Never before in the tech industry have we witnessed such a meteoric rise of anything than what Artificial Intelligence has managed to achieve in just a short span of time. And the best [or worst?] part is that it seems to have impacted near about all the domains in one way or another. Be it the call center employees, office assistants, assembly line jobs, drivers, artists, videographers, stock photo and video sites, and blogging.
While some like the bank tellers and mail carriers have witnessed an immediate negative impact, the likes of drivers and artists have faced that much of a negative effect but it’s not far behind before they get the ultimate nail in their coffin. One such field that might bear the brunt of Artificial Intelligence sooner than later is the blogging industry. This industry has spread its wings across numerous segments, with tech being the most popular among them all.
Apart from that, you also get writeups on food, travel, lifestyle, and sports, among others. However, with such a plethora of sites in each domain, it was becoming extremely difficult for the publishers to rank up their content at the top of the search results. So they decided to take alternative approaches. While some opted for aggressive SEO techniques others simply increased the total number of articles per day without giving due consideration to the overall quality of those write-ups.
However, the crack in the wall started appearing last year when many new websites with just random contents, some of which were blatantly copied from other sites, started occupying the top position in the pecking order. Even I can name 3-4 sites that were directly copying contents from my website [and even the screenshots- without even removing the watermarks!] and uploading them on theirs!
On the other hand, some use a word spinner tool to slightly change the content and then upload them onto their sites. While all this would have required quite a lot of manual time and effort a couple of years back, nowadays it is just a matter of seconds! You just feed the desired content or simply the URL to the AI and it will get the job done in a blink of an eye.
Users then do a Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V on their website before hitting the Publish button. So isn’t anyone taking any action on these sites? Well, the biggest player in the market is, but unfortunately, it seems to have completely missed the mark and has rather ended up wiping the useful sites from the web while leaving the shady ones still on their search result.
Google’s SEO Update Did More Harm than Good!
Back in September last year, Google rolled out the September Helpful Update, whose aim was to cut down on shady and spammy websites. However, as soon as the update was rolled out, many genuine publishers started witnessing a sharp decline in their revenue, which continued till March before the much dreaded Core Update.
Once the latter was rolled out, it completely messed up the blogging industry as it falsely categorized numerous genuine websites as spammy ones and then either removed some of the contents from the web or in some cases, ended up removing the entire website from the search results. Near about all the publishers in my bracket have reported a decline in their revenue between the 90% to 95% mark, which speaks volumes in itself.
Likewise, numerous businesses that had their model set up online, had to close down for good. So even though the role of the SEO update was to act as a death knell for the spammy sites, it ended up whipping the genuine sites from the web. Moreover, since this action was taken by Google, which shares the lion’s share of possession when it comes to search results [around 95%, as opposed to Bing, Yahoo, and Duck Duck Go shares the rest of the 5%], hence the impact was far and wide-reaching,
That is the reason why having a monopoly in any field is never a great idea. And even though we have the option to remove this monopoly at least from the search result, however, it will end up taking ages before one can snatch away the traffic from Google.
AI in Search? Goodbye Revenue!
As if all these troubles weren’t enough, Google decided to incorporate its AI [which has been an abject failure since its inception] into the search results. So instead of listing the search results in the form of websites as you get till now, the Bard, Gemini, or whatever you would like to call, will now comprehend the results from numerous sites into its own bracket and will display it ight at the top.
Since the users would already get the result from the AI itself, they would have no incentive whatsoever to open the web pages that would appear beneath the AI box in the results.
AI Might Still Prove to Be a Useful Asset for Bloggers
With that said, the blogging community could still benefit from Artificial Intelligence by taking in new ideas from it, asking it how to frame great write-ups, and generating new content-driven strategies, however, the negative impact that Google’s SEO updates had on numerous websites has infact put the AI in a bad light.
Infact, many publishers have started tagging it as the reason why they had their lively hood taken away from them, though infact a major chunk of that blame should be put on Google’s shoulders, thanks to their messy updates that have impacted legitimate sites whereas the shady ones are still ruling the web.
With that said, the search engine giant has given the impacted users [whose entire site has been de-indexed from the web] an option to appeal against the decision, however, we all know that this is just for the sake, in reality, nothing is going to change and none of your redressal appeals will have any impact whatsoever on the Silicon Valley giant.
How to Escape from this Dreaded Walled Garden
So this begs the all-important question- what else could be done to escape from this dreaded ecosystem and reduce your dependency on Google? Well, many users have already started moving away from Google to the likes of Instagram, Twitter/X, Facebook, and TikTok to promote their business and content.
Some have also shifted their business from write-ups to video recordings and have made YouTube their permanent abode, however, that is again owned by YouTube. Who knows how long will it take before Google one day decides to implement another one of its weird decisions on this product as well, thereby leaving users out there in the lurch.
Concluding Remarks
So this was all from this post on how AI is impacting the blogging industry. What are your views on this scenario, both as a user and a publisher? For the former, you don’t really care about the sites from where you are getting the result [even if it’s an AI] so this fiasco isn’t going to impact you much till the time you’re queries are answered. Or does it?
Likewise, as a content creator have you finally decided to make a jump from Google over to any other platform or the Silicon Valley giant is your first and unfortunately last course of action, because others aren’t as traffic-driven and in turn revenue-generative as the search engine giant? Do share your valuable opinions with us in the comments section below. On that note, we round off this write-up until the next scary update that messes our site even further!
