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Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google traffic since 2024
by Growtika
If you’ve visited any of these sites recently it’s obvious that part of the issue is that you’re bombarded with pops, ads everywhere, autoplaying video, etc. It’s nauseating and a horrible user experience. If all I’m looking for is straightforward content/info then I’m naturally using the most efficient way to get that content/information and visiting a website is not the most efficient way anymore
Infinite Jest describes a very similar (fictional) development, albeit with network TV. As viewers leave, content producers are ever-more desperate to monetize remaining traffic, which worsens the experience and drives more viewers away, creating even more desperation to monetize... a vicious cycle.
These news sites run ads that are borderline gore, disturbing images promoting snake oil weight loss or skin care treatments, and wonder why nobody wants to click into their site.
But I love internet chum! Don't forget "new law thing"; that's an important category.
If you live in California, insurance companies don't want you to know this
"internet chum" is a good one, it echoes "slop bowl".
"Chumbox" has been a descriptive term since 2015:
"A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum" (4 June 2015)
<https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...>
Cool Wikipedia read. These (chumboxes) are on our Windows 10 lock screens at work.
Wait a minute, what? What I read from your comment is that on your work machines the screen savers display ads? I mean, I’d heard Windows was getting bad with the ads, but surely it doesn’t work that way out of the box.
On Enterprise, configured by policy, no less, one would assume.
That is an absolute stone cold dead soul-sucking statement.
That's bottom of the barrel advertisers. You're being punished because you likely don't allow them to track you.
That the news sites allow bottom of the barrel advertisers on their site primarily reflects negatively on the news site, for not curating their partnerships. They decided to become a tabloid, and should lose an according amount of respect.
> These news sites run ads that are borderline gore, disturbing images promoting snake oil weight loss or skin care treatments
And that doesn't raise an eye brow, but well worded AI articles based on sources is described as slop
It's a downward spiral. As views start to decline there's more pressure to make money from the views that remain.
If views increased, there'd also be more pressure to make more money from them.
The direction of views is irrelevant. What's relevant is the forward passage of time. As t -> infinity, shitty monetization -> infinity.
It’s not inevitable. It’s just a specific form of leadership failure that comes from grabby short term business people being in charge of everything.
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 NYT is afloat because of its games.
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.
> 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.
Yes, and this has been the case for years. Cnet, ZDnet, PCmag have been user-hostile since long before AI summaries. Pop-ups, “before you go,” back jacking, all the worst.
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.
I used to work as a technology journalist. A guy from the business side always used to say, “there’s no way we are leaving money on the table“ as justification for putting ad modules, video players, lead generation forms and other junk around our articles. We had no say in the matter.
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.
My tech tutorials blog never had any ads, still doesnt. Still lost more than half the traffic. That's not the reason, that's an excuse and a distraction from the topic that AI captures everyone's IP and removes a lot of their economic incentive to create it.
I have a recurring problem where I can't even read one of my favorite recipe websites (seriouseats.com) from my phone because the series of popups completely blocks the page, and can't be dismissed.
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.
Add to that cookie accept popups and the www has really turned to junk lately
The WWW has been trending towards junk since the early 2000s. HN is still the pinnacle of web design.
Every time I visit the FT, the experience is reasonable enough.
FT is (largely) subscriber-supported, AFAIU.
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.
This article is about tech publications. I think of the FT as a financial/general news publication. Do others read them for their tech coverage?
Is anyone here actually browsing the internet without ad-blockers?
As soon as I accidentally turn them off I am disgusted by the consumerist, snake-oil, sexist, shit-storm that's advertisement.
Technically I run a tracking blocker, it just happens to block 90+% of all ads because they want to track me.
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.
Here? Probably not many. But in general? Yes, the vast majority of people do not even after being told about it, they are conditioned to accept ads because they are not optional on most any other device (minus techie hacks like pihole and such that understandable most people don't know how to do or understand).
I use adblockers everywhere. I still see some ads, but never sexist ones. What are you seeing?
The average viewer probably doesn't know ad blockers exist.
Roughly one third to 40% of people worldwide "report using an ad blocker". I'd suspect that awareness is near, if not comfortably above, a majority.
I run adblock, but it's been not very effective lately. Sites either work around it, or just outright refuse to work.
Are you using a chromium-based browser? Google crippled adblockers on those. I essentially never see ads on firefox
Nope, I'm on FireFox.
I tried NoScript, but it breaks way too many sites.
Weren't those ads always there, though? The most obvious change is that a little AI popup appears on Google search providing a brief (even if hallucinated) overview of what the user queried.
Unrelated, but I wouldn't expect this take on HN where I assumed everyone knew what an ad-blocker was.
Yes the ads were always there but that was the most efficient way to get the content/information. That has changed and even with ad blockers, websites are no longer the most efficient way to get to that content/infomation. That is what has changed
Okay, I see what point you were trying to make. I misinterpreted your comment as saying LLMs weren't the catalyst but instead the ads were.
I also read it that way. I guess the synthesis/charitable interpretation is that the negative ad experience meant it was ripe for disruption should an alternative come along.
But it raises a potential counterpoint: are there sites with non-terrible user experiences that are staying stable?
Wikipedia.
Mobile users (or other locked down devices where adblockers are forbidden) are still a decent chunk of traffic. It's much easier to just read the overview and not click through to the ad infestation, or even use a chatbot of choice as the search engine instead of going to Google, because "websites is how you get spammed with ads".
> Mobile users (or other locked down devices where adblockers are forbidden)
Just say Apple. They're still allowed on Android, although I don't think you can get them from the Play Store.
They didn’t “just say Apple” because it wouldn’t be true. What gives you the impression ad blockers don’t work on Apple mobile devices?
The part where you are forbidden from using a web browser that isn't Safari (Chrome + FF use Safari under the hood) without jailbreaking the phone?
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.
Not allowed on my work computer. Which I do use the internet on.
Also you can put ad block on Apple devices.
Ublock origin is a Firefox extension that works on mobile. You don't need a dedicated app for blocking adverts.
Not on iOS, there Firefox is actually Safari under the hood and you can’t use extensions… Haven’t found a good solution yet (other than avoiding websites with ads)
Wipr2; paid for Safari but it works on all Apple devices with that one payment.
I don’t use ad block.
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.
I use reader mode 90% of the time, I’m really not interested in fancy layout or formatting for a website. I just want the text readable and looking exactly the same way for every website. Designers probably hate users like me.
> and I consider the volume and type of ads an important signal for a website’s trustworthiness
You can get the former from the number showing up in the uBlock Origin icon.
So, Google promotes the enshittification you decry by monopolizing the way you make money on the internet. Then also Google cripples everyone’s ad-dependent business by sucking out the info these websites provide and have paid people to research and publish. Nonetheless, Google good, websites bad.
Many of today's news websites (tech or otherwise) cashed in their goodwill / reputation / page rank to sell ads.
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?
Why do you think that they are pushing so many ads? It is because they have too much money? Most sites are struggling to pay the few employees they have. Fewer ads aren't going to lead to better reporting. Would you be willing to pay a subscription to the website? Probably not.
> you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it
I thought we wanted the truth.
Some of us do but many people do not. Source: Married for 22 years.
Stated and revealed preferences
You can’t handle the truth
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I recently replaced a power supply to upgrade a GPU. I bought the power supply on Cragslist, so it had a jumble of cables and no manual. In the past I would have read an article that I would have found on one of those sites.
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.
It's crazy to me that you'd trust the output of an LLM for that. It's something where if you do it wrong it could cause major damage, and LLMs are literally famous for creating plausbile-sounding but wrong output.
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.
> It's crazy to me that you'd trust the output of an LLM for that. It's something where if you do it wrong it could cause major damage,
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.
Or you can ask for a link to the manual. I genuinely can't tell if your post is real advice or sarcasm intended to highlight the insanity of trying to fit square pegs in round holes of using LLMs for everything.
I'd probably view LLM advice like the blind spot indicator on my car. Trust when it's lit. Don't trust when it's not lit.
If the hardware changes significantly and those sites don't exist in the future wouldn't that mean gemeni would degrade in quality because it has nothing to pull from?
Right, that success story is only because there was "organic" (for lack of a better term) information from an original source. What happens when all information is nth generation AI feedback with all links to the original source lost?
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.
> Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs?
I think, for public internet data, we can only be reasonably confident for information before the big release of ChatGPT.
Yes, people have likened pre-LLM Internet content to low-background steel.
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.
That's exactly why text written before the first LLMs has a premium on it these days. So no, all major models suffer from slop in their training data.
One reason why Google made that algorithm to watermark AI output
We've all tried to ask the LLM about something outside of its training data by now.
In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.
That's definitely been my experience. I work with a lot of weird code bases that have never been public facing and AI has horrible responses for that stuff.
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.
I'm not sure what sorts of weird codebases you're working with but I recently saw Claude programming well on a Lambda MOO -- weirder than that?
I had to Google that haha.
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.
> In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.
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.
Once or twice, for me it's deflected rather than answer at all.
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.
This then becomes the hardware manufacturers problem. If their new hardware fails for to many users it will no longer be purchased. If they externalize their problem solving like so many companies, they won't be able to gain market share.
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.
> because it has nothing to pull from?
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).
Presumably companies will still provide manuals.
It'll be a single sheet of paper with a QR code that redirects to a canned prompt hosted at whichever LLM server paid the most to the manufacturer for their content.
If that was adequate then wouldn't there not be supplementary material?
Results vary of course. I have some very wonderful synthesizer manuals.
Yea so I’ve had an issue getting video output after boot on a new AMD R9700 Pro. None of the, albeit free, models from OpenAI/Google/Anthropic have really been helpful. I found the pro drivers myself. They never mentioned them.
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.
That's more than a little concerning you would put full faith in AI to connect expensive hardware without verifying.
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)
There is no modular PSU cable standard. Mixing cables between PSUs can destroy your hardware. Even among the same brand there is no standard.
Same experience here: someone at our company had a bricked Macbook Pro. It was previously MDM-managed with JamF, and it wouldn't boot up. Asked ChatGPT to give me steps to fix it.
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.
> I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly
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.
FWIW, things are standardized and keyed on the ATX board side of things. They aren't standardized on the power supply side of a modular power supply. Unless you've absolutely confirmed pinouts, never swap cables between modular power supplies. Fitment doesn't imply its actually going to put the right voltage on the right pins. Even within the same manufacturer pinouts have sometimes been different between models!
Also, some non-standard hardware looks very standard. (At least some) Dell motherboard/PSU connectors infamously are physically compatible (the plug fits the socket) with the ATX standard, but the wiring is sufficiently different that it can damage or be damaged by other hardware.
I have never seen a review site or tech blog go into detail about how to wire a specific power supply to a specific motherboard. I would also never go to such a site to get information I can easily get from the manufacturer through a handbook but I would also never ask a chatbot. Really odd use case tbh.
> Really odd use case tbh.
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.
> But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain
For some definitions of "better", that is. :(
I see a future just like the seo issue of today, where the well is poisoned and llm information is garbage.
Comment was deleted :(
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Three things are probably true:
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
Classic tragedy of the commons, this time with major impact on everyone everywhere.
Agreed on all three points, but I think this is pretty obviously terrible in the long run. The open internet was one of the greatest common goods in human history. That ecosystem is quickly being exploited to death by a handful of tech companies. Those companies are generating a lot of revenue in the short term, and the rest of humanity is losing a great deal.
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.
AI has successfully scraped enough of their content so that they are no longer needed. Thanks for creating the content, now someone else will make money with it.
Franky, good riddance. The websites that had SEO optimized their way to the top of Google's search results for queries like "how to change DNS settings", "best free VPN", or "best wireless earbuds under $300" were generally terrible, and I can't say I'm sad that that creating that kind of "content" is no longer economically viable.
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.
You'll just see it within AI responses instead.
I find that the AI surfaces things from actual manuals and data that were once easy to find in Google search before SEO ruined it.
Certainly so.
But we aren't there quite yet; that's tomorrow's problem. And I still have things that I need to do today.
Yeah, that's only going to last until the first bad actor.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
It seems very easy to manipulate.
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.
What do you think is going to happen to LLM content after it has replaced the rest of the internet? It sure as hell isn't going to stay relatively unbiased and ad-free. The degradation of Google Search is probably an optimistic comparison.
Except when they just hallucinate an answer that is plainly wrong.
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> And now we can enjoy Marxist advertising ("posts") within our discussions on how to replace a TPMS sensor.
Reddit is Marxist? Hilarious.
I can't believe real people believe shit like this. Truly, the state of education is dire.
Marx and Engles must be rolling in their graves as a beacon of capitalistic tech is called "Marixst". What a silly world we live in.
Please, for the class, stand up in front and define "Marxism" for us.
But where will the AI get new information when the websites stop publishing new info?
Yet these sites now use AI to generate more "content" (slop) than ever, leveraging their high Google rankings and SEO to lure people in. The people who haven't switched to an LLM for search, anyway.
Truly an ouroboros of garbage.
good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about new hardware is "I don't know"
No worries. We're on track to make consumer hardware unaffordable for the average user in 4 years anyway.
You'll rent it and use whatever is available for the low low price of $79.99/mo*
Many of these websites, I only ever interacted with when doing research either on tech or tech products. I did not appreciate their surface-level reviews and explanations, so in my head I've categorized most of these websites as "noise to wade through whenever I need to look up something". I can't say I'll miss these sites. I would be googling (ddg-ing) way more still if the internet wasn't full of low-effort SEO bait articles that dominate every search result.
It doesn't help that tech publications and gaming websites keep getting bought out by crypto and gambling companies.
https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...
Yes a lot of these publications produce low quality content. But some of it can be quite useful. If they disappear who is going to document at a consumer level the latest hardware doodad or whatnot? Manufacturers are going to have to invest in online resources that the AI bots can scrape. Perhaps good documentation will become a driver of profit.
Can't wait for SEO ..ahem.. AI optimized docs for everything... :/
I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line.
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?
Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.
But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?
Nearly 60% of traffic is gone from the tech publications, not gone from Google.
OpenAI was already found to be integrating ads into API. It is only a matter of time. Enshitiffication is inevitable.
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.
Gemini already drives some really valuable ads. It has, in effect, solved the "best pants" problem. It will use personalized chat to give you attributable shopping links for pants. And they don't have to share that revenue with some SEOmaxxing pants blogger.
You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.
Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.
> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.
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.
wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?
The results seem plausible, but it's worth noting that the source of their data (Ahrefs) is just a rough estimate. Given that every publication they examined - including several outside of the tech industry - showed declines, I'd hope they would confirm that it's not an artifact of the estimation process. Ahrefs themselves caution against using their data to make these sorts of conclusions:
>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-...)
Conde nast reported in the last few days their Web traffic is massively down too. Other big publishers have reported it themselves too.
The web and SEO are dead.
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Raises a few questions:
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?
> NerdWallet is publicly traded (NRDS) and its business depends on converting search visitors into financial product referrals. It went from 25M monthly organic visits to 6.8M, a 73% decline.
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)
They've done a great job capturing their audience into their app. I used to work for one of their top competitors, and they've been decimated.
What's with HN's apparent dislike of The Verge? Of all the tech sites I've been visiting for the past decade it is the only one that hasn't gone to shit.
Since the internet is ad-driven, what happens when these sites can no longer afford to stay in business because AI is siphoning off their traffic? What does AI do when the content it relies on stops coming?
The AI companies will be charging you a $20 monthly subscription fee. And showing you ads. It's going to be great.
That animated graph at the top is awful; does not render well on macOS Safari.
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?
So, soon the sources will be out of business and the LLMs will have no information to look up.
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.
A potential corollary: companies that offer a single service of high quality will be preferred by AI agents. Companies that cobble together low quality services will be replaced by agents that integrate high quality services on demand. The business model of "core service plus add-on services" will also be diminished, as low quality add-ons will be replaced by on-demand integration with higher quality equivalents or AI generated custom functionality.
So basically businesses who focus on maintaining best in class core services and avoid the cruft will be the winners in the AI world.
That all sounds nice, but I can't really see AI companies paying for content.
Putting morals and previous experience aside, they would need massive investment to people producing massive volumes of high quality content for training.
Google is rapidly becoming irrelevant/insignificant with each day
Tech publications get bent already because their core demographic is people who think ad-blocking is the savior of the internet. Nobody is paying for their content already.
The low ratio of quality original reporting vs political and opinion pieces made stop reading the verge.
Yeah because its mostly just slop, and now their slop is competing with AI slop. Googling anything that more than a handful of other people will google results in the same simplified and cut down information on all of the top 20 pages, 10 of which are AI slop copying both each other and the other top SEO slop.
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.
I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.
Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop everywhere?
Bots creating content, bots clicking on content, bots reading that content, and bots creating more content from it. It'll be like a capitalist cousin to Newspeak[1]; instead of a top-down enforcement of the language it will evolve by popular demand.
Quality content stopped being profitable well before ChatGPT. Quantity beat quality as a content strategy flooding the search page with high-level obvious “how-tos” and “best vacuum cleaner” slop. This destroyed the consumer search experience. Current models have plenty of rich historical data and are good at synthesizing quality responses with the right queries. Now the risk is that AI will be starved of recent quality information to pull from. Hopefully the pendulum swings back around to make quality information profitable again…
Happy to see general readership agrees with my opinion of The Verge.
I barely visit here anymore.
Oh no, did the tracking cookies, ads, seo spam and affiliate articles have a negative effect?
Who knew!
I think this is a good thing, and a natural evolution of the tech.
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.
What happens when the source data is killed off, these sites fold. Then where will Google AI summaries get info?
honestly: good. all of them jumped up their own asses for the sake of SEO and minimum required regulation compliance, which stopped me from even going to the ones that aren't low-quality, content mills, which many of them are.
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.
What would be your suggestion for monetization without ads or subscription? Or are you thinking some type of privacy-respecting ad system? Because those have definitely been tried.
Subscription used to work. They can work again, even better than before now that we have the facility for micro-transactions. A micro-transactional framework would have the added benefit of making it expensive for scrapers to steal content.
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.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of juice left in the "newstand" model. We just have to figure out how to translate the efficiency of "drop in quarter, get news" with digital currency and content. Like you said: a micro-transactional framework. That would be a hell of a thing to get started, but if you could my money's on it working like a charm.
This reminds me that The Onion is still doing print subscriptions, and they might be better value than most of real newspapers...
I'm not suggesting monetization without ads or subscriptions. I'm suggesting monetization without obnoxious bullshit like full page, scroll arresting ads, or news content locked behind a paywall, rather than editorial content locked behind a paywall.
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.
the only one that's a loss is How To Geek, which had some genuinely useful info
the rest are ad scams
Potentially hot take.
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.
Good, now do Forbes.com
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)
It's not entirely the bad UX/ad-riddled layouts, it's the content. Other than Verge and Wired maybe, all of the listed publications are mostly putting out late, regurgitated stories. They're not on the ball, and so have dropped it. We're more likely to get a breaking tech story out of CNBC, Reuters or NYT and go from there. And that's not even getting into Verge and Wired's paywalls or syndication over to outrage-farm 404 media in the case of the latter. And where's Ars in all this? (which suffers from some of the same problems/quality/timing)
now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats
Ads and brainless corporate propaganda and culture wars will do that.
Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.
You can shape the AI responses for some niche topics relatively easily even on accident. I recently saw 2 people arguing on a forum on a very niche industry topic and one of them started to use Gemini as a source to argue and Gemini was already referencing their thread as a source. I'm imagining people could start doing that on purpose with their own astroturfed blogs and public social media accounts.
> one of them started to use Gemini as a source
We need a variant of Godwins law to reflect (and prevent) the use of AI being used in internet squabbles.
Cut communication and notify them you dont like speaking with their llm and expected the conversation to be between the two people. Discount their credibility.
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Crafted by Rajat
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