Google is making Websites Irrelevant

Back in the 90s, I discovered Yahoo. I'm not sure I remember how, but it became my internet homepage. The moment the dial-up internet connected, I would navigate to Yahoo and start my quick journey before someone picked up the phone line. Yahoo made sense to me. I knew how to find what I was looking for, though it required digging through page 2, page 3, or just keeping going until I found what I was looking for.

When I was introduced to Google in the early 2000s, I was hesitant. What if I wanted to search by category? What if I needed to read the news? What about email and this and that? I was used to the Yahoo interface. Google seemed to be missing a whole lot, if not everything. But the simplicity quickly grew on me. I quickly noticed that I never had to click on page two of the search result page (SERP). Everything I wanted was always there on page one, as long as I learned to refine my terms. I switched to Google as my new entry to the web. Google just worked.

Then, over time, it didn't.

PageRank was a leap beyond the simple keyword matching methods other search engines used. That was until everyone started gaming it. In the early 2000s, if you checked the page source of websites, they hardly matched what was being rendered. Spammers would stuff the bottom of a page with dozens of keywords, then use CSS to make the text invisible to human visitors while still being readable to search engine crawlers.

As a result, the first page of Google became a wasteland of keyword-stuffed pages, shady backlinks, and content written for algorithms, not humans.

Then came Panda, Google's "fix" for spam. My employer at the time got hit hard, and honestly, I was glad. Their "content strategy" was garbage. But while Panda cleaned up the worst offenders, it didn't stop the next wave: ads and "authoritative" spam.

Until recently, the top of every search was ads, followed by listicles, content farms, and sites like WebMD that stretched 10 words of information into 1,000. ("Top 10 Best Hammers for Renovation!" with 5 paragraphs of fluff before the actual recommendations.) This degraded search results. Google wouldn't even match exact keywords, but will serve what it deems relevant.

For some types of searches, I've started using Yandex because it provides a more literal keyword match. Google, meanwhile, kept rewarding low-quality content from 'trusted' sources, often forcing me to scroll past unhelpful articles.

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Now, Google has a new fix: AI-generated answers. And in many ways, it's better. No more scrolling past ads. No more listicles. No more SEO-optimized junk. Just... the answer.

But here's the bitter irony: Google's AI is trained on the same web it's now making obsolete. It pulls from content websites like this very blog but gives users no reason to click through. They solved spam by making the websites that fought against it irrelevant.

My own website still appears in search, but nobody clicks anymore. Why would they? Google's AI extracts the answer and serves it right there, like a concierge handing you a summary instead of the book.

We celebrate the convenience of AI answers. We're happy to skip the spam and ads (for now). But we forget that Google doesn't magically know the answers to all questions. Real people use their time and make the effort to provide this information, but they end up as a footnote behind a submenu. Those websites are invisible to people consuming the AI overviews.

History says Google will "fix" this too, maybe by tweaking AI Overviews to send more traffic or by penalizing sites that don't "add enough value." But each fix creates a new problem.

The real question isn't how Google will change next; it's whether we'll remember we're the ones powering the cycle. We create the content that's being fed back to us. We click on search results letting Google know which result is relevant. We link to content that we trust. This is what powers search. But eventually, we will stop. That will become a new problem for Google to solve.

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