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I am terrified that Google will kill the website I live from the same way. It’s a genuinely useful website that people in my area know and love. Everything is written by hand from original research. It is only a matter of time before my traffic is handed over to Reddit or some other top 50 website that happens to have user generated content on the topic.

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Program some bots that use ChatGPT to answer questions by summarizing your website, and maybe 5% (or less to look less spamy) of the responses have a link to the corresponding blog post?

Maybe create a subreddit for your niche location/topic?

It absolutely sucks, but this might be one way to allow people to find your content.

These things would cost the same effort but bring a tiny fraction of the traffic.

If it comes to that, I will find other ways to earn a living. The content and website infrastructure will still be valuable to other people, so I can have my "exit". There are lots of other opportunities to make money in my little industry, but none are nearly as rewarding as helping a ton of people for free. Worst case scenario, I can always go back to web development.

I would just find it really sad if Google killed something useful and replaced it with SEO spam.

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