Niche Twins - Google has a fatal flaw 🚨

If your dog refuses to go for her early morning walk, you should pay attention. It might save your life.

Animal fatalities are much lower (often non-existent) when compared to human fatalities whenever there is a natural disaster caused by an earth quake.

Take a tsunami, for instance.

An earthquake starts at the ocean floor, rapidly displacing the water above and below it.

The result?

100 foot waves, moving towards land at speeds up to 500 miles per hour.

But the seismic pulse caused by the earthquake travels through the water and the ground 10 times faster than the wave above.

Hours before the tsunami hits land, animals start acting strange.

Elephants group together and move towards higher ground.

Zoo animals return to their shelters.

Dogs refuse their morning walks.

They act restless.

They whimper.

Then the tsunami hits and catches everyone off guard.

But there were signs.

There are always signs.

In recent months, Google has started to whimper.

And while the threat isn't imminent, and your life isn't in danger, your business might be.

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Here are a few of the "whimpers" Google has let out recently that you should be paying attention to...

The "Helpful" Content Update

The last Google Search algorithm update was over 4 months ago now.

And we all know the results at this point - smaller sites (niche sites), and even some sites that considered themselves a "brand", got absolutely destroyed.

Google replaced these smaller sites in their results with large forums, like Quora and Reddit.

Forums in general EXPLODED with traffic post algo update.

Glen Allsopp from Detailed.com did a great post-update analysis of 10,000 different keywords where product reviews ranked highly and he found the following:

• Forums like Quora and Reddit had 3x the presence of every other site combined.
• The 'Discussions and Forums' SERP feature was present in 77% of searches (Reddit was present in 97.5% of those!).
• 51% of the Reddits top-ranking threads had spam as a top comment.

So Google changed its algorithm, favoring Reddit (and other forums).

Shrewd folks observed this change and saw an opportunity to spam Reddit with their affiliate links.

Now more than half of Reddit's top product recommendations (which Google actively promotes!) are not "real" recommendations.

It looks a whole lot like Google was having a hard time ranking sites (post the massive influx of AI content from ChatGPT and others), and decided to up-rank Reddit to offload the burden to them.

But as it turns out, Reddit is just as susceptible to spam as Google.

Google Will Pay Reddit $60M a Year to Use Its Content for AI

Just yesterday it was announced that Google and Reddit would be entering a joint partnership.

Google will pay for Reddit's content - $60,000,000 a year to help train Google's AI models.

Hmmm.

So let's get this straight...

A little over 4 months ago Google changes its algorithm, resulting in Reddit getting ~266% more traffic every month (~400,000,000 more visitors, every single month!).

And now, just 120 days later, it's revealed that Google and Reddit are entering a partnership?

Oh, and just a few hours ago Reddit filed to go public (IPO).

Not the best optics, to say the least...

Google Halts Gemini AI Image Tool Just A Few Weeks After Launch

Without mincing words, Google released an AI image tool a few weeks ago that had a really hard time producing images of white people.

Here are just a few examples:

In 2000 years, a pope has never looked like either of the images produced. I am of course not saying that's a good thing. I'm simply stating reality.

I'm no historian, but that's not what Vikings looked like...

I mean it couldn't even produce a white result when you ask it for a ginger person. Come on!

The AI model even goes as far as to make sure Natzis are diverse! Wow.

But it doesn't stop at race.

Gemini shows women signing the Declaration of Independence.

The examples are endless.

Gemini got so much backlash that they shut the product down yesterday so they could "fix it".

But we know the truth - Google spent a TON of time testing this product BEFORE it was launched.

They observed these results and released it anyways. They probably even thought they would be celebrated for the types of results it produced!

It was only after they got massive backlash that they decided to shut things down.

So What's This All Mean?

Here's the thing, Google isn't going away any time soon.

They have a mountain of cash and massive market share.

And it's very possible (even likely?) that they get through all this and end up on top.

After all, they have more data than maybe anyone else, and data is the fuel for AI.

But at the very least Google has shown that 1. they do not care at all about you, or your content and 2. their current "talent" inside the company are capable of massively corrupting their products.

So it's also possible that we look back on this time period as the first inning of the end of Google.

There are certainly signs.

All this points to what you already know - do everything you can to reduce your dependence on Google.

Google can be a slice of the pie, but not the whole thing.

Newsletters, social, software, your own products and services.

Keith and I have checked 3 of those 4 boxes so far, and we plan to continue that trend.

You should too.

Have a great weekend.

Talk soon,

Mike

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