Mastodawn

Google Search referrals to the web have plummeted, AI links are 'less than 1%' of traffic

Google Search referrals to the web have plummeted, AI links are 'less than 1%' of traffic - Lemmy NZ

>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.

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pyramid20 1d ago

I thought this was wild, that no way it could have dropped THAT much: hell, I still search for things and didn’t rely on LLMs.

Then I remembered I switched my default engines to Duck Duck Go, and Startpage,

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calcopiritus 1d ago

A LOT of people out there just read whatever tho google AI tells them on their search. They’ve been trained that the answer is always the 1st non-ad link on Google. And now the thing at the top of a Google search is their LLM answer.

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lightnsfw 1d ago

That’s horrifying. That thing is wrong waaaaaaasy to often to trust it. Like, easily more than half the time and that’s me googling shit I’m not even that knowledgeable about.

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FinishingDutch

Searched for ‘is Death Stranding 2 on Geforce Now’ (streaming games service).

Answer it gave ie ‘yes, absolutely’. With a link.

The link? An Nvidia post about GPU drivers that had been updated to work with the game since it just launched on PC. Basically, because there was SOME mention of the game on the Nvidia site, it just went ‘yep’ without actually understanding the question.

Basically, if I’d bought the game based on that answer, I wouldn’t be able to play it…