Google Zero is slightly misunderstood. The problem is not that Google is nefarious in no longer sending traffic to your website. (They probably don’t care very much one way or the other.) The real problem is you’ve depended on Google for your business. You’ve been obsessed with SEO and search ads for years, all built around a single search company.
As traffic from Google drops off, some things will be worse for a little while, but the open web isn’t going anywhere. Over time, we’re going to be better off with new competition in search. Google’s dominance in search has also created an imbalance in AI training and robots.txt, essentially handing Google permission to do whatever they want with data, while Cloudflare and others restrict access from new crawlers. No one can afford to cut off Google’s crawler.
I’m loving Kagi. Am I searching the web less often because of AI? Sure. But web search is still useful and always will be.
I remember when AltaVista came out and blew away other search engines because it was so fast. Then Google obsoleted everything else because its results were so relevant. Now ChatGPT is even more disruptive because it works so differently, rarely needing to send traffic to websites at all.
I’m sorry if your recipe website littered with ads and filler content about the history of the avocado is no longer monetizing as well as it used to. That may sound a little harsh, and I don’t mean to completely dismiss the real frustrations that some website authors are feeling, but the truth is the web was already broken in some places, fueled by greed and the ad companies' surveillance machine.
The web is changing again, and we need to change with it. Not just to preserve the status quo, but to look for opportunities to make things better than they were before.
This is a great time to build a relationship with readers. Start a blog, start a newsletter, start linking to your posts on social media or wherever makes sense. Forget about Google. Put good content out on the web and the right people will eventually find it.
