535: The Death of Google Search: Here’s What’s Happening

Podcast: Download (Duration: 40:29 — 74.4MB)

Google search is still up and running, and the game has changed so radically that treating it like the reliable traffic source it used to be is a good way to go out of business. Since Google’s March 2024 core update (and the ongoing monthly updates that followed), user-generated sites like Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn have jumped to the top of most search results, real content sites have watched their traffic get sliced in half, and small publishers are quietly giving up on SEO for the first time in a decade. On this episode my co-host Toni Herrbach and I unpack what actually happened, why it happened, and what content creators and ecommerce brands should do about it.

We pull no punches on Google. We also cover the $60 million Reddit-Google training data deal, Sundar Pichai’s recent public statements about the “future of websites,” how AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are quietly eating the fact-based query segment, and why my traffic on MyWifeQuitHerJob dropped by half overnight and then recovered three days later.

Here is what is actually happening with Google search in 2024, why the old SEO playbook stopped working, and what to do next.

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Key takeaways

• Google has shipped a major algorithm update almost every month since late 2023, and each one has pushed Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn higher at the expense of independent sites.
• Reddit jumped from the 80th-biggest SEO site on Google to the 6th biggest in the span of about a year, after Google signed a reported $60 million deal to license Reddit’s data for AI training.
• ChatGPT and Perplexity are absorbing the “fact lookup” query segment (unit conversions, definitions, trivia) that used to belong to Google.
• The old EEAT ranking signals (Expertise, Authority, Trust) have effectively been overridden by Google’s tilt toward user-generated content.
• The winning response is diversification: email, YouTube, short-form video, direct brand traffic, and building the kind of brand authority that survives an algorithm change.
• SEO strategy has not changed. Answer real questions people ask. What changed is what Google chooses to rank on top of those answers.

Is Google search really dying?

Google search is losing its dominance over how people find information for the first time in 20 years, even though it is nowhere close to shutting down. Search behavior is splintering across ChatGPT for facts and definitions, Perplexity for cited answers, TikTok and YouTube for how-to, and Reddit for opinions, and Google itself is now serving up so much Reddit and Quora content that the “10 blue links” era is effectively over.

The parallel Toni draws on the episode is Yahoo, which went from the default search engine to irrelevance inside about 18 months once Google shipped in the late 1990s. Google is far more entrenched than Yahoo was (Android, Chrome, the Apple search deal), but “entrenched” is not the same as “safe.” Every previous king of a tech category eventually loses it.

The specific mechanism killing Google’s usefulness right now is the trade-off it made between quality and licensing revenue: it is filling the top of the results page with UGC platforms it has deals with, at the cost of the independent sites that used to answer the query directly.

What did Google’s 2024 core updates actually do?

Google’s March 2024 core update and the follow-on updates through April did two things: they pushed user-generated content platforms (Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn) to the top of search results for a huge share of queries, and they manually penalized thousands of independent sites for what Google called “scaled content abuse,” largely aimed at AI-generated content. The combined effect is that many established, human-written blogs lost 30 to 70 percent of their organic traffic in a matter of weeks.

Here is the pattern I have watched playing out across my own network. Mastermind friends who have been running six- and seven-figure blogs for a decade are seeing their best-performing posts drop from page one to page five in a single update. My BumblebeeLinens ecommerce blog has stayed relatively stable, but MyWifeQuitHerJob got shaken up, and I have seen 50 percent traffic drops recover in 72 hours (and vice versa) with no explanation from Google.

The pain is not evenly distributed. Sites in personal finance, coupons, health, and small-business advice have been hit hardest, because those are the exact categories where Reddit and Quora have the most user threads to promote in.

Why is Reddit ranking so high on Google right now?

Reddit is ranking so high on Google because Google reportedly signed a $60 million deal to license Reddit’s data for AI training, and (whether by design or by silent side agreement) has since started surfacing Reddit threads at the top of huge swaths of search results. Reddit went from being the 80th-biggest SEO site on Google to the 6th biggest inside roughly 12 months, which is a bigger organic climb than any single site has made in Google’s history.

The content quality argument makes this even more frustrating. The Reddit threads Google is serving up are frequently three to four years old, often wrong, and increasingly gamed by paid posters and marketers who now understand the traffic prize on the other side. Users type “best budget mattress 2024” and get a Reddit thread from 2021 that recommends a discontinued product.

Quora and LinkedIn have benefited from the same tilt, though at a smaller scale. Quora tends to surface for definitional queries, LinkedIn for professional or B2B queries. Any query that used to be answered by a real blog now competes with those three UGC giants for the top four to six slots.

How Sundar Pichai’s “future of websites” comment lands with content creators

Sundar Pichai recently gave a talk claiming the “role of websites remains crucial” for the “richness and diversity of content,” and that Google search is not going to be replaced by AI. The reaction across the blogging community was some variation of “then why are you actively killing websites by surfacing Reddit above them?”

The kinder read on his comment is that AI needs a source layer to pull from, and that layer has to be independent websites, so Google has an interest in keeping publishers alive. The less kind read is that the message was PR designed to slow the bleeding of publishers who are already talking openly about giving up. Both reads can be true simultaneously.

What Pichai did not address, and what publishers actually want an answer to, is whether Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience) will keep sending clicks to source websites or capture the click for itself. Every early data point suggests SGE captures the click. If that trend holds, “the role of websites remains crucial” becomes a compliment paid at a funeral.

Are AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity replacing Google?

AI search engines are already replacing Google for the fact-lookup segment (unit conversions, definitions, “who won the 1994 Heisman”), and are eating into the research and comparison segment. Toni and I both now default to ChatGPT for anything factual and only use Google to double-check. That behavior shift, multiplied across hundreds of millions of users, is exactly what pulls the floor out from under search advertising revenue.

Perplexity is the interesting middle option. It answers with an AI-generated response but cites its sources with clickable links, which means publishers can still catch a citation click on queries that used to send traffic. Perplexity’s citation rate is about 13 percent of relevant queries, versus roughly 0.6 percent for ChatGPT, which makes it far friendlier to sites that want to be found inside AI answers.

Google has been widely reported to be considering charging for its AI-powered search experience, because AI queries cost an order of magnitude more to serve than traditional searches. Bing meanwhile has quietly integrated AI answers for free and is picking up market share for the first time in years.

What should content creators and ecommerce brands do now?

The one-line answer is diversify away from Google search and invest in brand authority that survives an algorithm change. Every single one of my friends who has built a durable business over the last decade did it by leveraging one traffic source into another, not by depending on a single channel.

The concrete moves that are working right now for people I know:

1. Own a direct audience. Email and SMS are the only two channels a platform cannot take away from you overnight. If you do not have a growing email list, that is your top priority.
2. Publish on YouTube. Video results now show up above blog posts for a large share of queries. If your blog post ranked and your video did not, the video may still be pulling traffic in the top of the SERP.
3. Diversify to short-form video. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels are cheap to test and reach audiences Google cannot.
4. Build brand authority. Sites like NerdWallet get direct visits because people trust the brand. When a searcher types your brand into Google instead of a keyword, you are effectively immune to core updates.
5. Optimize for Bing and AI answers. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools. Get your content into Perplexity’s citation pool. Add schema markup so AI engines can extract your facts cleanly.
6. Keep publishing on the blog. The strategy has not changed. Answer real questions clearly. What changed is which sites Google chooses to rank on top of those answers, and that will keep swinging.

The single biggest mistake right now would be to panic and abandon the blog. The strategies that ranked in 2020 still rank when they get promoted. The problem is that they are getting demoted for Reddit, and Reddit will not stay on top forever.

Google search vs AI search: side-by-side

Signs a Google traffic drop is from the algorithm and not your site

If you were hit by the 2024 updates, here is how to tell whether the drop is algorithmic (which you cannot fix quickly) or something specific to your site (which you can). Check all four before spending a dollar on a technical audit.

• Your rankings did not drop for a specific keyword. They dropped across many keywords at once, on the same day.
• The URLs that replaced you at the top are Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, or news sites, not competitor blogs.
• Your rankings for e-commerce or transactional pages held up better than your informational blog posts.
• Your Google Search Console shows no manual actions and no coverage errors.

If those four are true, this is Google reshuffling the deck, not a punishment. Do not rewrite everything, do not delete old content in a panic, and do not chase AI-detector tools. The best move is to keep publishing, diversify traffic, and wait for the next update to swing.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google search dying in 2024?

Google search is losing dominance, not dying. Search behavior is splintering to ChatGPT for facts, Perplexity for cited answers, TikTok and YouTube for how-to, and Reddit for opinions. Google will remain the largest search entry point for years, but its share of the query pie is shrinking for the first time in two decades.

Why is Reddit ranking so high on Google?

Reddit is ranking high on Google because Google signed a reported $60 million deal in early 2024 to license Reddit’s data for AI training, and Reddit has since climbed from the 80th-biggest SEO site to the 6th biggest. Whether by algorithm design or side agreement, Reddit threads now dominate the top of many search results.

What was the March 2024 Google core update?

The March 2024 core update was Google’s largest algorithm change in years. It pushed user-generated platforms (Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn) to the top of many results and manually penalized thousands of sites for “scaled content abuse,” largely aimed at AI-generated content. Independent blogs commonly saw 30 to 70 percent traffic drops.

Can I recover from a Google 2024 update traffic drop?

Recovery is possible but not guaranteed. Sites that build genuine brand authority, add original first-hand experience to their posts, and get cited by other trusted sites tend to recover faster. Sites hoping to be moved back purely on a future algorithm swing may or may not get lucky.

Should I still invest in SEO in 2024?

Yes, but not exclusively. SEO still delivers when Google promotes your content, and the fundamentals (real answers, structured content, authoritative sources) also carry over to AI citations and to YouTube search. Treat SEO as one of four to five traffic channels rather than the only one.

Is Bing worth optimizing for now?

Bing is worth minimal optimization effort in 2024, because its search results have not been reshuffled as aggressively as Google’s and its market share is slowly growing. Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools takes 30 minutes, and Bing sends its indexing signals to ChatGPT search, so the return on that half-hour is disproportionately high.

What is the best replacement for Google search?

There is no single replacement. Use Perplexity for anything you need with sources, ChatGPT for definitions and synthesis, YouTube for how-to and reviews, Reddit for opinions from real users, and Google (or Bing) for local and commercial queries. Serious researchers now stack these tools, one query at a time.

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