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Google ate your content. Now it’s eating you
We all know the world-renowned author, Tim Ferriss. His books (e.g. 4-Hour Workweek) have been selling like hot cakes for years, and it had become like an annuity that he could depend on for life.
Then disaster struck…
Recently, he wrote this sobering article. It is a scary read for those in the business of producing content. As I explained in my book in 2014, the content business is already an extremely cut-throat harsh venture where the winner takes all, leaving the rest with scraps and leftovers to pick over. 2026 is going to be the watershed year where even the winners who have taken all, are being slaughtered.
For Tim Ferriss, sales of his books began to decline from 2022 onwards. At first, it did not look too bad. But within a few years, the decline gathered momentum. By the middle of 2026, you can say sales of his books crashed! Mind you, we are only halfway through 2026. What will happen by the end of 2026? Complete annihilation of sales?
What is the cause for the crash in sales?
Tim Ferriss noticed something interesting. The decline in sales began in 2022, when ChatGPT was first introduced. As AI started disrupting more and more business models and jobs from then on, the decline in sales gathered momentum.
The culprit, as we know intuitively, is AI.
How Google’s AI is destroying content producers
If you are in the business of creating content (e.g. publishers, content marketers, authors, writers, graphic designers, video-makers, animators), you need to be worried. Google is destroying your business and your job.
Google’s AI Overview is killing websites
Google’s AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries at the top of search results that answer the users’ queries without the need to click through to websites.
To produce the AI Overviews, Google’s AI LLM bot will ingest all your content, absorb every insight, digest every hard-won data point, learn from every sentence you sweated over, combine it with other people’s content, and then rewrite it into a tidy little answer box sitting right at the top of the page.
Sure, AI Overview will cite its sources (i.e. links to your website), but no clicks are required for the users. The sources (i.e. your website) are buried beneath the answer it already gave to the users. Consequently, there will be no visits to your website, no ad impressions, no email signups, no sales. The user gets everything they came for without ever knowing your name.
You did the work. Google keeps the user. That is not search anymore. That’s a toll booth where you paid to build the road, and Google keeps the money (attention).
There is hard evidence of the negative impacts caused by AI overviews. This report from Pew Research Centre is worrying:
- Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one.
- Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary.
- The most frequently cited sources in both Google AI summaries and standard search results are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit.
A year ago, this Wall Street Journal article sounded the alarm:
The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers.
Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting.
Last month, this Forbes article sounded another alarm:
DataSlayer analysis showed a 61% drop in organic click-through rates when an AI Overview is present. WordStream reported that zero-click searches now represent a major share of Google queries.For a small business that spent years building organic search rankings, the math has shifted. Organic search traffic you have worked hard to earn is now being consumed by Google prior to many users accessing your website.
To put it simply, Google is killing websites.
AI is making graphics designers jobless
Big Tech’s AI bots are trawling through the Internet, ingesting all photos, drawings, and illustrations to train their AI models. Then users can just send a prompt to the AI (e.g. Google’s Nano Banana) to produce an image. There is no need for a photographer or graphic artist.
You can imagine the devastation to the image licensing markets. Indeed, as this article reported, they are under immense pressure, thanks to generative AI.
NotebookLM is killing YouTube videos
If you think videos will be safe from marauding AI overviews, wait till you see what Google’s NotebookLM can do to them.
Let’s say you spend a gazillion hours producing a two-hour awesome kick-ass video and publish it on YouTube. Your follower then sends the YouTube link of the video to Google’s NotebookLM, and it watches the video for your follower and produces an article summarising your entire video. Your follower spends five minutes reading that article and goes away.
The same fate goes for podcasts.
AI is coming in between your content and your followers
As Tim Ferriss wrote,
I believe LLMs become the interface to everything: search and purchasing, obviously, but also surfing video, summarizing podcasts, navigating courses, even browsing books. The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.
When I wrote my Google Trap book in 2014, I wrote that
Basic economic theory says that the more abundant something is, the less valuable it becomes. Conversely, the scarcer something is, the more valuable it becomes. Today, information is dirt cheap, while attention is incredibly expensive. So, anyone who knows the secret art of attracting sustained attention of the masses will become rich.
I never imagined that AI was going to insert itself between users and content and eat all of the users’ attention. Back then, the winning content monopolised users’ attention, which the rest had to fight and kill each other for the scraps of leftovers. Today, the Big Techs’ platforms are gunning for the winners too.
What should be your content strategy?
End is neigh for prescriptive nonfiction
Basically, AI is killing prescriptive nonfiction content. As Ferriss wrote,
Anything with a core value proposition of “transferring instructions from my head to yours” is now competing with an interface that does it instantly, conversationally, and for free.
For example, these types of content will be killed by AI:
- “5 steps to…”
- “How to do Y…”
- “10 secrets to…”
- “Blah blah blah… the quiet part that no one talks about…”
Experiential fiction/nonfiction will survive
However, one type of digital content will still survive:
Experience that isn’t solely information: comedy, entertainment, storytelling, fiction, etc. You don’t ask an AI to summarize a stand-up special, and a synopsis of a great novel is not a great novel. Voice, taste, and personality may end up being the only durable moats. But “give me the 5 steps to X”? That’s a tough business that’s about to get a lot tougher.
For example,
- People read novels for the purpose of experiencing their story. There is no point in using AI to summarise the novel because it will strip out all the experiences.
- Chloe vs History is an example of digital content that will survive the AI apocalypse. People watch these videos because they want to be entertained by a visual extravaganza while learning history. Using AI to summarise that content will defeat its purpose.
Your content should ideally contain experiences that people want, such that stripping them out with AI will defeat its purpose. Let’s call such content experiential fiction/nonfiction.
That is a much higher bar to produce. This is something that I have to preach to myself. Unfortunately, not every type of content can be easily transformed into experiential fiction/nonfiction. Also, they require a higher level of creativity and technical skills to pull off. But unfortunately, that is the only way to survive the trail of destruction left by AI.
