AI, Search, and the Travel Creator

Last year, Google rolled out something called “the helpful-content update” (HCU). It felt that too many websites were over-optimized for search and not run by real people providing real answers based on firsthand experience.

Instead, there were too many SEO farms pumping out bad content for search and ad revenue. Hence, the desire to put “helpful content” (such as online forums like Reddit) at the top of the search results. After all, who better to have firsthand experience than a person posting about something on a forum? (Or so the logic went.)

If you’ve used Google since last October, you’ve likely noticed this change.

I think it sucks. I mean, I don’t care about a forum thread from 2013. I don’t want to search for answers through years of comments and replies, many of which are very out of date. I think this HCU has made Google results far, far worse. I recently tried to find a gym in Munich and rather than just list gyms in Munich, I got Reddit threads that were very outdated.

While I think Google will eventually roll back some of these changes (they tend to roll back some changes after seeing how people react) because too many users are complaining about the quality of the results. Still, I think this is the first nail in the coffin for blogs, especially single-destination websites that don’t have a “clear expert” behind them. (These blogs were among the hardest hit in the update.)

We bloggers have always lived and died by the algorithm. Whether social media or search, we are at the mercy of these companies. But these recent Google changes were some of the most extreme I’ve seen in the sixteen years I’ve been working online. Our search traffic is down 50% — and I feel like I’ve gotten off easy compared to people who have had their websites go to zero.

Many bloggers have just stopped blogging and are now looking for “real” jobs. Only a few seem to have gotten anything from the new changes, most notably Rick Steves, who, because he has a forum, has actually seen his traffic go up.

For the last couple of years, I’ve begun thinking that the Age of Blogging was nearing a close. Google has been making changes that pushes real content down in search results thanks to its ads, embedded widgets, and partnership spam at the top of the search results. People are instead moving toward social platforms to find information; for example, TikTok’s search is really good.

And, as I mentioned in another post, while AI…