I’ve only been on the bad end of a conspiracy one time, but that’s one too many for a lifetime. What I learned from this experience is that there’s a brief moment of relief that comes from knowing you’re not crazy, followed by the paralyzing realization that all your darkest fears are coming true. That’s a little bit what it’s like to be a publisher of a website in 2025.
LinkedIn is a good industry barometer, and right now, the automotive news industry is split between people hoping to pivot to some sort of membership model and people losing their jobs. I’ve long tried to offer at least freelance work to individuals who lost gigs in one of the now innumerable prior rounds of layoffs, but we’re getting squeezed by the same factors squeezing everyone else, so it’s a lot harder to keep up with the pace of people who need help.
No mega platform owes us anything. I want to acknowledge this. Google (or Alphabet, if you prefer) doesn’t have to send us any traffic or any advertisers, and it still does a lot of both. My understanding was always that we work hard to provide the content that makes Google’s many products valuable, and the company, in return, provides some reasonably proportional level of traffic. This was also the deal with Facebook before Facebook decided to pull the rug out on publishers. Implicit in this understanding is that, is that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and similar laws, companies like Google get a “safe harbor” from certain lawsuits because Google isn’t the one making any content. We are. So we assume that risk.
With the push to make everything about artificial intelligence, Google has tried to integrate its own AI systems into its suite of online products. You’ll notice the Gemini diamond on your Google Sheets, an AI assistant in your Google Meets, and generative AI maps in your Google Street… views.
I mentioned this in my previous article on the topic, but as these AI products started to roll out, it seems like Google understood this could be detrimental for publishers who assumed they’d still be at the top of searches, either via Google News or via regular search. This change didn’t have as big an impact on us as we were new and didn’t have a long tail of search results.
What Google did to make up for this is a product you may not even be aware of, but everyone in the industry knows as Google Discover. Basically, any time you go to any Google product, it’ll serve you up some stories, videos, or social media posts. Here’s what my search page looks like:
This has been a key way that people have found us, because it’s a more competitive place than search and gets more traffic than Google News. If more people clicked on our stories, Google seemed to show more people what The Autopian was writing. We write great stories and headlines, with excellent thumbnails, so we absolutely killed on this platform.
And then, as I mentioned, it started to go away. I attributed a lot of this to Discover ignoring its own guidelines for content and instead promoting a lot of AI-generated slop that somehow managed to sneak past the company’s own crossing guards (so much for Google’s excellent machine learing). The bulk of it may just be Google itself, as the latest report from web analytics firm Marfeel (full disclosure: this is the one we use) shows:
In key markets like the US, Brazil, and Mexico, AI Summaries already make up 51% of the feed. When they appear, AI Summaries often display multiple publisher logos but provide a single actionable click, which in most cases plays an inline YouTube (77% in the US, 100% in Brazil and Mexico). Deeper in the feed, AI dominates even more, quietly replacing publisher links.
It looks something like the graphic below, and you can understand why suddenly publishers aren’t getting the traffic that they expected to get in lieu of the search traffic slurped up by AI. We often get crammed in with other logos at the top in a way that results in little or no traffic to anyone.
Who owns YouTube? Oh, right. Alphabet.
None of this is a huge surprise, as TechCrunch reported on this summer, but seeing it in our reports confirms the fears of diminished traffic were correct. And it’s not just us. It’s either comforting or terrifying that our main competitors are also being smacked around by the same changes.
If you’re wondering why so many of your favorite sites are suddenly even more ad-heavy than usual in the fourth quarter, this is likely the cause. With less traffic, the only way to get more money is to squeeze more ad impressions on the page, but this causes more supply and then forces prices down, creating a need for even more ads… ad infinitum.
The difference between our site and those other sites is that we’re way more careful about how we roll out ads because we don’t look at display as our major source of revenue (my guess is that if you were out of the industry for even a year, you’d be shocked at how crappy RPMs are). We have a membership business, and that means we care about getting people to check out the page and then want to stick around.
I think about it this way: If your friend told you about this great restaurant with a chill vibe and a perfect juicy hamburger, you’d probably go. If you got there and the restaurant was full of TV screens blaring ads, the menus were dirty, and the waiter kept trying to shoo you away from your table, you wouldn’t care how good the burger was. You’d never come back. That’s what most websites are like now.
When your friend (in this metaphor, Google) sends you our way, we want you to love it here. We want it to be a nice experience. We want the burger to be delicious. And we want you to come back. Slamming the page with ads is counter to this, and other publishers in our space that have experimented with a lot of ads and membership have found that people didn’t really want to become members.
Our goal is to eventually turn as many of you as possible into members by making membership super valuable, but we also want more people to find this place, which means we’re not entirely paywalled. It’s a tough balance, but our plan has always been to lower our dependency on revenue from all platforms, not just Google, while also keeping our discoverability high.
I write this because it’s going to be difficult for publishers who have insisted on the other model to function going forward, and you’ll probably see other automotive websites you love either get smaller or do all sorts of seemingly nonsensical things (AI slop, trending TikTok articles) just to make up the difference. I also expect a lot more layoffs in Q1 of 2026.
Here’s another chart from Marfeel:
Do you really think the AI summaries are going to stay at the bottom of the page? I don’t.
Marfeel’s report pretty much nailed it when it said “Google Discover is shifting from a traffic distributor to an attention controller.”
This is also bad for Google! Going back to the original conceit of the Google-Publisher relationship, AI needs human thinking to feed its models. We provide that thinking. The more watered down and terrible and sloppy the inputs, seemingly, the harder it is to get a good output and the less valuable that input becomes.
Again, we’re building our business to be resilient against these sorts of changes over the long term. That means merch, toys, partnerships, some display advertising, and, most importantly, membership. If you’ve been thinking about becoming a member but haven’t yet, and are able to, now is a good time to do so.
Our plan is to review what sort of membership we can project out into 2026 based on Q4 of 2025, and we’ll use that data to decide how much we can spend on freelance, the website, more events, et cetera.
And if you’re already a member, as always, thank you for your support. It makes moments like this a lot more tolerable and keeps us focused on making this the best place to hang out on the web for car people.
Thanks, I hate it. My aggregated news feed is 75% those AI accumulated things and I never click them. I include swear words on every Google search to shut up Gemini (it’s less successful these days but searches for “weatherproof floor liner fucking reviews” make me laugh) and everybody’s chasing to the bottom, it seems. I started subscribing to the sites that are less awful last year and it’s about time to renew.
Consider adding unconventional revenue streams, like putting content in a print magazine, on home video, or perhaps simply doing crimes
Definitely have “doing crimes” on the 2026 road map.
Common advice is only commit one crime at a time.
No, you’re wrong. What you really want to do is commit both a felony and a misdemeanor nearly simultaneously with the intention of getting caught for the misdemeanor. You’ve both got an alibi and they’re never going to suspect you for the more serious offense.
(worked with my parents as a kid so surely it must work as an adult)
lol
As I understand it, so long as you fund your criminal activities with the right crypto coin, it’s totally legal now.
As I understand it, so long as you fund your criminal activities with
the rightany crypto coin, it’s totally legal now.May I suggest car pranks?
https://youtu.be/hKoa9yljW2w?si=1iJRQFuKCUzhj60i
From the consumer side, I don’t directly see this Google crap (other than its impact on websites). Probably because I have my browser default to DuckDuckGo for searches.
DuckDuckGo is the best solution at the moment. It is a Helm’s Deep to protect against
Sauron’sGoogle’s AI-generated army. We just need a Gandalf to bring reinforcements before one AI bot blows the sewer grate up.I don’t see it either – even with Google and Chrome
If I go to Google search I just get the search bar and a bare screen
If I search in Chrome I get search results the same as I have been getting for decades First 3 are paid placements then normal results
This might be something you have to opt into. Never heard of Google Discover before today. I search it and the Google AI summary says it is mobile android OS only. I’m windows at work / Apple at home. Preferred browser is Brave but it won’t work for all sites
The Google model (like all other tech giants) is to provide convenience at a financial loss, which only demands your (otherwise worthless to you) data. What they all have in common is that when they have accomplished their goals, they turn up the screws. I would argue that Google owes us its very existence and it’s especially true for content creators.
Stuff like this is part of why I’m a member. In addition to the great content, you are upfront about the business. It feels like a community rather than a simple transaction. I have no solution or advice to give, but damn do I wish there was more quality content like this and less slop. Vote with your dollars, folks – it’s the only way you’ll be heard.
Damned right! I really love the upfront openess too, it feels like we’re part of the journey with you too. Keep it up!
Vote with your dollars–100% agree. Stop posting on FB, stop using St@rlink, stop leasing/buying T*slas, stop using Ch@tGPT, stop buying crap on Am#zon. Not just for a day, never give these horrible people any money. Ever.
We’re in the full throes of enshittification.
We’re forced to wallow in the pigsty that is the modern internet.
AI is a bubble ready to burst. When it happens, if it gets bailed out, we are in deep shit. It’s purpose is less for “art” slop and job elimination(although it does those things as according to its owners), and more for a surveillance/control infrastructure. And it is very, very resource hungry.
My mom keeps trying to tempt me to move back home with many new datacenter jobs at a facility that isn’t online yet. Guess who owns it?
But among the many complaints I have about it, they’re filling in like 10 acres of protected wetlands in an area where many people go to see the wildlife, whether it be personal enjoyment or scientific studies. They’re “offsetting” this by contributing to an already growing wetland in the opposite corner of the county that is basically empty and won’t meaningfully help the situation they are literally bulldozing.
Spoiler alert: there aren’t datacenter jobs. A lot of hands are needed to build them, but after that, there are very few humans needed on site day-to-day.
Build them underground and put taxpayer funded sports arenas on top for a double whammy of “good job” creation bullshit.
At least that would lessen the footprint of wasted space.
We have about 500 MW of data centers in my city. Each has about 15 – 20 cars out front each day. I’d say about 200 direct full time jobs in what used to be a farm field employing maybe 1 guy full time. Way more property taxes for the city too
Are the the best industry to come to town – no but they were better than the status quo
How’s your electric bill? Mine has gone up (adjusted for usage) 15% from a year ago. It might not be all due to the data centers, but a healthy portion of it is.
The basic flat rate residential charge has gone from $0.15 per kWh to $0.20 per kWh from 2020 to 2025. I chose time of use pricing and I’m averaging $0.173 per kWh this year.
My all electric house + 1 EV cost me $1,324.97 in electricity last year.
Most of the data centers have gone into my city but PGE covers 50% of Oregon’s population so any data farm rate increases are spread over all rate payers while the jobs and property tax revenue stay local.
Our biggest driver for increased electricity rates is Oregon’s mandate that electrical utilities reduce their carbon footprint 90% by 2030 and 100% by 2040 That is causing PGE to purchase a lot of power as well as installing a lot of renewable and grid storage to replace the 4 GW of natural gas generation capacity that we have today.
Yeah, I’m aware. No real, lasting jobs there. Just a msssive power drain and a net negative for the community as a whole.
> they’re filling in like 10 acres of protected wetlands in an area where many people go to see the wildlife, whether it be personal enjoyment or scientific studies. They’re “offsetting” this by contributing to an already growing wetland in the opposite corner of the county
Boy, if that isn’t the epitome of the mode of thinking here: “yes, we’re driving that species extinct, but it’s ok! We’re contributing to conservation for that Other species! All of this stuff is interchangeable, right?” Human-resources-ass thinking.
I’ve been beating the membership-model drum for years now. It’s the only way to have a site that provides what its readers actually want. I’m so glad to see you’re putting maximum effort into building your membership. The internet needs this one-horse institution, if only so people have somewhere to go without crawling to Potter… Sorry, it’s that time of the year again when I re-watch It’s a Wonderful Life for the umpteenth time.
A suggestion for merch that I’ve mentioned before: co-branded tools! Much of your readership are wrenches and I bet people would love to have Autopian-branded tools. Maybe strike up a partnership with Icon or Tekton or some other supplier.
If the Autopian makes tools, they better be of the excellent quality. Maybe do a deal with Snap-On to re-brand the offerings accordingly.
While Snap On are good, they are absolutely not worth the price for the DIY’er.
GearWrench would be a great partner. I likely wouldn’t double up on a tool set but I can always use another BFW (big fckin wrench) so a co-brand crescent wrench or similar would be sweet. Automatic purchase if it’s a parallel jaw pliers wrench (knipex)
Many pros don’t think they’re worth the cost to them either, any longer.
Many specialty tools are now offered by reasonable competitors, and some old line industrial suppliers of tools have maintained their quality.
They aren’t even universally that good anymore. Lots of Chinesium at super-premium prices in those trucks these days.
10mm of the month club
Autopian branded BMW-logo wrench?
Special wrench for new, patent pending, Autopian “A”-headed bolts
Are the A-bolts for the A-holes?
beat ’em at their own game. I suggest making them reverse threaded for extra impracticality.
An Autopian JIS screwdriver set would be both useful and appropriately geeky.
Combination JIS and Pozi-drive so both the Japanese and Euro contingents are happy.
If LTT can sell $80 screwdrivers…
Now you’re talking… I need to replace a Vessel Impacta / Megadora screwdriver after having it walk out on me during a race.
Agreed, I’d buy an Autopian 10mm wrench and a JIS screwdriver for sure
One can never have too many flashlights. An Autopian-branded automotive grade flashlight of very good quality with a magnetic base, maybe rechargeable, and known affectionately by gearheads everywhere , as the “Torch” .
Only hand tools I buy are Tekton, so I second that idea
Autopian-branded Swiss Army Cyberknife.
I disagree with your statement that Google doesn’t owe you (and by extension anyone else) anything. They took over the internet. That wasn’t an accident and they did it for their own profit motives. In turn they as an enterprise are largely responsible for how people experience the web, whether we like it or not, and if they’re responsible, they should have some duty to make the web worth using. We already know how they see it though.
The deal is also this: You have all my data, and in return you give me a top notch product. They used to do that, but even before AI, the search started being just ads, now with AI it’s almost un-useable.
The thing the libertarians missed is that power is power, whether it’s corporate or government. You can’t negotiate with a megacorp.
All bandwidth belongs to the citizens.
ALWAYS
Intersting point. On the one hand, there would be no internet without Google figuring out how to find things on it. On the other hand, there’d be no Google without the folks who created and contributed to the millions of sites. It seems like both sides ought to be compensated equally as they are mutually dependent on each other. Doesn’t seem to be how it’s played out . . .
I tell every car nut/mechanic and friend about Autopian on a nearly constant basis. To the degree that they maybe are getting sick of me, but tough luck on them. This is truly a rarity in the world right now and we need to really, I mean really, understand that and keep subscribing and telling everyone about the amazing hamburgers.
Thank you!
FUCK GOOGLE, and AI too.
Duck Duck Go works fine and they don’t spy on you.
Fuck Google….and the Orange Turd for his AI stance too.
Time for Jesus to take the wheel, please….
Keep fighting the good fight! I appreciate your high quality bar – not just the authored content, but you have the only non-toxic community I’ve encountered on the Internet.
This. Great content and great commenters. That’s why I pay to be here.
AI will kill the internet. It is fast forwarding dead internet theory at a remarkable speed. I only worry about what will happen in the background after. Some countries are already letting it have government jobs. That terrifies me.
Just for anyone doubting or didn’t hear: https://time.com/7324934/albania-ai-minister-diella/
The number of people I say “Oh I wrote an article about the Rodius on the Autopian” and then have to explain what The Autopian is (people who are in the car community) is sad 🙁
They seem to like it once they look it up though.
It/s even worse when I’m talking to PR flacks.
“Have you heard of Jalopnik? We’re like the new version of that from when it was good”
”No”
JFC these people.
You guys have the “your favorite artist’s favorite artist” thing going on – the PR people may not know who you are, but I’d bet everyone else writing about cars does.
We’re the Sparks of automotive journalism.
You guys are SO much better than Sparks.
It’s always amateur hour around here.
The enshitification of the world, enhanced through, and by, AI, progresses…
Unfortunately it also seems like AI is eating its own tail.
AI generates content that gets placed on a page and provides misleading or incorrect information.
AI searches the web for content to integrate, stumbles upon its own slop and regurgitates an even more misleading version of that very content.
It can be tough to spot AI content and this process will make it so that is all the internet will be in a couple of years.
It’s bad enough that it was already crowded with idiots and miscreants, it’s only gonna get worse.
Some people have taken subtle approaches to sabotaging AI content.
The flip side of ever present data mining is the ease of feeding chaff to the machine.
It’s interesting to read about how these things work behind the scenes. It sounds like there is almost no chance of success anymore because popularity and a good product don’t equate to money.
Other than being a member and buying a little merch, do you have any thoughts on how we can help this place become more successful? For that matter, do any Autopians have any ideas?
Maybe more advertiser partnerships and I know this is not going to be nice to hear, but giving out (with subscriber permission) our emails for direct marketing? From my vantage point, if the advertiser is worthy and it would help Autopian survive and prosper I would sign on to that. A Wisconsin brewer in Minoqua has created a product portal for folks that are ‘woke’ and there are some of us who would rather help people like ourselves than ‘save’ a few dollars by handing it over to Bezos.
I figure that idea is as good as any. I’d give permission. It wouldn’t make my email any worse than it already is.
Sometimes I search for a product on amazon and when I locate it I go to the company website to buy it directly. Usually the prices are the same or better and the business get’s the full amount.
Me too. But I’d Autopian wants to
Create a portal of curated products that we might otherwise buy elsewhere and they get a % I’m all for it. As long as there isn’t a retailer selling David’s rusty trucks and jeeps that is.
“I’ve only been on the bad end of a conspiracy one time, but that’s one too many”
I heard. It’s a shame what they did to your pizzeria. It didn’t even have a basement.
Lol!
Perhaps we will go back to word of mouth, person to person trust. I took Amtrak into Chicago and back a day this week for a meeting. The train was packed with college students. The kids that sat next to me were talkative – one was headed to student teach HS english next semester, one a junior in econ and polysci to become an economist. They both struck up conversations with grouchy old looking me – both commenting on my paper copy of The Economist.
Both conversations centered around regaining trust in society, finding ground truth in the AI slop era, finding real connection when most stories are so charged with search hit words. We shared the hope that those who write will survive this upheaval. And joked that live performance may surge in the quest for authenticity.
So – I pay for subscriptions to news that I use and want to be around. And then I tell my friends. And for my fun reading? Used books from the second hand store, predating the AI era. At least until this sorts out.
I know this isn’t technically the place to bitch about Google’s AI(or maybe it is), but I’m old and have been a consumer of the internet since Mosaic, and NOTHING has pissed me off as much as Google’s AI summaries, they’re far worse than “slop”.Why? Because they’re FUCKING WRONG MOST OF THE TIME.
Look, I’ve been a mechanic most of my adult life, now I’m a fleet manager/shop foreman, I know my stuff when it comes to automotive repair, as much as one human being can in today’s complex world, and damn near every time, when someone around me asks a question, the first thing at the top of the phone screen is Google’s AI summary and it’s incorrect. Not in a pedantic way, or have a small part incorrect of a complex question, it’s just completely wrong.
And it’s wrong in an infuriatingly smug manner, no equivocating, no weasel words, it just spits out a wrong answer and unless you’re an expert or at least a learned novice, you’re not gonna know. Then the poor bastard that asked the question either goes about their repair job and screws it up, or asks someone else, or a specialty forum, and that person now has to A) answer the question correctly and B) convince the person that the first answer they received is bullshit.
It’s tiring and infuriating and I’m afraid the AI models are going to scrape already-incorrect content and get increasingly incorrect as the wrong info propagates across the Web. God help us all.
I can’t even trust Google anymore for a cursory check to see oil type and quantity when I’m helping a friend change the oil in their car.
The one thing AI got right, you don’t ever want your urinek to leak onto your cakeestor!
And they are quite literally bulldozing protected wetlands to do it. Enshittification is bleeding through to the real world too.
AI is good at some things and very bad at others. I’ve found AI good at basic stats / tasks
What was the msrp of a 2000 Honda Civic
How many cars were sold in the USA in 2004
It is also good at making tables a graphs quickly from prompts
It is very bad at trying to diagnose car problems
Wait, this place is a burger joint? I thought it was an ice cream shop!
Anyway the internet is becoming exactly what you’d expect when the gatekeepers are psychopath billionaires who don’t recognize the dystopian parts of the dystopian scifi they worship.
Sorry, sorry… it is an ice cream shop. That also serves burgers.
No Coke, Pepsi?
and as the comment above suggests, the pizza is no more
As long as wheelbarrow shrimp and shower spaghetti aren’t the only items on the menu.
“I attributed a lot of this to Discover ignoring its own guidelines for content and instead promoting a lot of AI-generated slop that somehow managed to sneak past the company’s own crossing guards (so much for Google’s excellent machine learing).”
I’m wondering if slop is really sneaking past crossing guards. Is Google actually promoting it?
I wouldn’t be surprised if Google execs are either indifferent to AI slop or even actively worried that AI is struggling. And they may well be leaning on algorithm developers to let more in.
I doubt it’s an explicit policy, if for no other reason than they want to maintain deniability. But a steady stream of memos and meetings questioning all kinds of decisions about what information gets promoted can easily make it clear to developers to stop favoring mainstream sources or setting up rigorous tests for information reliability.
Right — I think the scariest timeline is the one where nobody is left to critique AI (broadly) because they have such a vested stake in its success. Virtually nobody is taking a more conservative wait & see approach except maybe Apple — and they’re getting flak for that!
Our company has another “Intro to AI” seminar in early january and the agenda has 12 distinct AI tools listed. It all feels very much like a situation of throwing it all against the wall to see what sticks. That’s kinda sloppy for a Fortune 50 company, IMO.
Thanks for writing these posts! For many here, the backside of internet publishing and how google and similar work to filter traffic, is largely unknown – particularly as it rapidly changes.
Burn it all down. Internet 1.0 for life!
I make a point to send as many interesting articles to friends and family as I can. IMO, good websites should be household names — not something you stumble across via search…while that’s a valid source, of course, my layman’s guess is that ~50% of traffic coming directly to the site is an ideal goal. Then you know people are being pulled to you, and nobody can take that away.
The way searches go these days, I have to put my BS filter on “high” just to even read results from any major search engine. And I rarely click on anything where I don’t recognize the URL because odds are good it’s either all AI or enhanced to the point of blathering circular references and puffy, uncanny valley language.
For something so important to the billions of dollars they make, no one seems to want to destroy the internet as much as Google.
Who cares about tomorrow when there’s profits to be made today. Google search and the internet at large being mostly useless sounds like a tomorrow problem
I actually think it has less to do with any current profits and more to do with betting on a sketchy vision of future profits. And I think there’s a strong chance they’re pretty far down a sunk cost fallacy path they took several years ago.
I feel that neither current nor future profits play in to it. This whole thing is just based on FOMO. If they don’t build it, someone else will. And not having it will 100% be the death of the company while having it is a ???% chance of the death of the company.
Also, they have a gagillion dollars. When the internet becomes a useless hellscape, they’ll just aim their money cannon at some other yet-to-be-enshitified industry.
Don’t be evil they said… LOL
I recall that shit too.
They don’t.