What is Google traffic loss?
Traffic loss means when you have a certain number of visitors come to your website on average. This is considered your website traffic, which could range anywhere between 10 and 10,000 people a day. What’s always going to be somewhat consistent is how much traffic you’re getting in, so you should always see a consistent level of traffic, and if anything, it should always go up slightly. It depends on what sort of website you’ve got and whether you’re a seasonal website—you can expect to get more traffic over the Christmas period if you are a retail store, etc.—but in general, traffic to the website should be pretty steady, and the main source of this traffic is going to be Google.
If we take a look at the website below, this is a directory website that lists businesses in the UK that are “best in class.” For example, we’re listed under Charnwood Web Designs because we have over 95 star reviews and are considered best in class to get a listing on their website. I had a quick look at their SEO stats using AHREFS, and you can see from the graph below the website absolutely tanked in traffic in August 2024. Not just a little bit—it really dropped off. They went from averaging 150,000 impressions a day to now barely scraping past 5,000. This is a massive drop, and as you can see, this would have a huge impact on your business. A lot of these websites rely on Google ads that run on the website (Google AdSense), and by not having this traffic, their revenue is going to significantly drop.
Why does it happen?
The main reason why this happens is because of Google algorithm updates. “What’s the Google algorithm update?”This is basically where Google tweaks how search results are shown. So in today’s era with SEO and Google, they don’t just look at website pages and the words on that page to rank it, which was the case 15 years ago when you could literally stuff a webpage full of keywords and Google would rank that accordingly. Nowadays, there’s a lot more involved. They are obviously fighting the AI content battle, so making sure that all websites aren’t just full of AI content. They’re also fighting for useful information, evaluating whether the website is actually useful or if you’re just trying to publicise your own sales tactics using content. There are loads of things that go into it—basically, the algorithm is like a set of instructions for the computer on how it ranks your website.
When Google changes this, it can have massive, sweeping, colossal changes across the Internet, and for some unknown reasons, even credible websites can just “fall off a cliff” like the one above. There was also a case in September 2023 where a tech retro gaming website (retrododo.com) all of a sudden overnight lost 87% of its traffic.
As you can see below, they went from averaging around 500,000 Google impressions in September 2023 to 35,000 in August 2024—it has recovered a tiny bit but in reality nowhere near the height of what it was. I actually watched an interview with the owner of this website on YouTube, and he was discussing how it was massively impactful for his business. He had to lay off staff, but out of all this, he has managed to diversify and has made his brand into a much bigger entity rather than just relying on revenue from Google and AdSense.
Can you avoid it?
I’ve been in this game for a little bit now, and I realise that no, you can’t avoid these traffic drops. For example, take the company Retro Dodo—a very reputable business blogging with absolute uniqueness and quality content that their niche audience absolutely loves—so there’s no rhyme or reason why Google would tank this website’s traffic. Sometimes you do see traffic dropping on websites that seem a little bit dodgy or in a slight grey area, but I also see this on websites that are fully credible. So no, there is no rhyme or reason, and there’s no way you can avoid it. The only thing you can do is to make sure that you’re not fully reliant on Google search for your revenue in your business. This is one of the biggest takeaways: the owner of Retro Dodo has since really diversified his business, now offering different revenue streams rather than relying solely on revenue from Google AdSense.
As someone that does SEO for businesses, it can be highly infuriating when you do a lot of work and you either have zero change or even a decrease in traffic. When you look on the software that we use (Ahrefs), it tells you on the graph when Google algorithms are coming into play, and you can see how they directly impact traffic. For example, on the screenshot below, you can see exactly when this core update from Google came in, which was dated 15th of August 2024, and you can see literally overnight the traffic dipped. So yes, you can see when Google updates come, and unfortunately, we can’t avoid anything that comes our way. I understand in some respects that Google has to do things to make the search results better because the last thing we want in a few years’ time is to have millions of websites full of AI content that serves no real purpose. So it has to learn in real time how to update their own algorithms to make sure that the search results are good. But I do think that websites that have so much traffic, such as Three Best Rated, ideally need an explanation from Google as to why the traffic has dipped and if there’s anything they can do to recover it, because these are genuine businesses with real people working who are reliant on the website revenue for their income.
What can you do to mitigate this?
Google might not be around forever, and currently in the last 24 months, we’ve seen so much change in terms of the Internet landscape—we’ve seen the rise of AI massively. We’ve also seen other search engines coming online, such as ChatGPT (not chat.com), and we’re going to see more and more competition for Google. I think the only thing you can really do to protect against search-related damage to your website is to make sure that you diversify your revenue. Make sure that you’re not fully reliant on your website by utilising social media, paid ads, and anything else you can afford to put your name in multiple places across the Internet.
Are websites going to die with the rise of AI
I don’t think so. The landscape in which we search websites is probably going to change, and Google is going to get smarter and smarter, and other search engines are going to rise in prominence, but I don’t think websites at their core are going to die. You’re always going to need a place to showcase your services and represent your brand online, and this can’t be done without having a website. I think websites are always going to be key to an online business’s success. I think the way in which we find information is going to change in the future—we’re going to be heavily reliant on chatbots and virtual assistants to bring us information.
However, I do wholeheartedly feel that you still need a place to go to look for results yourself. I think the idea of sitting back and letting a robot do everything for us is somewhat boring, so yes, I do feel like we are going to change the way we search for stuff online. However, websites will always have a place, and I think the best thing you can do is what I’m doing right now in writing this article—just write the right stuff that you find interesting and relevant to your industry, and hopefully Google will pick up on these natural content sources and rank you well for it. Even if it doesn’t, it still shows that you’ve got credibility, and visitors who come to your website and check out your news page or blog page will still see that you’re writing information about your industry and your business, and it still adds credibility to your online presence.
The state of SEO in 2025
SEO also search engine optimisation I think he’s changing quite rapidly so in the last five years it was just a case of making sure you paid rank on Google going through a few chat boxes making sure you doing all the appropriate things put in the right content on your website right in the crap blogs making sure you got directory website link back to your website doing some backing all the usual stuff that’s involved in SCO however going forward I think the landscape is changing. I’m gonna have to be a lot more diverse and I think video he’s going to be at the forefront of new content going forward to 2025 will be the year of video content so when you see a piece of content online what you want to try and do is attribute to video to it so the same way that I’m going to this block post once I’ve finished the writing I’ll just do a quick five minute video going through my blood post talking about it so then you’ve given the audience different medias to consume the content so people want to sit and read it yes they’re fine. I can if they wanna sit and watch a YouTube video streaming Cave TV again they can so do different ways of doing it I think.
Also focus on different aspects of your online present so looking at your social media looking at your website looking at whether you coming up in AI Chat Bot on ChatGPT et cetera just making sure that you’ve got a good presence and I think the biggest thing that’s going to affect companies in 2025 is Google business profile
2025 is the rise of Google Business Profile (GBP)
Your Google Business Profile is mainly for local businesses, allowing you to maintain a presence on Google local search, collect reviews, share updates, display opening times, and more. This will be crucial in 2025 because reviews are the key differentiator between businesses. With more positive reviews, you’ll attract more traffic and foot traffic through your door. This aspect of your online presence will become even more vital than it is today.
