Google Shooting Itself In The Foot Is Probably Going To Hit Us Hard, So We Could Use Your Help

This month started with the objectively terrible news that the industry was losing another independent automotive news site, or, at least, that one of the longstanding automotive news sites was about to lose its independence. This is part of ongoing churn in the industry, and a lot of it has to do with how Google treats publishers, and it’s clear it’s probably going to get worse.

As it often does, this will end with me asking you to become a member, because membership is the best way for us to stay independent, and continue to pay and feature the writers you come here to read, as well as maintain the community that is, if you ask anyone with sense or taste, the absolute best in the car web.

But first, a little data. Last year around this time I did a similar post titled “Google Is Why Grandpa Thinks A Mustang Truck Is Coming And It’s Why The Autopian Needs Your Help.” The point there was that Google, by surfacing a lot of AI-fueled slop, was squeezing out honest publishers. It’s not that fewer people were using Google (searches are going up), it was that we couldn’t keep up with factories of disinformation.

This post was met with a huge influx of memberships, and more than 95% of people who signed up last year have remained. In fact, we made about as much from membership yesterday as we’re likely to make the entire month from advertising. That’s amazing, and it came at an important time for us. If you’re one of the many people who signed up and found enough value to stick around, I can’t thank you enough. If you’re a Day One (or two, or two hundred) ride-or-die fan, I’m also extremely grateful.

That’s the good news. Here’s the not-as-good news. Google announced on its quarterly earnings call this week that its AI Overviews and AI Mode are actually hurting its own advertising business, because people aren’t scrolling or clicking on things at the same rate as before. A study came out this summer that showed 68% of Google searches end without a click.

We are not as reliant as other publishers on search engine traffic, but it has provided a way to get people to discover the site, and also created a nice pad of advertising revenue. That’s gone, and the lesson that Google seems to have taken away is that it needs to put more ads in its AI, further crowding out any real, honest organic discovery. That’s bad for publishers, as CNET points out:

Lily Ray, a well-known SEO expert and founder of Algorythmic, told CNET that it’s going to become harder to use Google to find articles from preferred publishers and articles you want to read directly from a website. “You’ll have to dig deeper and look outside of Google’s products,” Ray said via email.

[…]

Ray said that with more ads, there’s going to be an even greater decline in organic click-through rates — in publishing speak, that’s the percentage of people who actually click on a natural, nonpaid search engine result, out of the total number of people who simply saw the headline on the page. Not only will the AI text answer your question, but Google will now aggressively route you toward advertisers rather than publisher links.

Yeah, this is going to suck. We’re on track to make roughly 30% of what we made in previous Q4s, which is the time of year when we expect to make the most money.

What are we going to do about it? Membership is really the most obvious way forward, and our plan is to make membership way more valuable. We want it so that being an Autopian member is a necessity for car fans, which we plan to do by providing very attractive and special discounts on things every car person needs. We’ll have some announcements on that front soon.

Until then, we suspect that there are still 7,500-to-10,000 active and frequent Autopian readers who match the reading behavior of most members. If we managed to turn half of those readers into members at current rates, we could turn down our current ad load and not really sweat Google changes.

If you would consider becoming a member this month it would be extremely helpful. As a little enticement, above is the preview (we are still doing final tweaks) of what next year’s Autopian Member Shirt will look. Join as Vinyl or above and you can score one of the remaining yellow member shirts, and will be in line to get one of the new green ones on renewal.

Thank you for reading!

Top photo: Harman