Traffic
“Traffic” – a cartoon that illustrates how Google’s adoption of AI in their search business is having an unintended consequence on small companies that depend on web traffic.
Google search attracts 106Bn visits a month, 4x the next four search engines combined, with a market share of 88%.
Global research by Datareportal shows that ‘find information’ is the most common aim for using the internet, across all generations.
Historically, there are concerns that the playing pitch is skewed towards Google’s interests, reflected by anti-trust cases in the US and Europe about monopoly pricing.
However, the rollout of Google Gemini and search algorithm updates has extended concerns deeper into the core product offering.
Gemini is the company’s AI-powered search and answer engine, which is designed to stop spammy results from auto-generated content (you know, that page that is basically an ad).
Google says the upside is “45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results,” but many sites with their own original content have gone through a near extinction event.
Analytics tool SEMrush suggests that the website for New York Magazine lost 32% of its Google Search traffic in the past six months.
Most impacted are companies that were trying to follow Google’s recommendations on creating their own independent content (e.g. blogs, videos), but no longer are top of the search result lists.
For example, Gisele Navarro, the founder of HouseFresh, an air purifying product distribution remarked that the changes “decimated us.
Suddenly the search terms that used to bring up HouseFresh were sending people to big lifestyle magazines that clearly don’t even test the products. The articles are full of information that I know is wrong.”
