Google AI Search Shift Leaves Businesses Feeling ‘Betrayed’ (1)

In March 2024, website owner Morgan McBride was posing for photos in her half-renovated kitchen for a Google ad celebrating the ways the search giant had helped her family’s business grow.

But by the time the ad ran about a month later, traffic from Google had fallen more than 70%, McBride said. Charleston Crafted, which features guides on do-it-yourself home improvement projects, had weathered algorithm changes and updates in the past; this time, it didn’t recover. McBride suspected people were getting more of their renovation advice from the artificial intelligence answers at the top of Google search.

The now-ubiquitous AI-generated ...