Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p><a href="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" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">bloomberg.com/news/articles/20</span><span class="invisible">25-04-07/google-ai-search-shift-leaves-website-makers-feeling-betrayed?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc0NDAzMzY5NywiZXhwIjoxNzQ0NjM4NDk3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTVFVFQkpEV1gyUFMwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEQUZGOTQ2MjMzOTM0NjI5QURDODEzNDRGQ0QwODBBOSJ9.g2Pj57IAuRue1QQiAlaOTEhlYtO4CumxIwre3di6lHA&leadSource=uverify%20wall</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GenerativeAI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Google" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Google</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AISearch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AISearch</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SearchEngines" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SearchEngines</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenWeb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OpenWeb</span></a></p>