[HN Gopher] Most-read tech publications have lost over half thei...
___________________________________________________________________
Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google
traffic since 2024
Author : Growtika
Score : 201 points
Date : 2026-03-03 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (growtika.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (growtika.com)
| StLCylone wrote:
| 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.
| spudlyo wrote:
| 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.
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| You'll just see it within AI responses instead.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.
| terminalshort wrote:
| I find that the AI surfaces things from actual manuals and
| data that were once easy to find in Google search before
| SEO ruined it.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yeah, that's only going to last until the first bad actor.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-
| chatgpt...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| tempodox wrote:
| Except when they just hallucinate an answer that is plainly
| wrong.
| rurp wrote:
| What do you think is going to happen to LLM content after it
| has replaced the rest of the internet? It sure as hell isn't
| going to stay relatively unbiased and ad-free. The
| degradation of Google Search is probably an optimistic
| comparison.
| seydor wrote:
| good luck in 4 years when the only answer they can give about
| new hardware is "I don't know"
| antisthenes wrote:
| No worries. We're on track to make consumer hardware
| unaffordable for the average user in 4 years anyway.
|
| You'll rent it and use whatever is available for the low low
| price of $79.99/mo*
| hackeraccount wrote:
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
| mjr00 wrote:
| Yet these sites now use AI to generate more "content" (slop)
| than ever, leveraging their high Google rankings and SEO to
| lure people in. The people who haven't switched to an LLM for
| search, anyway.
|
| Truly an ouroboros of garbage.
| SirMaster wrote:
| But where will the AI get new information when the websites
| stop publishing new info?
| Kirtirajsinh wrote:
| now your blog has a good backlink as well. congrats
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Will this result in loss of revenue, then layoffs, then less
| content, leading to a death spiral. Is the future just AI slop
| everywhere?
| troyvit wrote:
| 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
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
| PacificSpecific wrote:
| 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?
| andy81 wrote:
| 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.
| PacificSpecific wrote:
| 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.
| ctoth wrote:
| I'm not sure what sorts of weird codebases you're working
| with but I recently saw Claude programming well on a
| _Lambda MOO_ -- weirder than that?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| > In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that
| sounds the most plausible.
|
| Not if you use web search or deep report, you should not
| use LLMs as knowledge bases, they are language models -
| they learn language not information, and are just models
| not replicas of the training set.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| 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.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| 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.
| bigthymer wrote:
| > 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.
| nsvd2 wrote:
| Yes, people have likened pre-LLM Internet content to low-
| background steel.
|
| If in the hypothetical future the continual learning
| problem gets solved, the AI could just learn from the real
| world instead of publications and retain that data.
| nprateem wrote:
| One reason why Google made that algorithm to watermark AI
| output
| esperent wrote:
| Presumably companies will still provide manuals.
| PacificSpecific wrote:
| If that was adequate then wouldn't there not be
| supplementary material?
|
| Results vary of course. I have some very wonderful
| synthesizer manuals.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| 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.
| elictronic wrote:
| 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.
| roxolotl wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| > because it has nothing to pull from?
|
| Chat rooms produce trillions of tokens per day now,
| interactive tokens, where AI can poke and prod at us, and
| have its ideas tested in the real world (by us).
| righthand wrote:
| I see a future just like the seo issue of today, where the well
| is poisoned and llm information is garbage.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| 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.
| esseph wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| There is no modular PSU cable standard. Mixing cables between
| PSUs can destroy your hardware. Even among the same brand there
| is no standard.
| beej71 wrote:
| > 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. :(
| cj wrote:
| 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.
| Latty wrote:
| 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.
| ashleyn wrote:
| I'd probably view LLM advice like the blind spot indicator on
| my car. Trust when it's lit. Don't trust when it's not lit.
| visarga wrote:
| > 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,
|
| With critical tasks you need to cross reference multiple AI,
| start by running 4 deep reports, on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini
| and Perplexity, then put all of them into a comparative -
| critical analysis round. This reduces variance, the models
| are different, and using different search tools, you can even
| send them in different directions, one searches blogs, one
| reddit, etc.
| Latty wrote:
| Or you can ask for a link to the manual. I genuinely can't
| tell if your post is real advice or sarcasm intended to
| highlight the insanity of trying to fit square pegs in
| round holes of using LLMs for everything.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| That's more than a little concerning you would put full faith
| in AI to connect expensive hardware without verifying.
|
| I'd at least ask for a citation to the product manual (even
| though half the time it cites another fucking AI generated site
| instead)
| dehrmann wrote:
| > I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly
|
| I'm surprised this was a problem. Back in the day, there were
| things like making sure your two very similar AT power
| connectors had the black wires next to each other, not forcing
| in a molex connector upside down, or the same for ribbon
| cables. These days? The connectors are standardized and keyed,
| as long as your modular PSU vendor didn't get lazy on their
| keying.
| vel0city wrote:
| FWIW, things are standardized and keyed on the ATX board side
| of things. They aren't standardized on the power supply side
| of a modular power supply. Unless you've absolutely confirmed
| pinouts, never swap cables between modular power supplies.
| Fitment doesn't imply its actually going to put the right
| voltage on the right pins. Even within the same manufacturer
| pinouts have sometimes been different between models!
| delecti wrote:
| Also, some non-standard hardware _looks_ very standard. (At
| least some) Dell motherboard /PSU connectors infamously are
| physically compatible (the plug fits the socket) with the
| ATX standard, but the wiring is sufficiently different that
| it can damage or be damaged by other hardware.
| WarmWash wrote:
| 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.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| I could not care less about ZDNet. It already got reduced to spam
| blog that focuses only on selling affiliate link products.
| righthand wrote:
| Now why would anyone publish for free? Publish or die is dead.
| sct202 wrote:
| 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.
| GJim wrote:
| > one of them started to use Gemini as a source
|
| We need a variant of Godwins law to reflect (and prevent) the
| use of AI being used in internet squabbles.
| righthand wrote:
| Cut communication and notify them you dont like speaking
| with their llm and expected the conversation to be between
| the two people. Discount their credibility.
| TonyStr wrote:
| 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.
| dujuku wrote:
| 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...
| g8oz wrote:
| 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.
| dktoao wrote:
| Can't wait for SEO ..ahem.. _AI_ optimized docs for
| everything... : /
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.
| coldpie wrote:
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Gemini already drives some really valuable ads. It has, in
| effect, solved the "best pants" problem. It will use
| personalized chat to give you attributable shopping links
| for pants. And they don't have to share that revenue with
| some SEOmaxxing pants blogger.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| OpenAI was already found to be integrating ads into API. It
| is only a matter of time. Enshitiffication is inevitable.
|
| Google participates in AI bubble. When it pops, they will
| aggressively seek monetization. Be ready to see chatbot
| output to be populated with popups, video ads, popups, and
| stuff.
| glenstein wrote:
| Nearly 60% of traffic is gone from the tech publications,
| not gone from Google.
| surajrmal wrote:
| You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports.
| Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| > 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.
| eggbrain wrote:
| 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?
| flakeoil wrote:
| > you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly
| how you'd like to hear it
|
| I thought we wanted the truth.
| Trav5 wrote:
| Some of us do but many people do not. Source: Married for 22
| years.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Stated and revealed preferences
| pousada wrote:
| You can't handle the truth
| doug_durham wrote:
| Why do you think that they are pushing so many ads? It is
| because they have too much money? Most sites are struggling to
| pay the few employees they have. Fewer ads aren't going to lead
| to better reporting. Would you be willing to pay a subscription
| to the website? Probably not.
| catapart wrote:
| 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.
| 1shooner wrote:
| 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.
| troyvit wrote:
| 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.
| catapart wrote:
| Yeah, I think there's a lot of juice left in the "newstand"
| model. We just have to figure out how to translate the
| efficiency of "drop in quarter, get news" with digital
| currency and content. Like you said: a micro-transactional
| framework. That would be a hell of a thing to get started,
| but if you could my money's on it working like a charm.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| This reminds me that The Onion is still doing print
| subscriptions, and they might be better value than most of
| real newspapers...
| catapart wrote:
| 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.
| fnord77 wrote:
| the only one that's a loss is How To Geek, which had some
| genuinely useful info
|
| the rest are ad scams
| Aboutplants wrote:
| 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
| camillomiller wrote:
| So, Google promotes the enshittification you decry by
| monopolizing the way you make money on the internet. Then also
| Google cripples everyone's ad-dependent business by sucking out
| the info these websites provide and have paid people to
| research and publish. Nonetheless, Google good, websites bad.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| These news sites run ads that are borderline gore, disturbing
| images promoting snake oil weight loss or skin care treatments,
| and wonder why nobody wants to click into their site.
| ronsor wrote:
| But I love internet chum! Don't forget "new law thing";
| that's an important category.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| If you live in California, insurance companies don't want
| you to know this
| sudoshred wrote:
| "internet chum" is a good one, it echoes "slop bowl".
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Chumbox" has been a descriptive term since 2015:
|
| "A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum" (4 June 2015)
|
| <https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-
| intern...>
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox>
| functionmouse wrote:
| Cool Wikipedia read. These (chumboxes) are on our Windows
| 10 lock screens at work.
| mikestew wrote:
| Wait a minute, what? What I read from your comment is
| that on your work machines the screen savers display ads?
| I mean, I'd heard Windows was getting bad with the ads,
| but surely it doesn't work that way out of the box.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| On Enterprise, configured by policy, no less, one would
| assume.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That is an absolute stone dead cold soul-sucking
| statement.
| tencentshill wrote:
| That's bottom of the barrel advertisers. You're being
| punished because you likely don't allow them to track you.
| zeta0134 wrote:
| That the news sites allow bottom of the barrel advertisers
| on their site primarily reflects negatively on the news
| site, for not curating their partnerships. They decided to
| become a tabloid, and should lose an according amount of
| respect.
| visarga wrote:
| > These news sites run ads that are borderline gore,
| disturbing images promoting snake oil weight loss or skin
| care treatments
|
| And that doesn't raise an eye brow, but well worded AI
| articles based on sources is described as slop
| hypeatei wrote:
| Weren't those ads always there, though? The most obvious change
| is that a little AI popup appears on Google search providing a
| brief (even if hallucinated) overview of what the user queried.
|
| Unrelated, but I wouldn't expect this take on HN where I
| assumed everyone knew what an ad-blocker was.
| Aboutplants wrote:
| Yes the ads were always there but that was the most efficient
| way to get the content/information. That has changed and even
| with ad blockers, websites are no longer the most efficient
| way to get to that content/infomation. That is what has
| changed
| hypeatei wrote:
| Okay, I see what point you were trying to make. I
| misinterpreted your comment as saying LLMs weren't the
| catalyst but instead the ads were.
| glenstein wrote:
| I also read it that way. I guess the synthesis/charitable
| interpretation is that the negative ad experience meant
| it was ripe for disruption should an alternative come
| along.
|
| But it raises a potential counterpoint: are there sites
| with non-terrible user experiences that are staying
| stable?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Wikipedia.
| structural wrote:
| Mobile users (or other locked down devices where adblockers
| are forbidden) are still a decent chunk of traffic. It's much
| easier to just read the overview and not click through to the
| ad infestation, or even use a chatbot of choice as the search
| engine instead of going to Google, because "websites is how
| you get spammed with ads".
| pocksuppet wrote:
| > Mobile users (or other locked down devices where
| adblockers are forbidden)
|
| Just say Apple. They're still allowed on Android, although
| I don't think you can get them from the Play Store.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Not allowed on my work computer. Which I do use the
| internet on.
|
| Also you can put ad block on Apple devices.
| mikestew wrote:
| They didn't "just say Apple" because it wouldn't be true.
| What gives you the impression ad blockers don't work on
| Apple mobile devices?
| politelemon wrote:
| Ublock origin is a Firefox extension that works on mobile.
| You don't need a dedicated app for blocking adverts.
| pousada wrote:
| Not on iOS, there Firefox is actually Safari under the
| hood and you can't use extensions... Haven't found a good
| solution yet (other than avoiding websites with ads)
| sgtaylor5 wrote:
| Wipr2; paid for Safari but it works on all Apple devices
| with that one payment.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I don't use ad block.
|
| I find that when it messes with the layout or formatting of a
| website it's really annoying, and I consider the volume and
| type of ads an important signal for a website's
| trustworthiness.
|
| Oh and plenty of devices don't have easy access to ad block,
| like my work computer.
| pousada wrote:
| I use reader mode 90% of the time, I'm really not
| interested in fancy layout or formatting for a website. I
| just want the text readable and looking exactly the same
| way for every website. Designers probably hate users like
| me.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > and I consider the volume and type of ads an important
| signal for a website's trustworthiness
|
| You can get the former from the number showing up in the
| uBlock Origin icon.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Every time I visit the FT, the experience is reasonable enough.
| apparent wrote:
| This article is about tech publications. I think of the FT as
| a financial/general news publication. Do others read them for
| their tech coverage?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| FT is (largely) subscriber-supported, AFAIU.
|
| Though I don't know their revenue breakdown.
|
| Somewhat famously, the similar (though unrelated) _Economist_
| relies on three revenue legs: subscriptions, advertising, and
| bespoke consulting through the Economist Intelligence Unit
| (EIU), roughly evenly distributed. The fact that these have
| different economic-cycle behaviours also helps stabilise the
| newspaper 's income.
| afavour wrote:
| It's a downward spiral. As views start to decline there's more
| pressure to make money from the views that remain.
| vkou wrote:
| If views increased, there'd also be more pressure to make
| more money from them.
|
| The direction of views is irrelevant. What's relevant is the
| forward passage of time. As t -> infinity, shitty
| monetization -> infinity.
| npilk wrote:
| Infinite Jest describes a very similar (fictional) development,
| albeit with network TV. As viewers leave, content producers are
| ever-more desperate to monetize remaining traffic, which
| worsens the experience and drives more viewers away, creating
| even more desperation to monetize... a vicious cycle.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Is anyone here actually browsing the internet without ad-
| blockers?
|
| As soon as I accidentally turn them off I am disgusted by the
| consumerist, snake-oil, sexist, shit-storm that's
| advertisement.
| shawn_w wrote:
| The average viewer probably doesn't know ad blockers exist.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Technically I run a tracking blocker, it just happens to
| block 90+% of all ads because they want to track me.
|
| I don't understand why ads aren't targeted towards the
| content of the page, rather than me as a person, that seems
| to be more correct in the majority of the cases.
|
| I did accidentally try to play a YouTube video without
| signing into my premium account. That platforms is completely
| impossible to watch without premium or an ad blocker. YouTube
| managers should be forced to watch a few hours of content
| with ads enabled.
| cyberax wrote:
| I run adblock, but it's been not very effective lately. Sites
| either work around it, or just outright refuse to work.
| apparent wrote:
| I use adblockers everywhere. I still see some ads, but never
| sexist ones. What are you seeing?
| ugh123 wrote:
| Add to that cookie accept popups and the www has really turned
| to junk lately
| jmbwell wrote:
| Yes, and this has been the case for years. Cnet, ZDnet, PCmag
| have been user-hostile since long before AI summaries. Pop-ups,
| "before you go," back jacking, all the worst.
|
| The Verge is a surprise because it is relatively new and was
| relatively free of this crap for a long time.
|
| They're all just empty brands now. They totally caved to
| advertisers, and now only advertisers care about them.
|
| I dare say AI's popularity is a symptom of all this more than a
| cause.
| estsauver wrote:
| I have a recurring problem where I can't even read one of my
| favorite recipe websites (seriouseats.com) from my phone
| because the series of popups completely blocks the page, and
| can't be dismissed.
|
| But if I ask Claude or Gemini for a nice version of the recipe,
| it works perfectly. I think there's a lot of own goals out
| there.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| 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-...
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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?
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| 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.
| tempodox wrote:
| Classic tragedy of the commons, this time with major impact on
| everyone everywhere.
| rurp wrote:
| Agreed on all three points, but I think this is pretty
| obviously terrible in the long run. The open internet was one
| of the greatest common goods in human history. That ecosystem
| is quickly being exploited to death by a handful of tech
| companies. Those companies are generating a lot of revenue in
| the short term, and the rest of humanity is losing a great
| deal.
|
| I can't even begin to count how many times I've found
| interesting and useful information from an old
| forum/article/guide that was supported by some ads or simply an
| avenue to engage with people. Those incentives are now gone.
|
| Tech companies have no ethics and their leaders think it's in
| their interest to continue the exploitation, so that's what is
| going to happen. The only effective way to prevent a tragedy of
| the commons situation on this scale is major government action
| and there is zero political will for that at this time.
|
| In the long run there will be some sort of reaction, maybe site
| curation will make a comeback. A few big name sites will
| probably resist the slop and survive as an institution. But the
| internet many of us know and love is being pummeled to death
| before our eyes.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| What happens when the source data is killed off, these sites
| fold. Then where will Google AI summaries get info?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| 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.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| 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)
| moi2388 wrote:
| Oh no, did the tracking cookies, ads, seo spam and affiliate
| articles have a negative effect?
|
| Who knew!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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)
| djoldman wrote:
| > 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.
| hydroflame7 wrote:
| They've done a great job capturing their audience into their
| app. I used to work for one of their top competitors, and
| they've been decimated.
| Apreche wrote:
| 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.
| daxfohl wrote:
| 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.
| daxfohl wrote:
| A potential corollary: companies that offer a single service of
| high quality will be preferred by AI agents. Companies that
| cobble together low quality services will be replaced by agents
| that integrate high quality services on demand. The business
| model of "core service plus add-on services" will also be
| diminished, as low quality add-ons will be replaced by on-
| demand integration with higher quality equivalents or AI
| generated custom functionality.
|
| So basically businesses who focus on maintaining best in class
| core services and avoid the cruft will be the winners in the AI
| world.
| ArcHound wrote:
| That all sounds nice, but I can't really see AI companies
| paying for content.
|
| Putting morals and previous experience aside, they would need
| massive investment to people producing massive volumes of
| high quality content for training.
| ilovechaz wrote:
| I barely visit here anymore.
| nerevarthelame wrote:
| 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-...)
| nprateem wrote:
| Conde nast reported in the last few days their Web traffic is
| massively down too. Other big publishers have reported it
| themselves too.
|
| The web and SEO are dead.
| gortok wrote:
| 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?
| carefulfungi wrote:
| The AI companies will be charging you a $20 monthly
| subscription fee. And showing you ads. It's going to be great.
| modeless wrote:
| Happy to see general readership agrees with my opinion of The
| Verge.
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| Ads and brainless corporate propaganda and culture wars will do
| that.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| Raises a few questions:
|
| 1. Is there still value in a trusted source of high quality,
| relevant information existing in an easily accessible place? To
| me the answer is obviously yes, whether a human writes it or an
| agent, and also whether a human consumes it or an agent
|
| 2. If an agent visits a page, they shouldn't generate ad revenue
| (I guess they don't? is that true?). Should they just be able to
| copy the information for free? If the answer to 1. is yes, the
| answer here should probably be no.
|
| 3. Does this completely break the ad revenue model that powers
| like the whole internet?
|
| 4. Does this seriously threaten our ability to maintain a high
| quality, shared collection of knowledge? What can be done?
| jtrn wrote:
| The low ratio of quality original reporting vs political and
| opinion pieces made stop reading the verge.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| What's with HN's apparent dislike of The Verge? Of all the tech
| sites I've been visiting for the past decade it is the only one
| that hasn't gone to shit.
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