Where did all of the traffic go? 1000's of big brand sites, organic traffic gone.

contract

contract

We're all gunna mine it brah.
Joined
Jun 2, 2015
Messages
426
Likes
460
Degree
2
Using SEMrush. Prob not very accurate anymore but the organic traffic #'s seem to pattern what I've seen.

Every big brand down from Millions to like 200-100K, across the board. Even legit, brand sites. I get there where algo updates, which are align with the timing for all of these sites dying.. But you can't tell me all of these sites just lost billions in traffic and it disappeared?

I can type in any big brand site I've known for the past 10 years, dead traffic, got hit by algo. Even LEGIT sites.

So where did all of this traffic just go to? If you search, it's a mixed bag of sites, random as random gets.

The HQ content is just not there. Big brands, regardless of what they did, put out at least a few very HQ articles, like world-class, and those appear no where in a search where little exists. So did G just destroy pretty much all websites?

It just doesn't make sense. I get video, social, etc. taking a large share, but it's odd.
 
Google.com had a 15% drop in traffic YoY due to ChatGPT. SGE also made a lot of queries 0 click.

I've talked to several SaaSes and they reported 25% drop in traffic in Q2. Investors are pulling out from SEO big time right now. The only queries getting traffic.. are navigational queries.

Time to leave your ego aside, go into survival mode, and take a junior role in another field.
 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ STOP IT^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

_____________________________________________________

Its way Harder to keep a brand alive these days.

Most people can't even defend their brand tail.

I know I can't really anymore. It's slowly killing me.
I'm adapting. Its rough.

Platforms are killing .com and friends.
Google is a defacto platform that has recently used new bidding options and ai directional insertions to monitize everbodys brands even more aggressively. Making small brands die faster than ever. GPTs and assistants also consolidate everything to be very winner takes all and most of them rely on google and reddit anyway.

Pmax is fucking savage. They put you on the sell your brand equity merry go round and spin it round and round.
 
contract said:
But you can't tell me all of these sites just lost billions in traffic and it disappeared?
Click to expand...
Yeah, we can tell you that. It's exactly what happened. As I just posted in another thread, 70% of searches are resulting in no clicks to websites not owned by Google. They're trying to train users now to adopt AI features because that's the future. And it started by decimating informational queries and flagging non-mega-brands as unrankable.

But everyone is feeling the pain even without the purposeful destruction, because AI and the gradual creep of social media and YouTube have put a major dent in search traffic in general.

Basically, the high volume publishing on informational site models isn't doing good. That ship sailed. You even see Mediavine now doing affiliate deals with other companies and mass-emailing users to sign up, etc. Everyone is hurting. That "fraction of a penny per impression" model worked great when the traffic flowed. But products and services with at least medium prices and high margins seems to be the way to squeeze any money out of SEO these days, because you have to compensate for the lack of traffic and have the margins to pay for it through the equally tough PPC world.

secretagentdad said:
Pmax is fucking savage. They put you on the sell your brand equity merry go round and spin it round and round.
Click to expand...
I'm not well-versed in PPC, but I'll encounter information regarding what Google is doing to funnel everyone into Pmax and "let us use your budget for you", and including crap phrases that will not convert to burn up your budget, making it more difficult optimize and use negative keywords, and whatever other methods.

And we saw in those court case discovery documents how they'll even swap out results or change queries on you to charge you a higher CPC, and how they're raising the bid floor to squeeze advertisers for a nickel at a time (across zillions of clicks per month, so it adds up). Some allegedly crooked shit is going on in that side of the game, just like in the SEO side.

It feels like we're in the "loot the coffers" stage of search, watching Google prepare to flee for the AI hills and leave the city burning. And the slaps on the wrist for getting caught incentivize it. "Oh no, okay, we'll pay the government $10 billion (which never makes it back to the people), because we made $20 billion doing it."
 
Something I have wondered about... if these companies are using internet content to train their models. But they remove the incentive to produce content, or it becomes mostly AI generated. What happens to the training data?

You would think Google would tune the algo to offer some incentive back to publishers so they can continue to train their models. Unless the idea of LLM training via internet content is outdated.

I have read a few things about synthetic data, where they can generate their own training data. I don't know much about it, but I imagine they are all-in on this idea.
 
chubes said:
You would think Google would tune the algo to offer some incentive back to publishers so they can continue to train their models. Unless the idea of LLM training via internet content is outdated.
Click to expand...
They don't go to publishers for training data. They use experts. I see these job ads all the time looking for experts to train AI. A publisher would just be a middle man to the expert.
 
BakerStreet said:
They don't go to publishers for training data. They use experts. I see these job ads all the time looking for experts to train AI. A publisher would just be a middle man to the expert.
Click to expand...
That's not true. They are striking literal direct deals with publishers for training data: https://www.adweek.com/media/google-publisher-deals-train-ai-openai-perplexity/

I believe the experts are for reinforcement learning stuff, not knowledge base. When i was broke i took some of those gigs.

it was all about trying to stump the model on instruction following, and other metrics, and then correct the answer and document it.

They then feed that data back in to make them more accurate and reduce hallucinations.
 
I'm just going to talk some shit. I haven't in a while. It's been an interesting 2+ years. I've watched everything change, yet nothing has changed.

In the original Traffic Leaks thread the intro said to imagine a world where there is no Google.

Ironic now isn't it. SEO has been hit hard due to A.I., ChatGPT, TikTok, and social media.

But you guys aren't seeing it from the perspective of users. People are online more now than ever. Literally every 30 seconds they jump on their phones to doomscroll. They buy stuff through social media now more than ever. They watch videos now more than ever. They play mobile games, they chat, they have discussions in comments now more than ever.

But here you guys are saying the internet is dead? No - I told you it was evolving.

Think about it from a first principles perspective. Are people on the internet? Yes. Is there money being made on the internet? Yes. That's all I need to know.

Affiliate marketing is alive on TikTok - they literally are encouraging it and random consumers are getting their affiliate money promoting mopes.

You guys are dinosaurs refusing to admit the old ways are over. JUST like the yellow page (phone books) guys did when they said no one would take the internet seriously and it's a fad. You guys are going the way of the Yellow Pages advertisers - if you don't adapt.

Now we have to adjust to the new reality of generating traffic and revenue online. And it may not be that you generate money from your own website anymore. These platforms are maturing to the point they are paying to post content. Did you imagine Twitter would be paying to you post content on there? No. But here we are now. Even Instagram, you can have subscribers that follow you and pay you $0.90 or $5.99 per month just to read and view your content.

The blogs are dead guys. You ain't getting money through long-format blogging. And realistically ain't nobody got time for all that reading.

And now with the advent of A.I. video creation you literally can take your old content ideas and turn them into video for your audience and jump on YouTube or IG for traffic.

You guys have more tools now than ever to make money and through more channels that we did 10 years ago or 15 years ago.

Google is gone. In fact I use ChatGPT more than Google and when I do Google it's for times when movies at theaters or what time a restaurant is opened.

First Principles - we all have to go back to the drawing boards like it's 1995 and we are kids trying to figure out how to make dollars on this world wide web.

As JCash prophesied: "SEO - what a fucking waste of time."
 
CCarter said:
Even Instagram, you can have subscribers that follow you and pay you $0.90 or $5.99 per month just to read and view your content.
Click to expand...
You can get paid for posting on Instagram without subscriptions too. They have a bonus program that pays per impression. Facebook has the same thing now too.
 
secretagentdad said:
Why would killing off the sources matter?
They already looted all the info.
Click to expand...
As time goes on, info may become outdated. Such as, when people die, and the AI thinks they are alive. When Trump is president, but the AI still thinks it's Joe Biden.

It is possible that the current idea of a "knowledge base" is going to be lost in time and the AIs will eventually have real-time context. But, they still need some way of knowing what has happened in the world around them.

--- And here is some creative speculation --

I picture something like giving a website an API that can communicate with the AI. Something like MCP, where the model interacts with structured data.

So your website becomes a "node" for the model to interact with, and you provide it an optimized version of this structured data to make it easy for them to understand. This would enable remote checkout via agents, account creation, whatever you want to expose.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back