One Of The Last Independent Car Sites Loses Its Independence As Google Strangles Publishers

Being an independent publisher in 2026 is just watching Google repeatedly make your life miserable, no matter how much you attempt to play by the rules they tell you to follow. Carscoops, one of the last remaining independent sites in the car media universe, has been sold off to mega publisher Static Media, which also owns Jalopnik.

Yes, this will end with me asking you to become a member, because membership is the best way we have to bring you the articles and writers you love without having to stuff the site with a miserable amount of ads, slop, and junk. But first, I’d like to explain what’s happening.

Just to give you a chart to set your hair on fire, here’s what website tracking software Similarweb* shows as the last three months at two major publishers (I will blur their names):

Yikes! This shows a massive decline in traffic, as measured indirectly by Similarweb over the last three months. One site produces a lot of great, original content, and the other has a mix of original reporting and slop-heavy freelance. I think it’s meaningful that neither were spared. My sense is that October is only going to be worse, and that this might explain why Carscoops is just the latest site to sell to a conglomerate.

Enshittification On Steroids

Most of the news or enthusiast sites you read, whether inside or outside of the automotive universe, are probably funded primarily by display advertising, and most of that is likely programmatic advertising (90% according to most sources). This isn’t a carmaker doing an ad deal with a publisher, this is one set of servers selling to another set of servers, with publishers getting a cut.

In theory, this means that anyone can set up a website and start making money without having a huge sales team (or any sales team at all). In practice, what this means is that ethical publishers have to walk a tightrope: more ads means more money, but you don’t want so many ads that the site is unreadable.

Under this system, independent sites once flourished, and much of that had to do with a tacit agreement between massive platforms (Facebook, Google) and publishers. These platforms needed good content to make their products work, and rewarded good content with traffic, that was then served advertising. Facebook was one of the first major traffic sources to pop up, and helped popularize Buzzfeed-y style listicles and curiosity gap headlines (You’ll never believe how quickly contributors to that company got screwed when the Facebook traffic went away).

The Autopian is a post-Facebook-Apocalypse site, so we knew when we started that we’d never want to be reliant on any social network for traffic. Google was a slightly different story. Google doesn’t produce “content” in a practical way. It has, historically, connected valuable content with readers. This was initially Search, which led to some hacky SEO writing (What time is the Super Bowl?), but also products like Google News, which rewarded original work.

In fact, Google still tells publishers that when it ranks content it’s looking for “helpful, reliable, people-first” content. With Google leaning hard into AI summaries, search traffic suddenly became less valuable. Because most people on the web use some sort of Google product, the company seemed to try to make up this gap with a product called Google Discover. As a site, our great and original content was rewarded with traffic via Google Discover.

This all made some sort of sense to me, because even Google’s AI products rely on on our work to feed its AI models. Gemini doesn’t review cars. It doesn’t cover car news. Google needs us, like we need them. You’d think that would be enough to save publishers, but you’d be wrong.

I’ve written about this before, but secondary monitoring shows that what Google Discover has rewarded included our own original content, made-up hallucinated nonsense like the above, and crappy trending writing. So long as it was also rewarding us, I was fine with it. We did bend our headlines a bit towards what we knew worked on the platform when some genius came up with a good headline configuration, but we mostly just covered what we knew would serve our readership.

And then Google Discover traffic dramatically dropped. According to the latest report from Chartbeat, since July 2024, Google Search has dropped by 46% as a share of traffic, and Google Discover dropped by 28.4%. That’s across all the sites that are served by Chartbeat. For news publishers I’ve spoken with, the hit from Google Discover has been much larger. Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen a 63.8% drop in Google Organic traffic according to Google Analytics, though we’re in better shape than many other publishers.

What is Google thinking? I don’t know, but I think two things are happening. The first is a product issue, with Google using AI-fueled summaries to reduce the amount of traffic sent to websites. The second is a Google attempting to clean up bad actors in its ecosystem–the hardest hit sites seem to create a lot of slop content. Unfortunately, it’s never felt like Google has ever been that good at determining what is good content and what is bad content in any sort of consistent way, so a lot of original reporting gets hit with friendly fire.

How This Forces Publishers Like Carscoops Into The Hands Of Private Equity And Mega Publishers

I’ve been a Carscoops fan for a long time, and I’ve appreciated the way that they cover just about everything car-related, including more of the smaller European car news we don’t always post about. For many years, I’ve worked with the site’s publisher and founder John Halas to understand the larger web publishing ecosystem, and I’ve valued the insight he’s provided.

Carscoops, though, doesn’t have a membership model or any other obvious source of revenue other than display advertising. This means that it had nothing really to buffer itself against Google’s unpredictable behavior. Even sites that get value other ways (affiliate revenue, sales funnel) haven’t been able to stand on their own. This is why one company now owns MotorTrend, Autoweek, Car And Driver, and Road & Track.

Static Media, which bought Carscoops, was the buyer of last resort for Jalopnik. The details of the sale likely won’t ever be revealed, but I can guess what happens next. The website has already been converted to look like a Static Media site and it seems like the masthead has shrunk, with longtime editors gone. If it follows the path of other Static Media sites, full-timers will be slowly bled off and replaced with some mix of permalancers and poorly paid outside freelancers edited by other freelancers, leading to some bizarre outcomes.

I’m glad the site will exist in some form and that at least a few writers will continue to have jobs, but I fear for what will happen to a once-thriving site that wasn’t beholden to a massive corporate parent.

How To Stop This From Happening Again

We don’t do AI-wrtten stories. We don’t do slop. We pay people fairly. None of this is easy, but it’s our belief that the slow decline of other sites will eventually lead people to realize that a website like The Autopian is worth supporting. The way we get that support is via membership.

If you’re already a member, thank you so much for being a part of the community. If you haven’t become a member yet and have thought about doing so, now would be a key time. This hit we’re getting from Google is happening exactly at the worst time, as this is the time of year when ad rates are at the highest. Bleeding our traffic now is a huge blow to our bottom line. It’ll take about 2,000 new members to make up for the loss we’re projecting this year from losing Google traffic.

Given that Google relies on us to provide it insight, I’m not sure what the end goal is here. How does it benefit Google to drive publishers out of business? I don’t know, but I want to continue to build a model that doesn’t rely on them as a source.

And, as a perk, if you become a member the display ads and video pop-up goes away.

Please join if you can.

*There is no direct way to compare two websites, as most sites don’t release traffic data, so this is the best way to currently compare, and I’ve found it to be accurate enough to get close to an apples-to-apples comparison.

Top photo: Carscoops/Library of Congress via WikiCommons