Robert Milakovic

I've said this for a while. Whatever the "HCU" was, it no longer exists. They rolled it out for over a year, and when they were satisfied with their corporate goals, they "folded" it in the core and washed their hands of it. All Google is doing now is ensuring that they are not liable. That's the only reason they did the Creator Event, and it's the only reason they keep bringing it up and offering "advice." They want to prove that they tried to help small and independent businesses when the time comes when it inevitably reaches court. Unfortunately, because we keep falling for it, they have that evidence.

I was curious what the “related queries” were for the search term “AI Overviews” over the past year in Google Trends. Oh.

How many other AI licensing deals is Google negotiating secretly? And what happens to publishers that get left out? The monopolist of the search market should not be the one who decides which publishers survive in the AI future and which ones die, @JusticeATR

It's super disheartening how quickly society is accepting Google's AI Overviews as the source of ground truth Just in the past 24 hours, I've seen 3 YouTube videos & several Instagram reels use AI Overview screenshots as definitive proof of some fact or idea

Here’s another example of why plastering Reddit everywhere for “the benefit of users” is a @searchliaison smoke screen. We’re promised honest advice, yet this Reddit thread is a top result for “best electric toothbrush,” and it has 10 affiliate links in the question alone…

It’s 2025 and Google is still killing independent websites. Sure, the algorithm always punished sites. Sure, this is not the first site that died after being buried by the world’s most popular search engine. But the web can’t take much more of this devastation.

Unless you are a creator.

“I think Google’s goal is to turn into an answer engine instead of a search engine. That is why they are getting rid of smaller publishers and keeping the big ones on the SERPs, they plan to partner with them and use their content in AI Overviews.”

So funny that for every bad result on Google, you can just Bing the same keyword and it works exactly as one would expect.

About time the media took notice. This latest @Google Dec update has finally killed what was left of my 7 year old website that I have poured my heart & soul into. I despise them.

This is one of the 2024 stories that should be getting more attention: Google's increasingly misguided search algorithm is killing off some of the most helpful and original web sites in favor of SEO spam and AI-generated junk.

My uncle runs a small hobby website. He writes about his passion on the side. Does not know the first thing about SEO, nor would he care. He read the CNET story about how Google is killing websites and realized he felt like his traffic had died off the past 2 years. So he went in for the first time in a long time to check his GSC. Turns out his graph looks just like "down and to the right" graph of my site (Travel Lemming) that was published in CNET. Google's approach to AI isn't just going to kill the professional publishers. Google will also slowly erase all the little websites that make the open web great.

Is there a site reputation abuse scheme the @MiamiHerald will actually pass on? We already told you how it’s working with Paradise Media and Banks. Now, we can add StackCommerce to the list. That’s a lot of irons in the parasite SEO fire.

This has been a fucking horrendous year, honestly, and I lay the blame of it squarely at Google's feet. At best, they're incompetent when it comes to managing their search engine, at worst they're downright malicious. Glad this story is being covered properly.

The graph in the article looks very familiar. My two unrelated websites, not large like the ones mentioned but still tanked almost identically.

Google is killing publishers so it can move into ecom—and they’ve been stealing your content to do it.

Bing, meanwhile, puts SIX organic links to our site above the fold Yahoo, Ecosia, & DDG both put ads, then several organic links to the pages I want Compare that to Google, which tries to spin up an entirely new derivative article -- images and all -- right on the spot

Google tells bloggers to "build a brand" and write for your own audiences BUT if you do that and your audience tries to find you via brand search, Google will try its best to stop your audience from finding you in the SERPs Google will: -re-format and re-mix your blog post (replacing your editorial judgment with its AI's preferred ordering) -steal your photos and present them right in the SERPs -hallucinate a few entries that aren't actually on your post at all -then present it all on right on the SERPs as if Google made it Seriously -- what on Earth is the point of this EXCEPT for Google to compete directly against the same publishers its AI is stealing from?

Sharing this again. Spread the word about what Google is doing.

“Like an ant scrambling to rebuild its home after being stepped on, a small website trying to grab Google's attention after falling off the company's search algorithm can feel helpless. “ ► cnet.com/tech/services-…