As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

The "killing" started way before AI summary was launched, and the killing was done by the sites themselves, by turning themselves into garbage factories churning out slop (human slop!) that nobody wants to read. Look at this graph and tell me when Google AI Summary launched: https://x.com/YujieChen/status/1932566121846354228/photo/1

While many sites did shovel slop out the door in the name of SEO, the decline in Google search traffic is happening to all sites.

It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic.

Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most obvious culprit. But regardless, the change in pattern is real and not correlated with site content quality.

I know that I've stopped using Google's search primarily because it's been intentionally[1] made a worse tool. The AI overviews sound obnoxious and I'm not surprised if they're driving more people off of the platform.

I don't know what the hell is going on over there, but the systemic issues and awful decisions I see coming out of Alphabet companies in recent years paints a picture of suicidal levels of hubris at the c-suite level. The boards need to pull their heads out of their asses, otherwise incompetence is going to sink that ship before 2040.

[1] - https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-d...

The AI overviews are not obnoxious to me. I quite like them. It is the sites that are obnoxious!