by Davey Alba and Julia Love at Bloomberg
In March 2024, website owner Morgan McBride was posing for photos in her half-renovated kitchen for a Google ad celebrating the ways the search giant had helped her family’s business grow.
But by the time the ad ran about a month later, traffic from Google had fallen more than 70%, McBride said. Charleston Crafted, which features guides on do-it-yourself home improvement projects, had weathered algorithm changes and updates in the past; this time, it didn’t recover. McBride suspected people were getting more of their renovation advice from the artificial intelligence answers at the top of Google search.
The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them. That’s disrupting a delicate symbiotic relationship that’s existed for years: if businesses create good content, Google sends them traffic.
Many of the publishers said they have to either shut down or reinvent their distribution strategy, a cycle experts say could eventually degrade the quality of information Google can access for its search results — and to feed its AI answers, which have still at times contained inaccuracies that have made them a poor substitute for publishers’ content. For home-renovation questions, Google’s AI may give advice that’s unsafe or simply inaccurate, such as recommending specific products that don’t exist, McBride said.
Google denied that the rollout of AI Overviews had harmed websites’ traffic,…
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