Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google traffic since 2024
growtika.com
growtika.com
"A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum" (4 June 2015)
<https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...>
And that doesn't raise an eye brow, but well worded AI articles based on sources is described as slop
Unrelated, but I wouldn't expect this take on HN where I assumed everyone knew what an ad-blocker was.
But it raises a potential counterpoint: are there sites with non-terrible user experiences that are staying stable?
Just say Apple. They're still allowed on Android, although I don't think you can get them from the Play Store.
Also you can put ad block on Apple devices.
On my Android phone, I installed Firefox. It synced my extensions and installed uBlock automatically. That was it.
The last time I tried on iOS, I gave up. The adblockers I found didn't really work, they were painful to install, and the platform is so locked down that I couldn't figure out other options.
I find that when it messes with the layout or formatting of a website it’s really annoying, and I consider the volume and type of ads an important signal for a website’s trustworthiness.
Oh and plenty of devices don’t have easy access to ad block, like my work computer.
You can get the former from the number showing up in the uBlock Origin icon.
Though I don't know their revenue breakdown.
Somewhat famously, the similar (though unrelated) Economist relies on three revenue legs: subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke consulting through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), roughly evenly distributed. The fact that these have different economic-cycle behaviours also helps stabilise the newspaper's income.
The direction of views is irrelevant. What's relevant is the forward passage of time. As t -> infinity, shitty monetization -> infinity.
As a counter example, the Economist or the NY Times don’t feel anywhere near this bad. They make you pay. But subscribers get a much nicer product in return.
The Economist is the economist, and can ask for a higher subscription price given its target audience.
AI summaries are reducing visits to Wikipedia, which shall drive down donations.
Creating quality information for the average citizen is not a sustainable enterprise today.
It used to be. People used to subscribe to the newspaper.
Unfortunately, the advertising model convinced a generation that they don’t need to pay for journalism or really any information online. Journalism is just as expensive as it’s ever been. But news is only written if someone is willing to pay journalists and editors.
Having read &/or seen both, I would think modern advertising is closer to They Live.
As soon as I accidentally turn them off I am disgusted by the consumerist, snake-oil, sexist, shit-storm that's advertisement.
I don't understand why ads aren't targeted towards the content of the page, rather than me as a person, that seems to be more correct in the majority of the cases.
I did accidentally try to play a YouTube video without signing into my premium account. That platforms is completely impossible to watch without premium or an ad blocker. YouTube managers should be forced to watch a few hours of content with ads enabled.
I tried NoScript, but it breaks way too many sites.
The Verge is a surprise because it is relatively new and was relatively free of this crap for a long time.
They’re all just empty brands now. They totally caved to advertisers, and now only advertisers care about them.
I dare say AI’s popularity is a symptom of all this more than a cause.
But if I ask Claude or Gemini for a nice version of the recipe, it works perfectly. I think there's a lot of own goals out there.
Someone from the financial times did a test about the impact of this garbage on read times and brand loyalty. This was maybe 15 years ago. Of course the more ads shoehorned onto the page, the worse the metrics were.
The first shoe dropped when news websites realized they weren't generating content fast enough. Hard, in depth journalism takes time, but when people want to know something that happened _today_, they don't want to wait a week for all the facts to come out, and so the major websites started losing traffic to websites that churned out articles fast.
The additional benefit of churning out articles was that you could match against more and more long tail keywords, which lead to more traffic and more ability to sell ads. To keep up, many websites dropped quality for speed, and consumers noticed.
The second shoe then to drop was with affiliate marketing -- articles on CNET / Wirecutter etc were already ranking and rating products, so they figured "[...] why shouldn't we get a cut if someone ends up buying a product we recommend"? The challenge then became that consumers couldn't tell the difference between a product that was recommended because it was good, or because the product gave the biggest "kickback" to the website for using the affiliate link. Thus, people that gave "honest" opinions on products (e.g. people asking on Reddit, at least for a while, as the article suggests) became the new source of truth.
The result of this means that these days, if you read a lot of articles on the major tech websites, they feel more like they've been optimized for speed (e.g. churning out an article fast), SEO, and not much else. Many people have talked about how recipie websites are now short story generators more than food instructions, but it's been common for a while where I go to a tech website to read about something I specifically Googled, only for it to feel more like it was written _specifically_ to capture traffic for a keyword, rather than actually solve the issue or question I came into the website with.
The cherry on top is that AI has none of these problems (so far) -- yes, there's some movement on trying to do SEO for AI, and of course ads will eventually come to AI like it has everything else, but currently, you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it -- who wouldn't want that?
I thought we wanted the truth.
This time I conversed entirely with Gemini, sending pictures of the cables and of the components and the motherboard.
I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly and sent an image of that cable to Gemini.
Gemini said "It is very important that you stop and unplug that cable immediately... Hopefully the power supply's safety precautions kicked in before any permanent damage occurred."
I know that Gemini was conversing with me using plagiarized information from all those sites. But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain by reading a bunch of articles.
I don't see a future for tech content because Gemini isn't paying the authors and they don't give me an option to direct payments to them either.
In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.
As soon as I tried to make a todomvc it started working great but I wonder how much value that really brings to the table.
It's great for me though. I can finally make a todomvc tailored to my specific needs.
It's in that realm but more complex. I do plan to repeatedly come back and try though. Just so far it hasn't been useful.
On the other hand, they've also surfaced information (later independently confirmed by myself) that I had not been able to find for years. I don't know what to make of it.
Not if you use web search or deep report, you should not use LLMs as knowledge bases, they are language models - they learn language not information, and are just models not replicas of the training set.
Edit: A question from AI/LLM ignorance- Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs? I can imagine a quarantined database used for specific applications that remains curated, but this seems impossible on the open internet.
I think, for public internet data, we can only be reasonably confident for information before the big release of ChatGPT.
If in the hypothetical future the continual learning problem gets solved, the AI could just learn from the real world instead of publications and retain that data.
Results vary of course. I have some very wonderful synthesizer manuals.
This creates financial incentives to pay companies running the new version of search. Your thinking of this as a problem for these companies, when in reality it is a financial incentive.
Thats not to say AI is bad. It’s great in many cases. More that I’m worried about what happens when the repositories of new knowledge get hollowed out.
Also my favorite response was this gem from Sonnet:
> TL;DR: Move your monitor cable from the motherboard to the graphics card.
Chat rooms produce trillions of tokens per day now, interactive tokens, where AI can poke and prod at us, and have its ideas tested in the real world (by us).
For 99.99999% of people out there, LLMs are the new search. You can gnash teeth and yell and sob, but it is how things are.
For some definitions of "better", that is. :(
The first set of steps didn't work, so we iteratively sent pictures of the screen until the steps eventually did work and the issue was fixed.
This saved us from having to call Apple support.
If you wanted to use an LLM to identify it, sure, you can validate that, and then find the manufacturer instructions and use those. Just following what it says about the cables without any validation it's correct is just wild to me. These are products with instruction manuals made for them specifically designed for this.
With critical tasks you need to cross reference multiple AI, start by running 4 deep reports, on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, then put all of them into a comparative - critical analysis round. This reduces variance, the models are different, and using different search tools, you can even send them in different directions, one searches blogs, one reddit, etc.
I'd at least ask for a citation to the product manual (even though half the time it cites another fucking AI generated site instead)
I'm surprised this was a problem. Back in the day, there were things like making sure your two very similar AT power connectors had the black wires next to each other, not forcing in a molex connector upside down, or the same for ribbon cables. These days? The connectors are standardized and keyed, as long as your modular PSU vendor didn't get lazy on their keying.
1. in the short term this development is great for users. LLMs trained for free on a universe of high-quality human stolen content, and returns relevant parts of it to resolve specific customer questions, without ads, an operation funded by VC.
2. with LLMs redirecting search from knowledge producers (webpages) to knowledge aggregators (LLMs) the incentive to create knowledge is gone, and future knowledge (including that fed into LLMs) will degrade compared to a universe that kept this incentive alive
3. AI is hardware, energy and R&D intensive and VCs will need a business model to recuperate their investments and costs, a key-player has already announced an ad model re-creating part of the issue noted previously that we temporarily resolved
I can't even begin to count how many times I've found interesting and useful information from an old forum/article/guide that was supported by some ads or simply an avenue to engage with people. Those incentives are now gone.
Tech companies have no ethics and their leaders think it's in their interest to continue the exploitation, so that's what is going to happen. The only effective way to prevent a tragedy of the commons situation on this scale is major government action and there is zero political will for that at this time.
In the long run there will be some sort of reaction, maybe site curation will make a comeback. A few big name sites will probably resist the slop and survive as an institution. But the internet many of us know and love is being pummeled to death before our eyes.
There were large categories of information had become extremely difficult to search for thanks to SEO optimized content farms like these. People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this. To me, LLMs feel like a return to the golden age of AltaVista and Google, where the Internet was a place you could reliably find the information you were looking for.
But we aren't there quite yet; that's tomorrow's problem. And I still have things that I need to do today.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
Noticed the other day it now heavily cites and sources my one of my blog post to support the claim that yes, AI makes you boring if you google "Does AI make you boring?"
If you search "Does AI make you interesting?", it drums up other sources to support that contradictory claim as well.
You'll rent it and use whatever is available for the low low price of $79.99/mo*
Truly an ouroboros of garbage.
https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...
Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.
What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?
Google participates in AI bubble. When it pops, they will aggressively seek monetization. Be ready to see chatbot output to be populated with popups, video ads, popups, and stuff.
This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal.
The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.
>While these estimates don’t, and can’t, show you exactly how much organic traffic a website gets, they work incredibly well for comparison. For example, it’s fantastic for learning if your competitors’ websites get more or less organic search traffic than your own.
(https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-...)
The web and SEO are dead.
The above refers to the time until Jan 2026. Here are its financials:
Year Total Revenue Operating Expenses Net Income
2025 $836.6 ~$708.0 $48.7
2024 $687.6 $614.7 $30.4
2023 $599.4 $541.8 ($11.8)
2022 $538.9 $518.1 ($10.2)
2021 $379.6 $390.1 ($42.5)
1. Is there still value in a trusted source of high quality, relevant information existing in an easily accessible place? To me the answer is obviously yes, whether a human writes it or an agent, and also whether a human consumes it or an agent
2. If an agent visits a page, they shouldn't generate ad revenue (I guess they don't? is that true?). Should they just be able to copy the information for free? If the answer to 1. is yes, the answer here should probably be no.
3. Does this completely break the ad revenue model that powers like the whole internet?
4. Does this seriously threaten our ability to maintain a high quality, shared collection of knowledge? What can be done?
The LLMs will aggregate knowledge until that knowledge becomes useless to us. Then the LLMs will become near to useless for us because they lack that new info. Then the traffic generally on the internet will wane and this multi-decade distraction will pass into history to be replace and/or augmented to create something new that serves our purposes at that time.
The need for communication doesn't go away. The need for this particular iteration of networked telecommunications + dark-pattern-laden social media doesn't even exist in the first place, except to the social network owners. It too shall pass.
That being said, I am morbidly curious about traffic from RSS subscribers: has that gone up, gone down, or remained roughly the same in the same time period?
I guess the future model is, LLMs pay for raw data and news to ingest and use on demand, and ignore the "free" internet. That seems like a good landing point, where quality info is rewarded and cheap spin is not. Of course cheap spin will continue to be produced, but hopefully won't be baked into the system.
So basically businesses who focus on maintaining best in class core services and avoid the cruft will be the winners in the AI world.
Putting morals and previous experience aside, they would need massive investment to people producing massive volumes of high quality content for training.
Who knew!
I use to be able to quickly discard the top few SEO results, but now its all SEO results for pages, and none of them contain anything besides the barest of surface details to be essentially worthless.
As an example try googling about what trees can be grafted to cherry trees. It is one of the easiest trees to graft requiring no special tools and multiple different species of fruit trees will graft onto cherry tree stock. And yet how many of those other species do you find listed or mentioned int he first 10 results? It is just generic slop about "Yes trees can be grafted, take Species A stick and slice into Species A tree, blah blah blah 14 pages of the same thing repeated" except they just replaced Species A with cherry, and if you google any other tree grafting it is the same article just with pear or apple or apricot, nothing about it is specific to cherry tree grafting or cross-species grafting.
the rest are ad scams
cut the cookies and tracking, so you don't have to have a ridiculous compliance banner. cut the paywall that tells me what you had to say wasn't important enough for public consumption. cut the full screen ad breaks and page takeover nonsense.
these outlets have had years (decades?) to figure out how to monetize content that didn't drive users away. they have failed over and over and over again, so why should I care that they are failing now? if it wasn't AI, it would be something else that came for them. if you rely on the captiveness of your audience, rather than the quality of your product, I'm always happy to see you destroyed. whatever comes next will be different, at the very least. and I'm an optimist - I'll always hope that it's a better way. if it's not, let that shit die, too.
regardless, I have every faith that the good will that buoyed these sites in their respective heydays will continue on to provide some other resources for the same kind of media.
This is hard for me, an "information wants to be free" kinda guy, to espouse. But there are softer ways to do it, such as how The Guardian does it, or how public media does it.
If I go to your website where you purport to cover the news of the tech industry, it is always in your best interest to actually give me that news. I'd prefer it if they gave a dry, sometimes even bullet-pointed list of bare news facts. What they know, how they know it, and the basic ways it affects the site's topic/hobby, as soon as they possibly know it. From there, link to your subscription content that goes into detail about the news and provides attractive insight or framing or whatever, along with reasoned updates when the news stops breaking and we have some better or more reliable information. People who just want the news can hit the site, light up the in-page and side gutter banner ads, and then bounce. People curious for more or appreciative of the talent can subscribe and get more, and more informed, detail.
Basically, just the same old suggestions for any enterprise: figure out what people, right now, today, want; stop relying on what worked in the past or what is most convenient for your team. Break it down in to how people actually function, and then place monetization where you would purchase, for a price that you would purchase for. I'll always be able to find the news without you, so you don't have any leverage to hold it hostage. Use it as a lead for your content, which can be the kind of reporting (different than news in subtle but meaningful ways) that people will be happy to pay for.
We need a variant of Godwins law to reflect (and prevent) the use of AI being used in internet squabbles.
I would guess some people will say traffic is down because people are using LLMs to get news and are not reading news sites anymore.
My hypothesis is that all these tech sites are writing about are LLMs. People are sick and tired of reading about that, so they are not going to those sites anymore.
That parasite of a site still seems to rank high for many search queries, even tho their user experience is horrible (and their content too)