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That's 100% correct. Since Google's "helpful content update" Webmasters get massive amounts of "Crawled, not indexed" reports for anything Google considers "mor

That's 100% correct. Since Google's "helpful content update" Webmasters get massive amounts of "Crawled, not indexed" reports for anything Google considers "more of the same" or "thin content". If you're not an authority on a subject, simply meaning: you already rank for similar content, or if you don't get links from more popular domains, your content is in the abyss. It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM", but the algorithm (or model) they use is heavily skewed towards intents (actions) and brands (because they 'trust' big names). And it's not working. A simple, short informative blog about a tool you used that could be of interest to max. 100 people on this planet is no longer getting ranked, if it gets indexed at all. Those posts tick all boxes: no incoming links, no authority, thin content. It changes somewhat between "Google Updates", but it's pretty clear that it's no longer working. Multiply the 100 people not finding that post by millions of queries and it's now a big problem for Google. My dad asked me the other day if Google got worse because smaller companies are not paying Google enough money. He didn't see any difference between ads and content, because all results are now big brands only. "Helpful content" is such a misnomer. It removes all helpful content in favour of AI overviews and only shows intent-driven, commercial content. We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.

mschuster91 2mo ago
> We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure. Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.
- spiderfarmer 2mo ago
  If ChatGPT goes bust, they'll find another ChatGPT, not another Google. I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either.
  - mschuster91 2mo ago
    > I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either. Tiktok is cheap to run. AI however, it needs absurd amounts of power, RAM and GPU compute capacity to run... and there's serious constraints everywhere.
    - spiderfarmer 2mo ago
      Why do people insist on making predictions for the future with today's numbers and constraints? Inference costs are plummeting, mostly driven by Chinese inventions.
    - alightsoul 2mo ago
      TikTok and every large social media site needs absurd amounts of AI to run the recommendation algorithm for every user, moderate content, TikTok also uses it to recommend music and their companion app, capcut, also uses it for video effects which are widely used. Bytedance, their owner, has over 10000 Nvidia GPUs for this reason.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      DeepSeek Flash.
agentcoops 2mo ago
This is fascinating. I haven't really kept up with SEO for years, but was recently helping an academic publisher setup their web presence and ran into exactly this issue: Google was/is refusing to index the actual journal articles on the new site and they were moved into this liminal "Crawled, not indexed" state before vanishing entirely. Comically, it's now easier to get your content indexed and served with a visible link by ChatGPT than it is Google...
rurp 2mo ago
I can relate to this so much. My interests tend to be pretty niche and I have little interest in most of the major online websites. The scale at which Google has hollowed out the non-corporate internet boggles the mind. The earlier web era felt like this unimaginable realm of freedom and exploration to me. I stumbled on countless novel sites that were interesting, helpful, and/or entertaining. That content has decreased by orders of magnitude since then. These days most searches return a full page of SEO slop that all summarize (badly) the same source from years before. There's usually zero new information, personal touches, or community attached.

mschuster91 2mo ago

> We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure. Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.

spiderfarmer 2mo ago
If ChatGPT goes bust, they'll find another ChatGPT, not another Google. I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either.
- mschuster91 2mo ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either. Tiktok is cheap to run. AI however, it needs absurd amounts of power, RAM and GPU compute capacity to run... and there's serious constraints everywhere.
  - spiderfarmer 2mo ago
    Why do people insist on making predictions for the future with today's numbers and constraints? Inference costs are plummeting, mostly driven by Chinese inventions.
  - alightsoul 2mo ago
    TikTok and every large social media site needs absurd amounts of AI to run the recommendation algorithm for every user, moderate content, TikTok also uses it to recommend music and their companion app, capcut, also uses it for video effects which are widely used. Bytedance, their owner, has over 10000 Nvidia GPUs for this reason.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    DeepSeek Flash.

agentcoops 2mo ago

This is fascinating. I haven't really kept up with SEO for years, but was recently helping an academic publisher setup their web presence and ran into exactly this issue: Google was/is refusing to index the actual journal articles on the new site and they were moved into this liminal "Crawled, not indexed" state before vanishing entirely. Comically, it's now easier to get your content indexed and served with a visible link by ChatGPT than it is Google...

rurp 2mo ago

I can relate to this so much. My interests tend to be pretty niche and I have little interest in most of the major online websites. The scale at which Google has hollowed out the non-corporate internet boggles the mind. The earlier web era felt like this unimaginable realm of freedom and exploration to me. I stumbled on countless novel sites that were interesting, helpful, and/or entertaining. That content has decreased by orders of magnitude since then. These days most searches return a full page of SEO slop that all summarize (badly) the same source from years before. There's usually zero new information, personal touches, or community attached.