ID: 395
Category: Computer Ramblings
Added: 28th of May 2025
Updated On: Tutorial updated and rechecked on 30th of January 2026
Views: 914
Over the last 2 years I have noticed a steady decline of visitors to my website. After spending many hours trying to optimise my site, and seeing no upward trend of visitors to my site, I can only put that down to a change in Googles algorithm and the way Google is now displaying it's search results.
You would have noticed yourself, that search results show an AI summary first with links to websites after this, so users will take the most relevant information first, that being the AI summary and completely miss the website links below.
The most popular article on my site has always been Start, Stop and Restart the Cups print Server in Linux. This is on page one of Googles search results, but instead of being near the top of the page where visitors used to find the site, it is now pushed further down the page because of the AI summary.
I have no problems with AI, I have used it to myself to solve a few problems with my own wifi connections on Linux, and also used it to summarise text, which has saved me the trouble of browsing through lots of different websites to get the answers I need. As much I have found AI useful in summarising text, it can become to formulaic, so sites like NinjaHumanizer come in useful.
I will still continue to use Googles other services such as Maps & Gmail and of course Google for my own searches, because no matter how much Google has changed, they still provide the most accurate search results over all the other search engines.
AI is something as website owners we need to navigate and try to work with, but another thing I should mention is not to forget the other search engines such a bing, who will still drive traffic to your own websites and has less of a barrier in getting your pages listed, due to technologies like IndexNow.
Use the link below for further information on IndexNow
https://www.bing.com/indexnow/getstarted.
