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So how can you keep up? Well, the current report is there for you. Each week, marketing leaders on the cutting edge give you the latest insight. So if it's creating a buzz, they'll be talking about it. Subscribe to the current report wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more at IBM.com slash lots of next IBM. Let's create. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, Editor and Chief of the Virgin Decoder, as my show about big ideas and other problems.
We're on a short break this week. We'll be bringing you a fresh interview on Monday and then right back at you with great new shows in December. There's a lot in the Decoder pipeline and I think you're going to like it. Right now, though, it felt like a great moment to revisit one of the most important topics we've covered this year.
The entire idea of the open web and what's happening to it and the wake of major changes to Google search. This year in response to pressure from chat GPT and others, Google very notably added AI powered search results while also making a bunch of changes to how it ranks its results in an effort to combat a web full of slop and span all made by robots for robots.
In May, we talked to a bunch of small website owners about these changes and how it's impacting their businesses, sometimes in disastrous ways. Since then, these problems have only gotten weirder as AI search has only become more prevalent.
In fact, Google just made another big update to its search algorithm to try and combat something that's calling parasite SEO content, which is one site that ranks highly for one thing, so it's publishing unrelated random crap about another thing just to steal traffic.
Except it's getting weird out there. On top of that, the United States Department of Justice is about to propose its ideas on how to break Google up in its big antitrust case against the company and whatever happens there will forever change the web as well.
We always say at the Virgin Decoder that it's hard to understand how things might change unless you can see them clearly for what they are, so it feels like a good time to resurface the excellent conversation we had with small website owners about their reliance on Google and how that era of the web feels like it's coming to a close. 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.
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.
My name is Rasmus, and I run eradhero.com, which is a micromobility website where I test products based on cold heart performance data. I spent the last half decade building eradhero from scratch on my own, and until the September update last year, I was serving around 100,000 visitors per month. Over night that halft, 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.
Now, Google makes lots 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 show 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 nuked 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 summaries. 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. 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 forms play with a virtual reporter, Miyasato, on Dakota and 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 Dakota 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 Meredith Coppit Levian and fandoms Perkins Miller, how it would affect their companies. I gotta 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 when 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 merleth 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 the air 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
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 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.
So first hand experience from real people so they created like a block that sits as soon as people get their results as well as a search that is called discussions and forums where they round up just threads from reddit and quora what we have noticed personally in our space is an incredible amount of
shopping results just makes no sense as in blocks of eight rows with you know four products for four columns eight rows of just air purifiers 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
running on breaded 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 as 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 about Google that's a big question and we'll get to it in a second but first we have to take a quick break we'll be right back. Support pretty code or comes from a huntress.
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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 such engines we do get traffic from other such 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 at the top there's very few users that use I don't know Ecosia or you know the other the Braves of the world. Those numbers are important because when you get right down to it it's what market dominance really looks like.
When Google launched the 90s search was a pretty competitive field search engines like Alta Vista, Ecosia who and others were already popular and companies like ask Jeaves were launching natural language search. We could 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 but frankly being better in a crowded market it had to develop the best product to attract and obtain 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.
Googling 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 rocketed 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 and 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 gotta 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 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 get 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 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. We have been brought to believe that was the point provide value and good content and human as well. I listened to your interview with go see you and he say no 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 data.
And I think it's all about the experience and the user and so 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 message us about it. They are 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.
That 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 supposed to streamline the experience and make it faster and more efficient.
That means the creator relationship with the platform is changing. Not only our website owners no longer getting traffic is Google tweaks its ranking algorithms and hangs on to all those reads for itself. But also a whole 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 at how many rocks you should eat and it would give you an answer. Drawing 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 eleven year old Reddit post and suggest adding a quarter cup of glue. Google was changing how search worked with AI. But in some cases it was just getting dumber.
When I talk to Google CEO sonar Pashayev 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 but an inherent feature that L of M's 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 metric 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 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? Fox creative. This is advertiser content from Zell. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?
For the longest time we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on just kind of typing away in the middle of the night and honestly that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists and they're making bank last year scammers made off with more than $10 billion.
It's mind blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds if not thousands of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them.
But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize. What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive. Even my own father fell victim to a thank goodness a smaller dollar scam but he fell victim and we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other.
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Learn more at IBM.com slash Watson X. IBM, let's create. Welcome back. I'm talking with House of Fresh, Managing Editor, Giselle Navarro about what feels like the end of an era. Decoder listeners know that I often joke we've urged last Web site on Earth because so many of our peers have gone on to 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 meetup 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 in 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.
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 that 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 up 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 clearly 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, 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 these 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 would 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 happens 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, let's 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, turvy 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, on 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 to 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 a 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 view. The website owner's don't see value coming back from Google. I think we'll 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 docks are the real deal, saying we would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out of context, outdated or incomplete information. We've 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've 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, the web where people don't trust Google will be very different.
Like so many other platforms, Google started meeting with its creators, just I'll tell you she'd taken 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 close the gate tomorrow.
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