"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."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-07/google-ai-search-shift-leaves-website-makers-feeling-betrayed?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc0NDAzMzY5NywiZXhwIjoxNzQ0NjM4NDk3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTVFVFQkpEV1gyUFMwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEQUZGOTQ2MjMzOTM0NjI5QURDODEzNDRGQ0QwODBBOSJ9.g2Pj57IAuRue1QQiAlaOTEhlYtO4CumxIwre3di6lHA&leadSource=uverify%20wall
