Changes to the way Google returns its search results are seeing websites downsizing and shutting, and writers losing their jobs. A few thoughts.
Imagine being the person who looked at the schematics for Skynet, and thought: that might not be a good idea. That perhaps someone should have a word.
Sure, it would have ended The Terminator saga before it started, but still: in the world of the films, the people who stand up to the robots do tend to be on the side of good.
James Cameron, the creator of The Terminator, has switched sides in the last few weeks. He’s gone from fashioning a story about how artificial intelligence is going to cause the destruction of humanity to swigging back the Kool-aid. You can read more on that here.
That’s not really what this piece is about. It’s not the tools, per se, it’s how firms that to my eyes are unaccountable are wielding their power. In doing so, they’re building a world where the only two journalistic websites in the world will end up being Mail Online and some other alternative that’s less porn-y. Oh, and Reddit.
Let’s go back a little first.
Back in May 2023, I wrote a self-indulgent long piece on the state of the industry. In it, I ruminated about editorial websites writing for the Google algorithm, and pondering what’d happen when Google put AI results prominently on its front page. When, basically, the master they served suddenly turned on them.
My fear was that when Google basically used – my opinion – these digital plagiarism AI services to return its ‘own’ written result to a search query, the source website(s) in question that it gleamed the information from wouldn’t even get a click anymore.
Unfortunately, that’s how it’s turned out.
Starved of clicks, websites lose advertising too. Without the advertising? Well, you can see the rest. As publishers plan their budgets into 2025, an increasing number are opting to cut their losses, and social media is awash with people suddenly on the lookout for work. Magazines and websites are downsizing and/or closing before our eyes, and not, it seems, due to the quality of what they write.
If you want to see where all this is going, look at the gaming industry. Games journalism used to be brilliant: critical, in-depth, interesting, and varied. Some outlets still are. But there’s a non-critical homogenous edge to a lot of the output now, and those writing more nuanced material are being lost under the weight of everything else.
Increasingly, I think that games journalism is the canary down the mine, but that might be a piece for another time.
We are, then, where we are.
To my eyes, under the Google model now, there’s only apparently room for news websites of scale. If you’re not pumping out 1000 articles a day on your site, as always in the form that Google demands, then you’re in trouble. Even then, I know of one fairly large site who – courtesy of a Google algorithm change I’m coming to – has lost 70% of its revenue in astoundingly quick time. Not because it did anything wrong per se, but because a major global corporation rearranged its toys.
I can’t name the site, but I do know that it’s still writing about what it always has. It’s just that one month, Google rewarded that. The next, Google penalised it. Someone in California presses some buttons, a bunch of people thousands of miles away find themselves worrying for their livelihood and future, and start tightening their belt.
What’s been particularly damaging for many sites has been the Google Helpful Content Update. This is a change that Google made that on the surface seemed positive: it was seeking to reward material that was genuinely helpful to readers, that was original, unique, and that people engaged with. The latter point is why Reddit does so well out of it.
This update has been the metaphorical nail in the coffin for many outlets though, something that’s been discussed far better elsewhere. Bottom line: website traffic has been hit dramatically and quickly across news sites of many subjects.
I’ve made the point before that any outlet is on shaky ground if they align themselves with the whims of a tech company, but still, I’m also a realist. If a publisher is employing 50 staff, they need to find the income to pay them. I get why people play the Google game.
Yet – again – Google has never been their friend, and never will be.
Google’s focus is on its shareholders, and keeping the share price high. So what if a writer in the West Midlands just lost their job, irrespective of the quality of their work? If the latest Google update makes more money for shareholders, that’s – under American law! – priority one.
Underpinning the company’s decisions therefore is the standard corporate mantra of profit before people. Hence the swathes of resources being lugged at AI: the Google equivalent of the self-service checkout at the local supermarket. It looks more convenient, assuming someone knows how to scan the barcode on their cucumber, but each such till is two jobs gone. I’m never utterly convinced I get out of the supermarket any quicker, either.
I mean, look at the things. It’s like a row of lower budget than usual Daleks…
I want to get back to how all of this is affecting what you read on websites, be they entertainment sites or further afield.
A story to illustrate this. We had an excellent consultant in a year or so ago, who told us that to improve the SEO of the Film Stories website, we should be doing lots of recommended film lists. I like lists like that, that offer something outside of the usual films being namechecked, and we looked into it.
But he made the point: we should just get AI to write them. Stick what we need into ChatGPT, and print that. That way, we could have 500 lists within a week or so, and we’d be smashing our way up the Google search results.
We, perhaps foolishly, pushed back. If we’re just putting AI stuff out there, then why should anyone read what we do? Does it matter if we believe the stuff we’re running? What happens anyway when Google decides it doesn’t like AI, or only likes its own AI? What’s stopping another site doing the same thing, via the same tool?
Also, isn’t it just, well, wrong?
Annexed to this, there’s an article that popped up here over the layoffs at the Gamur group, that the firm put down to Google’s update. And a sentence in there brought home the challenge facing any outlet that wants to write stuff itself: “we’re going to get beaten by AI sites because they can shovel shit faster than we can.”
That’s the problem of the clickbait game: a computer can do it. A curated list of interesting films? A computer can only give you the perception of that. You need a human being to invest their time, brainspace and words to do it properly. But Google, even with its Really Helpful Honestly Update, gives you no reward for that. It makes it a lot, lot harder to get noticed.
As ever, for proof this article is written by a human, and not an AI contraption, here’s a picture of a rabbit. This one’s called Horace. Please say hello to Horace in the comments.
Anyway, I’ll go further. In my opinion, I think Google is suggesting sites delete material.
In essence, the firm is driving additional editorial decisions about what’s in the back catalogue. Specifically, it suggests outright deleting what it calls “unhelpful content”. One example might be a news story about a film, for instance, from several years ago. If the film’s out now, that ‘content’ isn’t helpful anymore. Few people read it, and so what’s the point of keeping it?
As such, rather than have some kind of archive, Google seems to want you to just get rid of it.
It’s the digital equivalent of going into a newspaper office and burning the majority of the pages printed before, say, 2015. Because who needs history anyway? Who needs to leave little bits of news and goings on for someone to read long after we’re dead? No, it’s all about the clicks, and your archive is to be thrown away as collateral damage in your quest to get your website on the first page of Google.
Nobody seems to question this. The number of articles I’ve written elsewhere on the internet that have been removed for this reason is heading to three figures. Gone forever. I’m not suggesting what I write is high art or of importance. But multiply me by thousands of other writers. Stuff is being wiped on a daily basis.
Not because there’s no room to store it: we’re talking computer bytes, not reams of paper. But because it makes a website look more impressive, temporarily, to Google. It makes it a little faster too, which Google rewards. As such, if you’ve got old material? Throw it on the bonfire, because Google has spoken. Hence, material disappears.
An aside. There was a period where once, Facebook infamously predicted a massive shift to video. Here’s a post it put on its site from back in 2015.
Off the back of its briefings and predictions, media outlets replaced those who wrote words with those who spoke to camera. Lots of people, of course, lost their jobs, as Facebook’s prediction fell way short. Facebook didn’t pay a notable price, of course. But the businesses that listened to it did, and – more importantly – the people at the end of the chain who found themselves looking for work.
Google, meanwhile has found itself counting annual revenue of over $250bn, and has decided you know what? That’s not enough. We’ll take the search results ourselves now and try and make a much-needed few extra quid.
I’ll say it again: these big tech corporations are not your friend. They never will be.
The path forward, then.
It’s inexhaustible power that’s being wielded here, and it’s affecting more than ever what you get to see. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen a rapid acceleration of posts from writers who have lost their jobs, both full time and freelance. Several times, the traffic collapse of websites has been cited, tied to the Google Helpful Content Update.
It’s not a new lesson that if you don’t give Google what it wants, how it wants you, that it has the power to basically kill off your publication. It’s not for me to name the outlets that are closing and/or experiencing massive cutbacks, outside of noting that there are big and small names involved. It’s affecting so many outlets that something, surely, is amiss here. There’s simply too many affected for this to be a strange fluke.
But also: where does the person who matters most of all figure in this? Even this piece, the person missing – at least so far – is the most important of all: the reader. What does a reader actually want? That should be ground zero for an outlet, but, sadly, rarely is.
Newspapers, magazines, websites: they need eyeballs to exist. Even though we’re in an era where articles are being written that a computer has suggested, and where they’re being written in a manner a computer can process, so that a computer can then read them? Even in the middle of that, you need a human somewhere.
Don’t you?
Maybe I’m an idealist. The core idea for me remains for me that you write something interesting, designed for a human, presented in a way that a human being wants to read it. That, to me, is what should be rewarded.
Who, then, gave Google all this power to determine how things should be done? We did, of course, one tiny slice at a time.
The bigger questions are what recourse do we have? What can we do about it? How can we replace Google? As powerless as we are in the political spectrum, at least we get a vote twice a decade for our government. In the case of a Google, an Elon Musk, a Facebook… well, it’s – outside of a few token slaps on the wrist – ridiculous amounts of power they all have. Heck, a year or two ago, the British Prime Minister interviewed Elon Musk on stage. The expected power dynamic completely inverted.
The kind of power tech companies have means what you read isn’t determined per se by what you like, but by what they choose to present you with.
I wish I didn’t feel so powerless against them, but really, what can we all do? Outside of supporting the outlets we like and spreading the word, it feels a bit like an ant standing in front of a steamroller.
Still, I’m a glass half full person, and I see independents cropping up, and people who keep trying to hold the ladder out for others (those who pull the ladder up deserve a permanent spot on Santa’s naughty list. I keep names). I see those who try, in the face of massive corporates who discourage them, to put interesting material into the world.
I’d suggest this: if you see anything of that ilk, amplify it. Tell someone. Click. Tap on the ads. Do something to support them. I’m aware I have skin in the game here, but I also believe that if readers knew the power they had, Google might not have things all its own way.
I must admit I do wonder if someone at Google ever looks at the impact its decisions have made on independent – and even less independent – publishing, and thinks: you know what? We’ve done bad here. We’ve cost people, and hurt outlets trying to not serve up clickbait bilge. More likely though, I picture them just popping off for lunch, and not giving the slightest shit in the world.
Well I do. I give a shit.
It’s why I’m going to keep banging this drum, and keep fighting this, for what it’s worth. It’d be lovely if someone with a lot more power than me would do the same. Who knows? Maybe even James Cameron.
But collectively, as readers, maybe we’re the ones with the power. It just needs enough of us to go to, say, page four of the Google search results and look there. To avoid the AI and clickbait dumps. To go out of our way to support what we like. If enough of us do it, the tide may yet turn. But right here, right now, there are a lot of people preparing their CVs, even as Google is planning an ever-more-lavish Christmas party.
I suspect I’m not invited.
