AI is killing All About Berlin
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This is the traffic to All About Berlin, the website that I run since 2017, and live from since 2020. After 7 years of growth, it has lost 70% of its traffic to Google AI Overviews.
When you Googled something, you used to get a link to my website. Now you get a page of ads, then an AI-generated answer trained on my content, then finally a link to my website. This has a devastating impact on traffic.
It’s hard to fund my work with 70% fewer visitors. Soon, I will need another way to pay my rent. Instead of writing new guides, I spend my days preparing for that future.
It’s not just about the money. I have poured 8 years of my life into making something good and useful. Strangers’ faces light up when they learn that I run All About Berlin. Local and federal government offices refer people to my guides. The Berlin immigration office uses my data about themselves. It inspired two government portals and a few similar websites in other cities.
If my work just get mixed into an AI-generated answer, I lose my voice and my audience. My carefully chosen words lose their meaning. No one shakes my hand and buys me a beer. No one tells me how their citizenship application went.
This is not an isolated case. Many website owners have reached out in private to commiserate. Some have paywalled their work. Others have given up and moved on. They keep the websites online, but they no longer update them. It’s just not worth it.
It will get worse. Last week, Google has made two announcements: AI-generated answers will replace search results entirely, and they have ads in them.1 This is the future of the internet. No websites, just a chat box with ads.
I don’t know where All About Berlin fits in that future.
This was also discussed on Mastodon, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you are in the same boat, do reach out. You are not going through this alone.
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