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https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-10-15/how-business-adapt-google-pivot-ai-in-search/105867240>
“Darren Woolley spent years sharing his expert knowledge of marketing on the
web for free.
Almost overnight, users mostly stopped reading his words.
"It's essentially thousands and thousands of hours and years and years of work
to generate this content," Mr Woolley, a former chair of the Australian
Marketing Institute, said.
"Our website had over 3,500 pages of content. We were publishing three times a
week."
"Then traffic dropped off around 80 per cent."
Mr Woolley's marketing consultancy is one of many Australian businesses
affected by what may be the most significant change to the web in 20 years.
The open web — the decades-old global public resource of millions of websites
without paywalls, accessible via a standard browser, from news sites to
small-business home pages — appears to be in decline.
For years, the popularity of social media and the rise of centralised in-app
platforms have been eating into the open web's share of digital ad revenue.
Now, Google's pivot to the use of AI-generated answers in search means many
websites are reporting significantly fewer visitors, since search users aren't
clicking on source links to the same extent.
This is changing the underlying economics of web publishing.
Like many other businesses, Mr Woolley's consultancy published useful content
in order to attract customers to its site via Google search (a technique known
as "content marketing").
But since March this year, Google referral traffic to his website has "dropped
off to a fraction of what it was".
Rubbing salt into the wound, he recognises his own words in the AI summaries
(partly trained on his content) that are now choking traffic to his website.
His business now publishes less freely available content.
Multiplied across the internet, decisions like his could accelerate the open
web's decline.”
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
