How Google is Disrupting Wordpress Bloggers and Business Models that Played the SEO Game

It's the End of Independent publishing as we know it. The End of the human blogger happens in 2024.

Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

Read this above tweet carefully.

Google it Tweaking SEO to Downvote Human Content

As you might know, Google has had a draconian monopoly on SEO for quite some time. We sometimes mistake the “internet”, somewhat conveniently, for Google’s moat. But what happens now as Amazon and Google open the floodgates to AI generated content? Amazon recently in a generous gesture to non-AI augments, said authors would have a maximum of 3 books a day that they could self-publish.

Independent publishers who are creative and human, won’t ever compete in independent book publishing again. Market supply-demand mechanics will now reduce the market to spam or worse.

Now the same has started in the SEO realm of websites. This won’t just impact publishers and local news outlets, but hundreds of thousands of independent bloggers. You might not realize this, but a lot of Substacks too rely on SEO for discovery. I’m one of them.

A lot of bloggers, well this is their income. Some of whom rely on that income for sustenance as their full-time gig.

Only in the Era of ChatGPT

While Medium claims to be against A.I. generated content (despite their being no fool proof test to identify it), how about wordpress? This week, Google has dropped “content written by people” and now says it looks for quality content—no matter how it was generated.

What do you suppose happens to the free human internet, in such a scenario?

The immediate impact? Independent bloggers on Wordpress (their own websites) said that in some cases traffic was down 70% from SEO by all these new 500 word AI generated content in their niche.

Google recently tweaked its guidelines to permit AI-generated content and it’s already having dystopian impacts.

Google recently released guidelines (in February, 2023) for SEO and AI-generated content. These guidelines emphasize the importance of transparency and ensuring AI-generated content is unique and valuable for readers.

So what changed in the nine months since Google’s former stance?

Back in April, 2022, Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller said content automatically generated with AI writing tools is considered spam, according to the search engine’s webmaster guidelines. Fast forward a year and a bit later, not anymore!

Morgan Overholt saw half of her website's traffic disappear overnight.

"This is a joke," another person wrote on a forum for website owners. "I've got long-form content, well written, well researched, filled with original image content LOSING to 500 word AI generated crap…Google is apparently forcing publishers to generate AI spam or die." - said a recent Insider article.

I’ve noticed this avalanche of AI generated content also hit new Substack Newsletters, popping up on the topic of A.I. faster than they should have been doing organically. Skillful humans can make it impossible to tell. But the robotic tone and content that seems gamified for selling is a dead giveaway. Often these authors won’t use their real names to avoid potential legal liability.

Generative AI models are changing the economy of the web, making it cheaper to generate lower-quality content. Now with Google’s change to SEO, it permanently will make the web a less human-centric place. Less real owned websites and more control by Google’s own SEO rules, also means Google can have more power in how it changes consumer behavior regarding Search and Gemini, a LLM that it is about to launch.

Recently Amazon said is has “created a new rule” limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months.

I think 2023 is just a testing ground, but in 2024 the content of the web shifts more to A.I. driven content and it’s going to feel like an avalanche of spam. SEO rules have made it difficult to build a writing or blogging career online for quite some time, by A.I. generated content really be the straw that broke the camel’s back of independent publishing and blogging.

Refuges like Substack, won’t be immune from the trend.

Google Plays its own Long-Term Game

The new update, which has been rolling out this month, promised several positive tweaks to punish pages that are built only to rank well in search engines, said Insider. But website owners, travel bloggers and wordpress enthusiasts already have found their business model has crumbled under the sudden influx of bot-competitors.

The new rules basically say something about the AI-human internet that is rubbing creatives and writers the wrong way:

It also came with a big red flag that currently has a lot of website owners worried: human authorship is no longer necessary.

If the future of media and website creation is AI-driven, what happens to the actual writers? Someone posting three “books” a day to Amazon as independent creations isn’t an author, they are an orchestrator.

People who figure out how to game SEO with ChatGPT isn’t exactly a creative, they are more like a scammer or a fraudster. Essentially, Google’s guidelines of February 8th, no longer really seem to apply.

This is a brave new world and companies like Google hold the keys to the future. Google and Facebook as an advertising duopoly already destroyed most of media and most journalism jobs, but what happens as YouTubes and micro video also begin to become A.I generated? The internet will feel a lot different pretty soon.

Google Search was already beginning to break under the weight of clickbait and less human based content. Not only does the reality of HustleGPT make young people scammers, Google’s trial has shown it “fixed” its own price to boost revenue by as much as 10%. If that’s not AI Snake oil I don’t know what is. Google rigging its own auctions are well-documented but it makes you wonder why Google has chosen to disrupt writers with AI generated content? Perhaps it’s to have even more control over what the internet becomes.

The Algorithmic Web is Eating Itself

Whether it’s the exodus from Twitter, now X, or Google’s increasingly nefarious behavior to increase its profits, YouTube is even a worse monopoly, with TikTok under threat of being banned, something doesn’t quite feel right on the internet any longer in the 2020s.

I’ve been warning about synthetic media for quite some time, but it’s only in late 2023 that we are finally seeing the weight of it on the lives of bloggers, independent media producers, small websites, more media publications and the integrity of journalism and media as a whole.

It’s not something like a platform like Substack can save or do anything about, it’s about the entire world’s internet. It’s about the world wide web of our civilization.

Content is No Longer Human

As spotted by SEO Roundtable's Barry Schwartz (see the X post), Google recently tweaked the documentation explaining how it defines "helpful content." No longer is it "helpful content written by people, for people," but simply, "Helpful content written for people."

You almost have to assume that most of what you will be reading soon, wasn’t written by a human at all. And it’s a sad and inevitable point we will be arriving at soon.

It all Began on September 14th, 2023

Read the update here.

• The update disrupted many wordpress websites and the business model of bloggers. It turned on the floodgates of AI generated websites, as if without warning and the SEO impacts changes the internet forever.

The change was first reported by Stack Diary.

What did Stack Diary and Barry notice:

In its previous iteration, it said the following:

Google Search's helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results. This page explains more about how the system works, and what you can do to assess and improve your content.

And now since starting the rollout of their latest version, this paragraph has been rephrased to:

Google Search's helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content created for people in search results. This page explains more about how the system works, and what you can do to assess and improve your content.

Google’s conduct in this update, swung the pendulum to the side of those who articulate and mass product their content optimized for SEO with the help of tools like ChatGPT.

The comments on webmasterworld about the update aren’t as bad as the results were and experiences of those even 48 hours later for those who actually are independent websites, bloggers and who depend on SEO traffic heavily.

One travel blogger said she watched 80% of her traffic disappear in the space of 48 hours, with posts "very obviously AI written" now outranking her.

What this means is AI-human hybrid content will break SEO, as if it wasn’t already broken before to favor Google’s own business model, roll-out of Gemini and its other leverages over controlling the internet. Ironically this is all occuring while Google is literally in court. As if Alphabet is telling the world secretly: “you can’t win!”

Alphabet’s own Terms of Use

• The new language shows that Google recognizes AI as a tool heavily relied upon in content creation.

• But instead of simply focusing on distinguishing AI from human content, the leading search engine wants to highlight valuable content that benefits users, regardless of whether humans or machines produced it.

Google can simply say, we have our end-users best experience in mind. So if ChatGPT writes better “SEO-optimized” content than me or another website writer, they will win and our traffic will decline to next to nothing. Google with its LLMs, from PaLM to Gemini, is saying AI is the future.

There’s no opting in or opting out, this is the entire internet we are talking about.

Google has been trying to sell an AI-generated content creator tool to News outlets rather aggressively. This is a significant danger to the future of all of media, as if the current internet owned by Google weren’t already a false prism of a platform.

Google according to its PR people doesn’t actually care if you are human or a scammer using AI to game SEO:

The Silicon Valley Rot of Bots, Copilots and ChatGPT

"We are not targeting content produced by any particular method – AI or otherwise – we're concerned with the quality of a given webpage and its helpfulness to readers."

Things like blogging, independent publishing, wordpress websites and the like have been dying for a long-time, but with the acceleration of synthetic content they will die in a new way, death by a thousand ChatGPTs. It’s not just algorithmic injustice now, it will be the social injustice of copilots and the “democratization of AI” we will have to blame.

Google is a company of engineers, we cannot except them to understand the soul of writers. But I expect synthetic content to make the internet a worse and worse place very rapidly, just as social media has been corrupted by corporations that put data harvesting, and advertising revenue ahead of their users and their actual customers.

The incentives for people to use AI to scam a profit will put a lot of others out of business. And it’s a shame. It will quickly degrade the quality of Google search even further heading into 2024 and the 2020s at large. By 2030, the web will be almost unrecognizable.

It's currently impossible to spot the difference between machine-generated content and human work. But website owners and independent bloggers are noticing a major SEO change, and AI generated content seems to be the culprit. They are being disrupted by AI-human teams.

People using AI to game SEO can outcompete a human writer relatively easily. This is because ChatGPT and writing Copilots rehash SEO proven tactics with language in a convincing manner at a speed and scale impossible for a human not using AI (an un-augmented person) to do. It’s the destroyer of worlds, and not only is Google okay with it, it even wants to sell its tool to what’s left of the mainstream Media.