Will Google I/O provide any hope for websites dying in Search?

Ben Schoon | May 12 2024 - 9:00 am PT

Google Search is effectively a bridge between users and content on the web nowadays, but volatility in Search has led to many smaller websites seeing steep dropoffs. As Google I/O approaches, will anything at the event provide a ray of hope?

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Over the past few months, there’s been a clear and worrying trend. Websites are dying because of Google Search. That’s following various changes to Google including the “Helpful Content Update” that the company issued earlier this year which, by Google’s description, was all about weeding out low-effort content that was designed solely to get a ranking in Search.

But websites that are producing that “helpful” content are still dying.

The two widely discussed examples of this have been HouseFresh, an in-depth air purifier review website, and RetroDodo, a website dedicated to retro gaming news, reviews, and more.

Both websites are independently owned and have seen success in years past by ranking on Google for their subjects due to their in-depth coverage. But, this year, both sites have seen their traffic drop dramatically as their rankings dropped far far lower in Search. And there are two factors at play. For one, there’s the heavy emphasis that’s been put on Reddit on Google Search in recent months, as well as the continual flood of content from big-name publishers.

As HouseFresh explained recently, some big publishers are “swarming” Google Search with huge amounts of low-effort content on a subject with the singular goal of getting an article to rank highly on a keyword. A key example was Forbes, which has published thousands of articles about pets in an effort to direct site visitors to pages about pet insurance for which the publication gets affiliate dollars. Prior to that, the same site put out a solid explanation of how major publishers – Red Ventures, Future, Valnet, DotDotMeredith, and more – often flood the web with “best of” lists that aren’t based on actual testing. Retrododo pointed to similar issues in the gaming space.

It’s a troubling trend, and one that could only get worse depending on Google’s actions.

With that in mind, will we see anything helpful at I/O this week?

Google I/O is the company’s biggest event of the year and, as such, it often brings some of the most influential announcements. As our Abner Li brought out earlier this week, news on the Search Generative Experience (SGE) is highly likely, and that has the potential to have a massive impact on Search going forward.

Abner said:

The Search Generative Experience (SGE) was announced a year ago and I wonder if Google has deemed it mature enough to exit the Labs preview program. I can see the utility of directly providing an answer rather than requiring people to sift through links. At the same time, the ramifications of that approach for publishers is — to say the least — profound.

If SGE were to launch in its current state to the wide base of Google Search users, it likely would do anything except help the state of online publishing. SGE buries traditional search results further down the page, is not good at showing citation links, and has taken content word-for-word from publishers including myself.

A wide launch for SGE would only drastically accelerate the problems that smaller publishers are seeing today. The only hope there is that Google may not make this the default experience. In fact, a report claims that Google may make it a paid service.

But, in any case, it just seems wholly unlikely that I/O will be the stage from which Google addresses this problem. Especially with mounting pressure from its rivals – OpenAI plans to launch its own search engine powered by AI the day before I/O, reports say – I/O will be the place where Google focuses on its most “impressive” new tech. SEO rankings just aren’t exciting enough.

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