You may recently have heard bloggers like myself (but probably better and more successful) moaning about the Google algorithms lately. While it may not be something you’ve paid much attention to if you’re not in the business, it’s big news.
Eh? Come again?
I’ll be brief because I know this kind of stuff is pretty dull: The people in charge of the Google Search Engine have decided that their latest move is to prioritise Google-owned websites (Reddit, Youtube, Quora etc) over any others when deciding what it will show you in answer to a search query. Loads of bloggers and website owners, who previously made a living providing informative and useful content on the internet (so… not me really) have found their traffic absolutely destroyed overnight by the latest updates. Yikes.
People like my good friend Bella, a multi award winning travel blogger, writer and photographer, who would be considered by most people to be an expert and writes insightful, useful and unique content about places she has actually travelled to and experienced, is now beaten in the search rankings by Dave2386 that went somewhere on holiday in 2011 and an entirely uneducated, non-expert opinion about it on Reddit.
And what about Google AI?
Even worse news for bloggers, Google has jumped aboard the latest craze: AI. It is now pushing AI answers to people on its search engine, rather than directing them to the websites of people who have created the content it has used to train its AI bots, or whose content has been stolen wholesale and parroted out by the Google AI Bots.
Yes, you heard that correctly. Someone has paid to host a website, they’ve created recipes or they’ve spent time planning and writing content, they’ve taken pictures and goodness knows what else and now Google have said ‘Yoink, I’ll have that and I won’t even say thanks!’.
For example, I didn’t even know that Google even had any kids but they are adamant that the oatmeal smoothie is their kids’ favourite…
But upon further investigation, it has simply stolen the recipe from the blog Kristine’s Kitchen.
This is obviously catastrophic for people who have previously made a living out of providing useful information.
I’ve been hit – the organic traffic to my review posts which did OK before is now fairly non-existent which is a bummer as it has affected my ad revenue (one of the ways I make money blogging).
As mentioned in the post linked above, I have diversified my income and traffic sources, so I’m not entirely reliant on Google for money. And let’s be honest; my website was never really that popular to start with.
However, those that have travel and recipe blogs and websites who have previously had thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of hits a day, are particularly affected. With AI content giving people an instant answer to their query right there on the Google homepage there is now zero motivation from people to go any further and visit any other website. Their ad revenue is through the floor.
It sound very unfair on bloggers, but why should *I* care?
You’re not a blogger, so why should you give a toss about all of that? Well, it is a problem for the user too.
Firstly, if bloggers are not getting anything for their hard work, they’ll stop. If they can’t exist on their ad revenue then there will be no new content for Google to scrape, no new content you to consume, and the internet will just be people arguing on social media, and spouting their opinions as fact on Reddit. There will be no expert analysis, no real advice from people who know their subjects. No new recipes, no up to date travel information. Just AI bots stealing each others’ out of date content and spitting it back at each other.
And secondly, it’s been shown that Google AI isn’t necessarily the most reliable.
These are the types of answers you can expect to receive if you are currently in America (but being rolled out to a country near you soon!)…
It’s lazy, it can’t read past the headline, it can’t work out the difference between a website with legitimate information on it against a parody site, and it definitely doesn’t understand satire or trolling…
…It gives downright ridiculous answers that probably aren’t medically sound…
…And to be honest, unless they change it quickly, I doubt it’ll be long before someone gets sued.
In short: If you can avoid using Google at all, I’d highly recommend it.
Vote with your feet, and they might just get the message!
For an alternative search engine, you can try Duck Duck Go, or Ecosia instead. For every search on Ecosia, they plant a tree which is nice. YOU DON’T DO THAT, DO YOU GOOGLE? You can do this easily in the settings menu of your Chrome browser.
Or you can choose to keep using Google, and try skipping past the first results.
But whatever you do, definitely do not trust Google’s AI content.
If you enjoyed this and you’re feeling generous, you can buy me a cup of tea or a glass of wine – or donate to my houseplant addiction fund – here.
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Hello Fran! This is a great post. Thank you 🙂
It’s also very encouraging to read. I’ve found myself getting increasingly annoyed at all the horrible things the tech companies are doing, not least among which is how they’ve put together these LLMs, how they operate, and how they disadvantage humans who publish content online. It’s heartening to see other people thinking along similar lines.
I completely agree that people should try to avoid these AI tools. By using them, we’re essentially a) rewarding extremely poor behaviour on the part of the tech companies (e.g. scraping all our data and profiting from it without even telling us, and b) shooting ourselves in the foot, in terms of what it will do to the internet long-term.
Your prediction about the future dearth of online content actually reminds me of the ‘Dead Internet Theory’, which says that in the future, the internet will just be populated by AIs having endless reiterative conversations with each other. Humans will basically realise the whole thing is useless, and leave it alone.
I know that theory is quite extreme, but I already see signs of something similar happening on a much smaller scale. Social media, for example, is starting to struggle because more and more people are realising it’s a gigantic toilet and just opting out. I suspect the influx of AI tools will drive that process much further. And personally, I welcome it.
Anyway … as I said, thanks for the excellent post. Keep up the good work 🙂
Anthony.
Thanks Fran, this is exactly what is happening, and it’s devastating. Effectively, copyright has been abolished.
You probably know that the New York Mycological Society recently (last Sept I think) issued a warning against using books allegedly identifying which mushrooms are safe to eat. Only they got it wrong a lot of the time. And poisonous mushrooms can only be eaten once after all.
hi, I posted this on facebook and now I am banned.
Ha why?!