There was a time when Google felt like a generous librarian. You wrote good stuff, it helped people find it. A fair deal.
But year by year, that deal got worse.
1998–2011:
A golden age (in hindsight). Publish useful content, earn links, get traffic. Google even told you what people searched to find you. Transparency felt normal. It wasn’t.
2011–2014:
The keyword data vanished. “Privacy,” they said — unless you paid for ads. The crackdown on low-effort content began, but with it came a new posture: suspicion.
2014–2015:
Google began showing full answers pulled from your site — right in the results. No click needed. Your content, their interface. A quiet pivot from search engine to answer engine.
2015–2019:
Clicks declined. “People Also Ask” flooded the page, encouraging users to stay put and keep clicking within Google. Less room for you. More signals for them.
2019–2020:
The algorithm updates got more frequent, more cryptic. Optimising for search became guesswork. Vague guidance replaced actual feedback.
2020–2022:
Ads expanded. Organic results shrank. A new leadership team doubled down: more monetisation, less user trust. Relevance took a back seat to revenue.
2022–2024:
AI arrived. Google started using your content to generate answers — bypassing your site entirely. And then came the final twist of the knife: Google struck licensing deals with giant platforms like Reddit and Wikipedia.
Big brands were rewarded with visibility. Small publishers? Buried. The message was clear: if you’re not already massive, you don’t deserve to be seen.
Entire categories of websites — niche communities, specialist blogs, indie review sites — quietly disappeared. Replaced by Reddit threads, AI summaries, and brand-name blurbs.
2025:
Now the strategy is fully operational. Google scrapes your content, rewrites it, and serves it up with no attribution, less traffic, and no way to know what’s working. The links still exist, technically — but they’re buried in AI-generated soup. Clickthrough is a coin toss. Accuracy is worse.
It’s not about helping users anymore. It’s about owning the interface — and slowly starving the rest of the web out of existence.
This isn’t a search engine. It’s a black hole.
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