Search engines have undergone significant transformations over the past five years. Traditionally, their primary function was to find the best resources to deliver valuable search results to users. However, nowadays is different and I don’t think that it will change in the near future.
In their pursuit of increased revenue, search engines now prioritize enhancing their own metrics over providing genuine links tailored to user searches. For example, when you search online, they often aim to deliver answers directly on their platforms, keeping you engaged to boost their average session duration and time on site (thus, they can show you more ads). Their focus has shifted away from facilitating web exploration and helping users discover hidden gems that they would otherwise miss.
Google is Trying Hard to Kill Your Traffic
Google has even patented a method to generate landing pages on the fly from search results, thereby diverting users from original websites. This strategy minimizes traffic to external sources while encouraging users to remain on their site, increasing their ad exposure.
Currently, the relevance of search results has diminished greatly compared to previous years when Google prioritized showcasing authentic results. Many links displayed during searches are either irrelevant or advertisements. The prevalence of “People also search for” and “People also ask” links has outstripped genuine links to other websites. It’s no wonder I prefer using alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave, whose systems are less complex and aim to deliver relevant results. In my tests, Bing has even outperformed other search engines in providing quality results.
If you believe that creating valuable content will automatically enhance your search rankings, you are mistaken. AI can process that content to provide answers across various platforms, including search engines, often crediting you with only a small link at the bottom. This is precisely what larger search engines are doing, and it’s resulting in decreased traffic to your site. As a result, maintaining a blog or an article section on your website has become less impactful than it once was.
Search Engines Without Websites Don’t Help
SEO is undoubtedly evolving, but what concerns me is that Google seems intent on undermining the very sources that support it. In reality, the dynamic should be the opposite. If content is not available on the web for Google bots to crawl, the search engine’s relevance diminishes as well as the answers they provide. However, without Google’s dominance, websites could still thrive through directories and direct links for marketing their businesses.
Reference
US12536233B1 – AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user – Google Patents. (2025, January 3). Google.com. https://patents.google.com/patent/US12536233B1/en
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