Ya, I'm in a similar boat (https://shepherd.com). Despite sky-high engagement stats, we lost 70% of our traffic from Google. Luckily, we have a strong brand, a growing community, and get decent traffic directly (and from other search engines).
We are surviving, but we've changed our entire focus as the web we know is a dead man walking. AI bots are the new frontend for the web, and I am curious about what the web will look like in 2 to 10 years. I hope the AI companies start paying to access the data as they answer queries or construct dynamic frontends (but I doubt it).
I have many friends who ran great indie websites, and it has been sad to see that 90% of them are now frozen or closed.
I expect to lose a lot of information websites, especially when the outcome of a long research is a few bullet points (such as product/place recommendations). Once tech companies feel the need to monetise LLMs, all bets are off.
I am curious what it looks like when you need a good product review in two or three years. Is YouTube the only trustworthy source by real people? For most products, the web is just going to be Astroturfed Reddit posts and Forbes AI-written junk that didn't even have the product to test.
I'm hoping paid MCP data sets might get there, then I could make my data available there, and hopefully make a $1 to $4 per thousand requests to the data set. If that replaced the loss of Google traffic, that would be amazing.
I'd love for 25% of my AI subscription to go toward that each month, i.e., I can pull "a list of all science fiction books the NYT recommended in the 1950s" and it gives NYT a few cents to go through their data...
We are surviving, but we've changed our entire focus as the web we know is a dead man walking. AI bots are the new frontend for the web, and I am curious about what the web will look like in 2 to 10 years. I hope the AI companies start paying to access the data as they answer queries or construct dynamic frontends (but I doubt it).
I have many friends who ran great indie websites, and it has been sad to see that 90% of them are now frozen or closed.