social media. We are doing that now. We're going into video. We can see now immediately within a couple of months of starting into it how video makes so much sense for what we're doing. We are publishing two videos a week plus short form video.
We don't want to give up. There is a big part of what we want to do, which is just keep pushing to find really bad products, which is not good for business. We're not very smart. We're clear. We're not very smart because we're spending time trying to find what's wrong. But we think it's so, so important to be able to say, okay, you know, don't buy this thing. And that's how we also build trust. And that's why we also we do have a community of people who know who we are.
You would see this Google highlights, small publishers and success stories and these things. And you're like, oh, one day that's going to be us, right? We're going to be one of those. They get to go to the office and they get a photo shoot and you're doing well. And I think we got caught up in that thinking that was, I don't know, that will take us. I think we were trying to get to a point where we could explore all these other things.
The good thing is now this happened and it made us on the one hand just jump. All these plans we kept thinking, well, wait until we get to this point with Google until we get to that point with traffic until we get to this point. And now it's like, well, you know, we're in minus now. Like this, just try it. So we could be that actually that pushes us to become something way bigger than we ever thought that we could be.
But turning those audiences into sustainable businesses means we're starting to lose a lot of the openness that made the web so exciting in the first place. Because if there's anything that top-sea, turbid platform era and media made clear and set subscriptions and paywalls are probably the safest and most reliable source of revenue for creators. We are also planning on looking at certain features we can add to the site that could perhaps be gated.
Because there are people who actually come to our site a lot and we know they have supported us. We added a bias, a coffee thing and we actually started getting so much support. We feel like perhaps there are people who would like to help us on a monthly basis or a yearly basis to be able to access certain things that we know we have that we were going to give out for free and now we're going to have to put behind some sort of paywall.
That in turn leaves us with a lot of questions not just about the future of the web but about the future of Google itself. If there's no incentive for people like Jizel to publish the open web anymore, where will Google get all the data it needs for its AI? What results will even exist in search? When I asked Sundar for try about this, he said the company would remain a huge source of traffic but that the ecosystem was in fact changing.
We rely on this value of the ecosystem right over time on an aggregate if the website owner's don't see value coming back from Google, I think will pay a price. So we have the right incentive structure. But obviously we are careful about there are a lot of individual variations and some of us users choosing which way to go. I think that part is hard to sort out. But I do think we are committed at an aggregate level to do the right thing.
All these changes have brought the SEO industry to what feels like a breaking point over the long Memorial Day weekend here in the United States a few days after Jizel and I spoke. A couple SEO industry sites published a whole bunch of information purporting to be a leak of Google's internal documentation for search APIs.
All the rules the company has tried to keep quiet. Google later confirmed to the birds that these docs are the real deal saying we would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out of context, outdated or incomplete information. We have shared extensive information about how search works and the types of factors that are system way while also working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.
But what the leaks reveal is that Google hasn't been entirely honest about how search works. A few of those blog posts come right out and accuse the company of repeatedly lying for the past several years. Throughout this episode I have compared search to other platforms a few times. Imagine if almost every Instagram influencer felt like Instagram had been lying to them for almost a decade or if every YouTuber felt like YouTube was lying to them.
That's the same Google's in with search a web where people don't trust Google will be very different. Like so many other platforms Google started meeting with its creators just out of the sheet taking a meeting with the Google search team.
They asked her if the traffic comes back will you trust Google search again. She said no. It'd be great if the traffic comes back but that's not going to change my mind which is I'm not going to make business decisions on the possibility of traffic continuing to flow when I know that you can't close the gate tomorrow. I'd like to thank Giselle again for joining us on the show.
I'd also like to thank all the small website owners who told us how the changes to search are affecting their businesses. If you're feeling this too please reach out we'd love to hear from you. If you have thoughts about this episode or what you'd like to hear us do more of you can email us at decoderethaverg.com. We really do read all the emails where you can hit me up directly on threats on at reckless 1280. We also have a TikTok for now. Check it out it's at decoder pod it's a lot of fun.
If you like decoder please share it with your friends subscribe or with your podcasts. If you really like the show hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of the version part of the box meeting podcast network. Today's episode was produced by Kate Cox mixed that it was edited by Kelly Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder music is by break master cylinder. We'll see you next time.