9 ms·

Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google traffic since 2024

229 points by Growtika 7mo ago

StLCylone 7mo ago
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.
- spudlyo 7mo ago
  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.
  - m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
    You'll just see it within AI responses instead.
    - ssl-3 7mo ago
      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.
    - terminalshort 7mo ago
      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.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7mo ago
    Yeah, that's only going to last until the first bad actor. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt-and-googles-ai-and-it-only-took-20-minutes https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
    - marginalia_nu 7mo ago
      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.
  - paulnpace 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - esseph 7mo ago
      > 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.
    - Henchman21 7mo ago
      Please, for the class, stand up in front and define "Marxism" for us.
  - tempodox 7mo ago
    Except when they just hallucinate an answer that is plainly wrong.
  - rurp 7mo ago
    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.
- seydor 7mo ago
  good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about new hardware is "I don't know"
  - antisthenes 7mo ago
    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*
- hackeraccount 7mo ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
- mjr00 7mo ago
  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.
- SirMaster 7mo ago
  But where will the AI get new information when the websites stop publishing new info?
Eddy_Viscosity2 7mo ago
Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop everywhere?
- troyvit 7mo ago
  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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Kirtirajsinh 7mo ago
now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats
xrd 7mo ago
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.
- PacificSpecific 7mo ago
  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?
  - andy81 7mo ago
    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.
    - PacificSpecific 7mo ago
      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.
      - ctoth 7mo ago
WarmWash 7mo ago
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.
zvqcMMV6Zcr 7mo ago
I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.
righthand 7mo ago
Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.
- sct202 7mo ago
  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.
  - GJim 7mo ago
    > 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.
    - righthand 7mo ago
      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.
TonyStr 7mo ago
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.
dujuku 7mo ago
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…
g8oz 7mo ago
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.
- dktoao 7mo ago
  Can't wait for SEO ..ahem.. AI optimized docs for everything... :/
marginalia_nu 7mo ago
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?
- pixl97 7mo ago
  Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.
- coldpie 7mo ago
  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.
  - marginalia_nu 7mo ago
    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?
    - jeffbee 7mo ago
      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.
    - renegat0x0 7mo ago
      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.
eggbrain 7mo ago
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?
- flakeoil 7mo ago
  > you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it I thought we wanted the truth.
  - Trav5 7mo ago
catapart 7mo ago
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.
- 1shooner 7mo ago
  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.
  - troyvit 7mo ago
    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.
    - catapart 7mo ago
      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.
newzino 7mo ago
[flagged]
fnord77 7mo ago
the only one that's a loss is How To Geek, which had some genuinely useful info the rest are ad scams
Aboutplants 7mo ago
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
- camillomiller 7mo ago
  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.
- wildrhythms 7mo ago
  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.
  - ronsor 7mo ago
    But I love internet chum! Don't forget "new law thing"; that's an important category.
    - wlesieutre 7mo ago
      If you live in California, insurance companies don't want you to know this
    - sudoshred 7mo ago
      "internet chum" is a good one, it echoes "slop bowl".
      - dredmorbius 7mo ago
Anonyneko 7mo ago
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-ai/ https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...
stego-tech 7mo ago
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?
NoLinkToMe 7mo ago
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 How this is great in the long-run, I don't see.
- tempodox 7mo ago
  Classic tragedy of the commons, this time with major impact on everyone everywhere.
- rurp 7mo ago
  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.
FrustratedMonky 7mo ago
What happens when the source data is killed off, these sites fold. Then where will Google AI summaries get info?
Henchman21 7mo ago
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.
AznHisoka 7mo ago
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)
moi2388 7mo ago
Oh no, did the tracking cookies, ads, seo spam and affiliate articles have a negative effect? Who knew!
ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
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)
djoldman 7mo ago
> 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) It doesn't look like the lower traffic, if true, has hit the bottom line yet.
- hydroflame7 7mo ago
  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.
fishcrackers 7mo ago
[dead]
Apreche 7mo ago
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.
daxfohl 7mo ago
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.
- daxfohl 7mo ago
  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.
  - ArcHound 7mo ago
    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.
ilovechaz 7mo ago
I barely visit here anymore.
nerevarthelame 7mo ago
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-traffic-in-ahrefs-and-how-do-we-calculate-it https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-...)
- nprateem 7mo ago
  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.
  - onetokeoverthe 7mo ago
    [dead]
gortok 7mo ago
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?
- carefulfungi 7mo ago
  The AI companies will be charging you a $20 monthly subscription fee. And showing you ads. It's going to be great.
modeless 7mo ago
Happy to see general readership agrees with my opinion of The Verge.
Tanjreeve 7mo ago
Ads and brainless corporate propaganda and culture wars will do that.
ngriffiths 7mo ago
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?
jtrn 7mo ago
The low ratio of quality original reporting vs political and opinion pieces made stop reading the verge.
gherkinnn 7mo ago
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.
AngryData 7mo ago
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.
geldedus 7mo ago
Google is rapidly becoming irrelevant/insignificant with each day
hbogert 7mo ago
The push from google feeds to go to these sites is absurd. The quality is garbage, they're probably using LLMs heavily themselves.

229 points by Growtika 7mo ago

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.

spudlyo 7mo ago
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.
- m4tthumphrey 7mo ago
  You'll just see it within AI responses instead.
  - ssl-3 7mo ago
    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.
  - terminalshort 7mo ago
    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.
- SketchySeaBeast 7mo ago
  Yeah, that's only going to last until the first bad actor. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt-and-googles-ai-and-it-only-took-20-minutes https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
  - marginalia_nu 7mo ago
    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.
- paulnpace 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - esseph 7mo ago
    > 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.
  - Henchman21 7mo ago
    Please, for the class, stand up in front and define "Marxism" for us.
- tempodox 7mo ago
  Except when they just hallucinate an answer that is plainly wrong.
- rurp 7mo ago
  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.
seydor 7mo ago
good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about new hardware is "I don't know"
- antisthenes 7mo ago
  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*
hackeraccount 7mo ago
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
mjr00 7mo ago
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.
SirMaster 7mo ago
But where will the AI get new information when the websites stop publishing new info?

Eddy_Viscosity2 7mo ago

Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop everywhere?

troyvit 7mo ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

Kirtirajsinh 7mo ago

now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats

xrd 7mo ago

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.

PacificSpecific 7mo ago
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?
- andy81 7mo ago
  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.
  - PacificSpecific 7mo ago
    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.
    - ctoth 7mo ago

WarmWash 7mo ago

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.

zvqcMMV6Zcr 7mo ago

I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.

righthand 7mo ago

Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.

sct202 7mo ago
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.
- GJim 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - righthand 7mo ago
    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.

TonyStr 7mo ago

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.

dujuku 7mo ago

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…

g8oz 7mo ago

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.

dktoao 7mo ago
Can't wait for SEO ..ahem.. AI optimized docs for everything... :/

marginalia_nu 7mo ago

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?

pixl97 7mo ago
Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.
coldpie 7mo ago
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.
- marginalia_nu 7mo ago
  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?
  - jeffbee 7mo ago
    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.
  - renegat0x0 7mo ago
    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.

eggbrain 7mo ago

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?

flakeoil 7mo ago
> you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it I thought we wanted the truth.
- Trav5 7mo ago

catapart 7mo ago

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.

1shooner 7mo ago
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.
- troyvit 7mo ago
  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.
  - catapart 7mo ago
    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.

newzino 7mo ago

[flagged]

fnord77 7mo ago

the only one that's a loss is How To Geek, which had some genuinely useful info the rest are ad scams

Aboutplants 7mo ago

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

camillomiller 7mo ago
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.
wildrhythms 7mo ago
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.
- ronsor 7mo ago
  But I love internet chum! Don't forget "new law thing"; that's an important category.
  - wlesieutre 7mo ago
    If you live in California, insurance companies don't want you to know this
  - sudoshred 7mo ago
    "internet chum" is a good one, it echoes "slop bowl".
    - dredmorbius 7mo ago

Anonyneko 7mo ago

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-ai/ https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...

stego-tech 7mo ago

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?

NoLinkToMe 7mo ago

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 How this is great in the long-run, I don't see.

tempodox 7mo ago
Classic tragedy of the commons, this time with major impact on everyone everywhere.
rurp 7mo ago
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.

FrustratedMonky 7mo ago

What happens when the source data is killed off, these sites fold. Then where will Google AI summaries get info?

Henchman21 7mo ago

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.

AznHisoka 7mo ago

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)

moi2388 7mo ago

Oh no, did the tracking cookies, ads, seo spam and affiliate articles have a negative effect? Who knew!

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago

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)

djoldman 7mo ago

> 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) It doesn't look like the lower traffic, if true, has hit the bottom line yet.

hydroflame7 7mo ago
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.

fishcrackers 7mo ago

[dead]

Apreche 7mo ago

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.

daxfohl 7mo ago

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.

daxfohl 7mo ago
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.
- ArcHound 7mo ago
  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.

ilovechaz 7mo ago

I barely visit here anymore.

nerevarthelame 7mo ago

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-traffic-in-ahrefs-and-how-do-we-calculate-it https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-...)

nprateem 7mo ago
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.
- onetokeoverthe 7mo ago
  [dead]

gortok 7mo ago

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?

carefulfungi 7mo ago
The AI companies will be charging you a $20 monthly subscription fee. And showing you ads. It's going to be great.

modeless 7mo ago

Happy to see general readership agrees with my opinion of The Verge.

Tanjreeve 7mo ago

Ads and brainless corporate propaganda and culture wars will do that.

ngriffiths 7mo ago

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?

jtrn 7mo ago

The low ratio of quality original reporting vs political and opinion pieces made stop reading the verge.

gherkinnn 7mo ago

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.

AngryData 7mo ago

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.

geldedus 7mo ago

Google is rapidly becoming irrelevant/insignificant with each day

hbogert 7mo ago

The push from google feeds to go to these sites is absurd. The quality is garbage, they're probably using LLMs heavily themselves.