Seth Godin complained in June that Google has spent a decade making independent blogs less visible, and he had Google Gemini confirm it. The AI listed a series of numbers and labelled them verified reality. Some of them, however, do not hold up. The trend is real, though, and for independent creators it carries a clear lesson.
Over the past decade, the search engine has changed from a gateway into a destination. It answers directly on the results page, and the free traffic that websites once depended on is disappearing. Anyone who builds their entire livelihood on it is betting on an asset that does not belong to them.
Three waves that hit independent websites
It began in 2013. On 13 March Google announced, and on 1 July it shut down Google Reader, breaking the RSS ecosystem through which websites kept a direct relationship with their readers. According to The Next Web, the rival Feedly picked up 500,000 users in 48 hours, but readers mostly moved to algorithmic feeds and search engines.
The second wave came with the algorithm. The Helpful Content update from September 2023 and the follow-up core update of March 2024 rewrote the rankings, and small sites fell. The review site HouseFresh described how it lost around 91% of its search traffic. Google, meanwhile, set itself the goal of cutting low-quality content in its results by 40%.
The third wave is zero-click. According to a SparkToro study, in 2024 58.5% of searches in the US and 59.7% in Europe ended without a single click. AI Overviews have deepened this. Pew Research measured that on a page with an AI summary, people click a result in only 8% of cases instead of 15%, and in 26% of cases they end the search right there.
The impact on websites is measurable. According to Chartbeat data, processed by the Reuters Institute, traffic from Google to publishers fell globally by 33% in 2025. Small websites lost 60% over two years, while large ones lost only 22%.
Which numbers hold up and which do not
For creators and brands alike, the difference between a thesis and a documented number matters. Godin’s claim that more than half of searches end without a click holds up, and the data even exceeds it. The claimed decline of 40 to 90% holds only in part. Real websites did experience the upper bound, but the lower 40% is not a decline of websites, it is Google’s goal of trimming low-quality content. And the claim of a 58% loss for independent websites since 2024 has no support in any primary source, as the figure coincides with the American zero-click figure. The story is true, but some of the numbers are not.
GEO means nothing without SEO
But beware of the shorthand that SEO is dead and GEO has taken over. Generative Engine Optimization is the effort to get content into the answers of AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, so that they cite you rather than simply listing you among the blue links. The term was coined by an academic paper from 2023 (Princeton, Georgia Tech and the Allen Institute for AI), and its conclusion is unambiguous. Citations, statistics and clarity raise visibility in AI answers by 30 to 40%, while old-style keyword stuffing does nothing. These principles largely belong to SEO.
That GEO rests on SEO is shown by the data. According to an analysis by seoClarity of 362,000 queries, 94% of AI overviews overlap with the organic top twenty, and 56% of citations in them come from pages that already rank on Google. BrightEdge also found that this dependence is growing: the share of citations from organically ranked pages rose from 32% to 55% in sixteen months. In other words, to get cited by AI, you usually have to rank already. SEO remains the foundation, and GEO is an add-on.
That this is a serious direction is shown by Anthropic itself. The company behind Claude is hiring an SEO Lead, not a GEO Lead, and its qualifications for the role explicitly include “Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategies for LLM-powered search”. Alongside this come a few small tricks, for example that AI pulls LinkedIn profiles in as a trusted source about a person and a brand. The channel is still small, though. According to Press Gazette and Similarweb data, referrals from ChatGPT to fourteen major publishers rose eightfold to 3.5 million a month, but they still make up less than 0.1% of visits.
Own the relationship, not the traffic
The conclusion is not resignation but a shift of focus. Borrowed traffic is a random gift, not a foundation to build on. The one thing nobody can switch off is the creator’s direct relationship with their audience.
That relationship today is mainly email and subscriptions. Substack passed five million paid subscriptions in March 2025, and in July it raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion. This is no coincidence. It is an escape from borrowed reach to an owned audience.
For Creator’s Hub, the lesson is the same. The most valuable asset is not a search ranking but our own data, newsletter and direct subscribers, who come back regardless of what Google does.
The question for independent creators is not how to beat the algorithm. It is who will be in their address book when the algorithm changes its rules again.
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