Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google traffic since 2024

If you’ve visited any of these sites recently it’s obvious that part of the issue is that you’re bombarded with pops, ads everywhere, autoplaying video, etc. It’s nauseating and a horrible user experience. If all I’m looking for is straightforward content/info then I’m naturally using the most efficient way to get that content/information and visiting a website is not the most efficient way anymore

Many of today's news websites (tech or otherwise) cashed in their goodwill / reputation / page rank to sell ads.

The first shoe dropped when news websites realized they weren't generating content fast enough. Hard, in depth journalism takes time, but when people want to know something that happened _today_, they don't want to wait a week for all the facts to come out, and so the major websites started losing traffic to websites that churned out articles fast.

The additional benefit of churning out articles was that you could match against more and more long tail keywords, which lead to more traffic and more ability to sell ads. To keep up, many websites dropped quality for speed, and consumers noticed.

The second shoe then to drop was with affiliate marketing -- articles on CNET / Wirecutter etc were already ranking and rating products, so they figured "[...] why shouldn't we get a cut if someone ends up buying a product we recommend"? The challenge then became that consumers couldn't tell the difference between a product that was recommended because it was good, or because the product gave the biggest "kickback" to the website for using the affiliate link. Thus, people that gave "honest" opinions on products (e.g. people asking on Reddit, at least for a while, as the article suggests) became the new source of truth.

The result of this means that these days, if you read a lot of articles on the major tech websites, they feel more like they've been optimized for speed (e.g. churning out an article fast), SEO, and not much else. Many people have talked about how recipie websites are now short story generators more than food instructions, but it's been common for a while where I go to a tech website to read about something I specifically Googled, only for it to feel more like it was written _specifically_ to capture traffic for a keyword, rather than actually solve the issue or question I came into the website with.

The cherry on top is that AI has none of these problems (so far) -- yes, there's some movement on trying to do SEO for AI, and of course ads will eventually come to AI like it has everything else, but currently, you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it -- who wouldn't want that?

I recently replaced a power supply to upgrade a GPU. I bought the power supply on Cragslist, so it had a jumble of cables and no manual. In the past I would have read an article that I would have found on one of those sites.

This time I conversed entirely with Gemini, sending pictures of the cables and of the components and the motherboard.

I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly and sent an image of that cable to Gemini.

Gemini said "It is very important that you stop and unplug that cable immediately... Hopefully the power supply's safety precautions kicked in before any permanent damage occurred."

I know that Gemini was conversing with me using plagiarized information from all those sites. But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain by reading a bunch of articles.

I don't see a future for tech content because Gemini isn't paying the authors and they don't give me an option to direct payments to them either.

Three things are probably true:

  1. in the short term this development is great for users. LLMs trained for free on a universe of high-quality human stolen content, and returns relevant parts of it to resolve specific customer questions, without ads, an operation funded by VC.

  2. with LLMs redirecting search from knowledge producers (webpages) to knowledge aggregators (LLMs) the incentive to create knowledge is gone, and future knowledge (including that fed into LLMs) will degrade compared to a universe that kept this incentive alive

  3. AI is hardware, energy and R&D intensive and VCs will need a business model to recuperate their investments and costs, a key-player has already announced an ad model re-creating part of the issue noted previously that we temporarily resolved

How this is great in the long-run, I don't see.

AI has successfully scraped enough of their content so that they are no longer needed. Thanks for creating the content, now someone else will make money with it.

Happy to see general readership agrees with my opinion of The Verge.

Many of these websites, I only ever interacted with when doing research either on tech or tech products. I did not appreciate their surface-level reviews and explanations, so in my head I've categorized most of these websites as "noise to wade through whenever I need to look up something". I can't say I'll miss these sites. I would be googling (ddg-ing) way more still if the internet wasn't full of low-effort SEO bait articles that dominate every search result.

The results seem plausible, but it's worth noting that the source of their data (Ahrefs) is just a rough estimate. Given that every publication they examined - including several outside of the tech industry - showed declines, I'd hope they would confirm that it's not an artifact of the estimation process. Ahrefs themselves caution against using their data to make these sorts of conclusions:

>While these estimates don’t, and can’t, show you exactly how much organic traffic a website gets, they work incredibly well for comparison. For example, it’s fantastic for learning if your competitors’ websites get more or less organic search traffic than your own.

(https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-...)

Since the internet is ad-driven, what happens when these sites can no longer afford to stay in business because AI is siphoning off their traffic? What does AI do when the content it relies on stops coming?

It doesn't help that tech publications and gaming websites keep getting bought out by crypto and gambling companies.

https://aftermath.site/gameshub-clickout-media-seo-gambling-...

> NerdWallet is publicly traded (NRDS) and its business depends on converting search visitors into financial product referrals. It went from 25M monthly organic visits to 6.8M, a 73% decline.

The above refers to the time until Jan 2026. Here are its financials:

  Year   Total Revenue   Operating Expenses   Net Income
  2025   $836.6          ~$708.0              $48.7
  2024   $687.6          $614.7               $30.4
  2023   $599.4          $541.8               ($11.8)
  2022   $538.9          $518.1               ($10.2)
  2021   $379.6          $390.1               ($42.5)

It doesn't look like the lower traffic, if true, has hit the bottom line yet.

Yes a lot of these publications produce low quality content. But some of it can be quite useful. If they disappear who is going to document at a consumer level the latest hardware doodad or whatnot? Manufacturers are going to have to invest in online resources that the AI bots can scrape. Perhaps good documentation will become a driver of profit.

So, soon the sources will be out of business and the LLMs will have no information to look up.

I guess the future model is, LLMs pay for raw data and news to ingest and use on demand, and ignore the "free" internet. That seems like a good landing point, where quality info is rewarded and cheap spin is not. Of course cheap spin will continue to be produced, but hopefully won't be baked into the system.

I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line.

Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.

What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?

That animated graph at the top is awful; does not render well on macOS Safari.

That being said, I am morbidly curious about traffic from RSS subscribers: has that gone up, gone down, or remained roughly the same in the same time period?

I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.

Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop everywhere?

Oh no, did the tracking cookies, ads, seo spam and affiliate articles have a negative effect?

Who knew!

Quality content stopped being profitable well before ChatGPT. Quantity beat quality as a content strategy flooding the search page with high-level obvious “how-tos” and “best vacuum cleaner” slop. This destroyed the consumer search experience. Current models have plenty of rich historical data and are good at synthesizing quality responses with the right queries. Now the risk is that AI will be starved of recent quality information to pull from. Hopefully the pendulum swings back around to make quality information profitable again…

I barely visit here anymore.

Tech publications get bent already because their core demographic is people who think ad-blocking is the savior of the internet. Nobody is paying for their content already.

I think this is a good thing, and a natural evolution of the tech.

The LLMs will aggregate knowledge until that knowledge becomes useless to us. Then the LLMs will become near to useless for us because they lack that new info. Then the traffic generally on the internet will wane and this multi-decade distraction will pass into history to be replace and/or augmented to create something new that serves our purposes at that time.

The need for communication doesn't go away. The need for this particular iteration of networked telecommunications + dark-pattern-laden social media doesn't even exist in the first place, except to the social network owners. It too shall pass.

What happens when the source data is killed off, these sites fold. Then where will Google AI summaries get info?

Potentially hot take.

I would guess some people will say traffic is down because people are using LLMs to get news and are not reading news sites anymore.

My hypothesis is that all these tech sites are writing about are LLMs. People are sick and tired of reading about that, so they are not going to those sites anymore.

It's not entirely the bad UX/ad-riddled layouts, it's the content. Other than Verge and Wired maybe, all of the listed publications are mostly putting out late, regurgitated stories. They're not on the ball, and so have dropped it. We're more likely to get a breaking tech story out of CNBC, Reuters or NYT and go from there. And that's not even getting into Verge and Wired's paywalls or syndication over to outrage-farm 404 media in the case of the latter. And where's Ars in all this? (which suffers from some of the same problems/quality/timing)

Good, now do Forbes.com

That parasite of a site still seems to rank high for many search queries, even tho their user experience is horrible (and their content too)

the only one that's a loss is How To Geek, which had some genuinely useful info

the rest are ad scams

honestly: good. all of them jumped up their own asses for the sake of SEO and minimum required regulation compliance, which stopped me from even going to the ones that aren't low-quality, content mills, which many of them are.

cut the cookies and tracking, so you don't have to have a ridiculous compliance banner. cut the paywall that tells me what you had to say wasn't important enough for public consumption. cut the full screen ad breaks and page takeover nonsense.

these outlets have had years (decades?) to figure out how to monetize content that didn't drive users away. they have failed over and over and over again, so why should I care that they are failing now? if it wasn't AI, it would be something else that came for them. if you rely on the captiveness of your audience, rather than the quality of your product, I'm always happy to see you destroyed. whatever comes next will be different, at the very least. and I'm an optimist - I'll always hope that it's a better way. if it's not, let that shit die, too.

regardless, I have every faith that the good will that buoyed these sites in their respective heydays will continue on to provide some other resources for the same kind of media.

now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats

Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.

I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.

Tech publications get bent already because their core demographic is people who think ad-blocking is the savior of the internet. Nobody is paying for their content already.

now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats

Many of today's news websites (tech or otherwise) cashed in their goodwill / reputation / page rank to sell ads.

> you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it

I thought we wanted the truth.

This time I conversed entirely with Gemini, sending pictures of the cables and of the components and the motherboard.

I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly and sent an image of that cable to Gemini.

Gemini said "It is very important that you stop and unplug that cable immediately... Hopefully the power supply's safety precautions kicked in before any permanent damage occurred."

I don't see a future for tech content because Gemini isn't paying the authors and they don't give me an option to direct payments to them either.

It's crazy to me that you'd trust the output of an LLM for that. It's something where if you do it wrong it could cause major damage, and LLMs are literally famous for creating plausbile-sounding but wrong output.

If you wanted to use an LLM to identify it, sure, you can validate that, and then find the manufacturer instructions and use those. Just following what it says about the cables without any validation it's correct is just wild to me. These are products with instruction manuals made for them specifically designed for this.

If the hardware changes significantly and those sites don't exist in the future wouldn't that mean gemeni would degrade in quality because it has nothing to pull from?

Same experience here: someone at our company had a bricked Macbook Pro. It was previously MDM-managed with JamF, and it wouldn't boot up. Asked ChatGPT to give me steps to fix it.

The first set of steps didn't work, so we iteratively sent pictures of the screen until the steps eventually did work and the issue was fixed.

This saved us from having to call Apple support.

There is no modular PSU cable standard. Mixing cables between PSUs can destroy your hardware. Even among the same brand there is no standard.

> But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain

For some definitions of "better", that is. :(

I have never seen a review site or tech blog go into detail about how to wire a specific power supply to a specific motherboard. I would also never go to such a site to get information I can easily get from the manufacturer through a handbook but I would also never ask a chatbot. Really odd use case tbh.

I see a future just like the seo issue of today, where the well is poisoned and llm information is garbage.

AI has successfully scraped enough of their content so that they are no longer needed. Thanks for creating the content, now someone else will make money with it.

Franky, good riddance. The websites that had SEO optimized their way to the top of Google's search results for queries like "how to change DNS settings", "best free VPN", or "best wireless earbuds under $300" were generally terrible, and I can't say I'm sad that that creating that kind of "content" is no longer economically viable.

There were large categories of information had become extremely difficult to search for thanks to SEO optimized content farms like these. People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this. To me, LLMs feel like a return to the golden age of AltaVista and Google, where the Internet was a place you could reliably find the information you were looking for.

good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about new hardware is "I don't know"

I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line.

Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.

What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?

Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.

You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.

> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.

This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal.

The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.

Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.

wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?

Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop everywhere?

Bots creating content, bots clicking on content, bots reading that content, and bots creating more content from it. It'll be like a capitalist cousin to Newspeak[1]; instead of a top-down enforcement of the language it will evolve by popular demand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

Same experience here: someone at our company had a bricked Macbook Pro. It was previously MDM-managed with JamF, and it wouldn't boot up. Asked ChatGPT to give me steps to fix it.

The first set of steps didn't work, so we iteratively sent pictures of the screen until the steps eventually did work and the issue was fixed.

This saved us from having to call Apple support.

> But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain

For some definitions of "better", that is. :(

There is no modular PSU cable standard. Mixing cables between PSUs can destroy your hardware. Even among the same brand there is no standard.

I see a future just like the seo issue of today, where the well is poisoned and llm information is garbage.

You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.

> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.

This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal.

Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.

wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

regardless, I have every faith that the good will that buoyed these sites in their respective heydays will continue on to provide some other resources for the same kind of media.

What would be your suggestion for monetization without ads or subscription? Or are you thinking some type of privacy-respecting ad system? Because those have definitely been tried.

Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.

You can shape the AI responses for some niche topics relatively easily even on accident. I recently saw 2 people arguing on a forum on a very niche industry topic and one of them started to use Gemini as a source to argue and Gemini was already referencing their thread as a source. I'm imagining people could start doing that on purpose with their own astroturfed blogs and public social media accounts.

> you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it

I thought we wanted the truth.

Some of us do but many people do not. Source: Married for 22 years.

If the hardware changes significantly and those sites don't exist in the future wouldn't that mean gemeni would degrade in quality because it has nothing to pull from?

Right, that success story is only because there was "organic" (for lack of a better term) information from an original source. What happens when all information is nth generation AI feedback with all links to the original source lost?

Edit: A question from AI/LLM ignorance- Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs? I can imagine a quarantined database used for specific applications that remains curated, but this seems impossible on the open internet.

We've all tried to ask the LLM about something outside of its training data by now.

In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.

This then becomes the hardware manufacturers problem. If their new hardware fails for to many users it will no longer be purchased. If they externalize their problem solving like so many companies, they won't be able to gain market share.

This creates financial incentives to pay companies running the new version of search. Your thinking of this as a problem for these companies, when in reality it is a financial incentive.

Yea so I’ve had an issue getting video output after boot on a new AMD R9700 Pro. None of the, albeit free, models from OpenAI/Google/Anthropic have really been helpful. I found the pro drivers myself. They never mentioned them.

Thats not to say AI is bad. It’s great in many cases. More that I’m worried about what happens when the repositories of new knowledge get hollowed out.

Also my favorite response was this gem from Sonnet:

> TL;DR: Move your monitor cable from the motherboard to the graphics card.

Presumably companies will still provide manuals.

> Really odd use case tbh.

For 99.99999% of people out there, LLMs are the new search. You can gnash teeth and yell and sob, but it is how things are.

You'll just see it within AI responses instead.

Yeah, that's only going to last until the first bad actor.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

> People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this.

And now we can enjoy Marxist advertising ("posts") within our discussions on how to replace a TPMS sensor.

Some of us do but many people do not. Source: Married for 22 years.

Thats not to say AI is bad. It’s great in many cases. More that I’m worried about what happens when the repositories of new knowledge get hollowed out.

Also my favorite response was this gem from Sonnet:

> TL;DR: Move your monitor cable from the motherboard to the graphics card.

This creates financial incentives to pay companies running the new version of search. Your thinking of this as a problem for these companies, when in reality it is a financial incentive.

> Really odd use case tbh.

For 99.99999% of people out there, LLMs are the new search. You can gnash teeth and yell and sob, but it is how things are.

good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about new hardware is "I don't know"

But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?

What would be your suggestion for monetization without ads or subscription? Or are you thinking some type of privacy-respecting ad system? Because those have definitely been tried.

Subscription used to work. They can work again, even better than before now that we have the facility for micro-transactions. A micro-transactional framework would have the added benefit of making it expensive for scrapers to steal content.

This is hard for me, an "information wants to be free" kinda guy, to espouse. But there are softer ways to do it, such as how The Guardian does it, or how public media does it.

I'm not suggesting monetization without ads or subscriptions. I'm suggesting monetization without obnoxious bullshit like full page, scroll arresting ads, or news content locked behind a paywall, rather than editorial content locked behind a paywall.

If I go to your website where you purport to cover the news of the tech industry, it is always in your best interest to actually give me that news. I'd prefer it if they gave a dry, sometimes even bullet-pointed list of bare news facts. What they know, how they know it, and the basic ways it affects the site's topic/hobby, as soon as they possibly know it. From there, link to your subscription content that goes into detail about the news and provides attractive insight or framing or whatever, along with reasoned updates when the news stops breaking and we have some better or more reliable information. People who just want the news can hit the site, light up the in-page and side gutter banner ads, and then bounce. People curious for more or appreciative of the talent can subscribe and get more, and more informed, detail.

Basically, just the same old suggestions for any enterprise: figure out what people, right now, today, want; stop relying on what worked in the past or what is most convenient for your team. Break it down in to how people actually function, and then place monetization where you would purchase, for a price that you would purchase for. I'll always be able to find the news without you, so you don't have any leverage to hold it hostage. Use it as a lead for your content, which can be the kind of reporting (different than news in subtle but meaningful ways) that people will be happy to pay for.

We've all tried to ask the LLM about something outside of its training data by now.

In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.

That's definitely been my experience. I work with a lot of weird code bases that have never been public facing and AI has horrible responses for that stuff.

As soon as I tried to make a todomvc it started working great but I wonder how much value that really brings to the table.

It's great for me though. I can finally make a todomvc tailored to my specific needs.

Once or twice, for me it's deflected rather than answer at all.

On the other hand, they've also surfaced information (later independently confirmed by myself) that I had not been able to find for years. I don't know what to make of it.

> Can the source database for an LLM be one-way, in that it does not contain output from itself, or other LLMs?

I think, for public internet data, we can only be reasonably confident for information before the big release of ChatGPT.

That's exactly why text written before the first LLMs has a premium on it these days. So no, all major models suffer from slop in their training data.

Presumably companies will still provide manuals.

It'll be a single sheet of paper with a QR code that redirects to a canned prompt hosted at whichever LLM server paid the most to the manufacturer for their content.

If that was adequate then wouldn't there not be supplementary material?

Results vary of course. I have some very wonderful synthesizer manuals.

Yeah, that's only going to last until the first bad actor.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

It seems very easy to manipulate.

Noticed the other day it now heavily cites and sources my one of my blog post to support the claim that yes, AI makes you boring if you google "Does AI make you boring?"

If you search "Does AI make you interesting?", it drums up other sources to support that contradictory claim as well.

You'll just see it within AI responses instead.

Certainly so.

But we aren't there quite yet; that's tomorrow's problem. And I still have things that I need to do today.

> People switching to Reddit for discovery because of this search index pollution was a direct response to this.

And now we can enjoy Marxist advertising ("posts") within our discussions on how to replace a TPMS sensor.

> And now we can enjoy Marxist advertising ("posts") within our discussions on how to replace a TPMS sensor.

Reddit is Marxist? Hilarious.

I can't believe real people believe shit like this. Truly, the state of education is dire.

Marx and Engles must be rolling in their graves as a beacon of capitalistic tech is called "Marixst". What a silly world we live in.