Business · 1d ago
Google Zero: The End of Free Web Traffic
Google's long-standing deal to send traffic to websites in exchange for indexing their content is collapsing. AI-generated answers and zero-click searches now keep users on Google, reducing referral traffic. Publishers face a new reality where Google no longer needs their content to satisfy user queries.
Meridian48 take
This shift underscores Google's growing power to dictate the web's economics, but publishers' over-reliance on Google traffic was always a risky bet.
google-zerosearch-traffic