It appears that Google has recently been having so much of an effect on the news industry that it is determining as much as who wins or fails. The search giant has such a majority stake in worldwide search traffic that it is turning into the global voice of what should or shouldn’t be when it comes to the World Wide Web.
This situation has prompted certain news sources to reduce their staff or close down sister publications and topic categories, all in an effort to mitigate the overall impact. Including some of the larger publications and studios.
It seems to go back to around the summer of last year (2023) when Google was rolling out its typical updates to its search algorithms and seems to have gotten even worse ever since. These algorithms determine what content the search engine considers to be more important, what criteria it thinks websites should adhere to or provide, and consistently adds to an endless list of other rules that can have an effect on sites listed.
This has always been the case. But over the last year, these updates seem to be having a much stronger effect, and in some cases, have completely crippled certain blogs and publications. Leading to as much as an 80-90% loss in traffic coming from the search engine. And since Google has a very large majority in global search traffic, this can end a business pretty quickly.
I have been having some really deep conversations with contacts/friends that work with competing publications/studios. Some of these are owned by massive advertising giants or investment groups and have as much traffic as we do or more. They have been sharing some of the data in regards to the internal layoffs and hardships suffered due to the last year of changes at Google.
It seems that your typical SEO and strength of content is no longer the go-to for everything. Instead, Google has polluted its algorithms with so many rules that its virtually impossible to completely understand what it wants from these sources in order to be considered a good search result. Allowing a single corporation to have a majority voice on what should or shouldn’t be, regardless of what the people want. To make things worse, it seems as though a lot of this is handled via AI which wipes content out faster than anyone can respond to or even make a guess as to why.
It’s a mess and it may only get worse before it gets better. Meanwhile, if it continues to have the effect it has, this could completely reshape parts of the news industry (it already has been). Showing favor to paid listings, pro-AI content, and other things Google finds more important than simply matching search terms to the best possible content.
Sadly, there isn’t much that can be done unless global regulators step in to figure out what on Earth is happening (assuming they ever will). As a user, your best action you can take is to simply use a different search engine. If enough people do, it might just balance the tables a bit. I know I have started to do that myself, which was hard at first, but eventually I found peace in doing so. It’s unfortunate as I have always been a pro-Google user on the internet. But no company should have so much power over the internet.
