AI driven drop in human web traffic (opens in new tab)

I feel the pain. Year on year traffic is down 43% for the website I live from. Everyone in the industry is suffering.

I had to make up for the loss by diverting attention from the mission to monetisation. I want to help people become German citizens, but instead I'm doing conversion rate optimization on a health insurance form. It's fortunately a feature that benefits my users, but it's not the one I meant to work on.

I will survive just fine, but a lot of websites people love will disappear. Those that remain might feel a pressure to charge for their content, or monetise in unpleasant ways.

The worst part is that I'm still expected to feed those AIs content. They're not replacing me, but forcefully inserting themselves between me and my audience. They're killing the web that feeds them in a short-term bid for supremacy.

To add insult to injury, I see ChatGPT visitors to pages that don't exist, hallucinated sources. They're using my name to give their lies the appearance of credibility.

In my experience search engines have rapidly deteriorated - probably because of the SEO arms race - and LLMs often feel like search engines used to feel back when they worked. Who knows what will happen once all the marketing attention shifts towards influencing LLM output.