Data gathered by Chartbeat and shared by Axios reveals that, over the past year, Google Search traffic to publishers across the broader web have fallen drastically, and proportionally more so for smaller websites. Referral traffic from Google apparently fell by 60% for “small publishers,” while “medium publishers” (those with between 10,000-100,000 daily pageviews) saw a drop of 47%. “Large publishers,” meanwhile, saw a 22% drop. That last category would be any site getting over 100,000 daily pageviews.
It’s not just Google Search either. While Search traffic dropped by 34%, traffic from Google Discover has also fallen by 15% over the past year, the report found.
It’s AI overviews which result in almost no clicks and people using LLMs like ChatGPT.
Former SEO here. I know so many people that now just ask ChatGPT things as their search engine. Many SEOs are now trying to SEO LLMs.
I have a silly theory that some of the obvious misinformation online is designed to pollute LLMs, so that when someone asks “Who is responsible for ___” or “Did ___ do this crime?” or “who won the ___ war?” the answer will be conveniently incorrect / sanitized.
Is this happening?
Oh, I’m sure people are trying to poison them models. Many still crawl and scrape websites and people do put in their own prompts to mess with them.