Below are the most recent 30 comments. I try to keep it clean of comment spam, but some times things
get through and it takes me several hours to get to it. So please excuse any of that comment spam.
Every second day, new reports of volatility arrive. Just ridiculous at this point. It's never going to end until every single publisher is crushed.
If you're a true industry expert within your niche, theres an easy solution. Cast some spells, make some potions, do your rituals?
They work for paying customers so it must work for you surely?
i'm basically just bleeding out. site isn't even in discover (lost that years ago) and this update is killing us. we don't have self serving listicles either. always something. such a waste to do anything anymore. cancelled semrush and all tools. why bother looking at them or working on the site or publishing new content? been holding on to a couple employees, although they haven't worked any hours in over a year, but left them attached hoping i'd give them some good news that we are resuming work. today, i will officially let them go. i've lost all hope that this will ever recover. hopefully karma strikes those who deserve it.
Like muriatic acid poured on an open wound. Google earns record profits, by stealing content from publishers, and their tax bill drops by 35%.
<b>Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet report plunging tax bills thanks to AI investment and new rules in Washington</b>
<blockquote>The annual report from Alphabet, meanwhile, reported a tally that combined US federal and state tax totals and showed a drop from about $21.1 billion in 2024 to $13.8 billion in 2025.</blockquote><blockquote>"Tax cuts pushed through by the Trump administration last year and in 2017 have made it possible for the fastest-growing companies in the world to pay record-low federal income tax rates on their income," the group wrote. “This is likely just the tip of the iceberg with the vast majority of the nation's largest corporations yet to disclose their 2025 tax payments."</blockquote>Full story: <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-meta-and-alphabet-report-plunging-tax-bills-thanks-to-ai-investment-and-new-rules-in-washington-161229652.html">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-meta-and-alphabet-report-plunging-tax-bills-thanks-to-ai-investment-and-new-rules-in-washington-161229652.html</a>
i just had a dream...
i woke up and check my stats... omg, so many leads!!! i was so happy... i faster come here to seroundtable and everyone was happily sharing their traffic stats and we're all getting our traffic and sales back. we were all congratulating each other. i was hopping around like a little girl in tears... never felt so happy after so long.
then i woke up.
FUCK!
Barry, about a couple of months ago I sent you a message saying that google at a roundtable told to publishers to forget traffic from Google. It seems that this is it...
Traffic from Google is so dead their algo/AI needs a defibrillator. In following past trends, I expect this volatility to continue mowing down publishers by stealing more of our content/traffic.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9731611d53a350d66be7c04e340a234ced827434b509d43b21c6fe0fbb3262e0.jpg
how is that? how can you have thousands of clicks from google but only tens from bing, wow that's really low
then it's not even worth optimizing for bing
Tell me about it, haven't had a good night's sleep in months, and now I'm very scared I won't be able to keep a roof above my head. Crushed basically overnight, no recovery, no idea what happened. November, ironically, was one of my best months in terms of growth across News, Search and such and that all ended on December 12. Since then, nothing but bot traffic, no impressions, no clicks and yeh... at one pont 120,000 clicks in a day, now I am lucky if I hit 80.
Bing for comparison, not all that much traffic here if I'm being honest. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1c8bbad747cf87aaefbf412dee97971a3c1581767bad8bfa7fc05eb906447903.png
You guys want to know something more wtf? It turns out that Reddit’s quarterly earnings were great. They made huge ad revenue again despite some of us reporting that Reddit’s traffic fell last November-December, according to SEO tools like Semrush.
But the stock has dropped like a rock.
Reason? Their user growth has slowed, and the CEO announced that they will stop disclosing logged-in vs logged out users in future financial reports.
<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/maybe-wasn-t-wrong-reddit-171109326.html">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/maybe-wasn-t-wrong-reddit-171109326.html</a>
I guess even the CEO knows they will have issues getting new users, especially with AI overviews and AI mode.
And it is apparent that Reddit has many fake user signups. Sometimes you can see Redditors posting very weird questions that just don’t make sense. It is like karma and engagement farming. And these users feel like bots because they will either stop posting later, or their other posts feel so bot-like. I won’t be surprised if Reddit is flooding its platform with its own bots to manipulate engagement and registration numbers (that’s what Pinterest was caught doing some years back).
Yeah, it is getting really worrisome and absolutely WTF. Last year, I remember seeing some AI edited video of Warren Buffett saying he believes Bitcoin is the future and how one can make huge fortunes out of it. What’s scary is that the AI even generated his fake voice, and it sounds so real. Like, absolutely WTF.
And Big Tech aren’t doing anything about it. Google and Facebook always claim they’re clamping down on scam ads, but they never do so because it is good money.
You guys should read this if you’re interested:
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/">https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/</a>
Oh, and another:
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbryanporter_google-allows-scam-sites-to-advertise-on-activity-7374108479508328449-OGzy">https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbryanporter_google-allows-scam-sites-to-advertise-on-activity-7374108479508328449-OGzy</a>
More than a decade ago, I remember Google didn’t allow anyone to bid a company’s name. But then, they allowed it later. The impact was almost immediate – competitors bidding each other’s brand keywords, and they were practically just stealing each other’s business. And, of course, scammers came in to create fake tech support websites.
Now add this with AI, and it is a blackhatter’s galore.
It's scary, AI is getting so real and with watermarks being removed, they can be used to tarnish people's reputations. Governments make these videos illegal but it won't stop and they'll be hard to disprove that they were fake once they've gone viral.
Many are using for propaganda purposes too. There’s just no end to it now.
It is ironic that Google once detest AI generated content, but then allows it. Then they created tools to let others generate even more AI slop everywhere. But, at the same time, they’re harvesting content from everyone to ‘train’ their AI.
https://media1.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTg5OGZmOWM5bHhoaWRjbHp0Zm4yN2ZrajhtempoNDIwYTRnOXoyN2dmZGxpZnRsbyZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/I9ETGDiI3MN8s/giphy-downsized-small.mp4