So thankful to be included here. Google gaslights and lies. They royally wasted my money and time having me to their headquarters in October and then proceeded to stomp on the crumbling remnants of our google business. I will shout it from the rooftops - Google is evil!

Too bad the Google "Liaisons" jumped off this platform as soon as things started to get tough. Soft. Speaks volumes about how Google really feels about content creators. We all knew they didn't really care, but man they could not show it more than they currently are.

Google's Super Bowl ads spotlight 50 small businesses "doing amazing things with AI in Google Workspace" Well, Morgan's small business was also once featured in a Google PR campaign Everyone should hear Morgan's heartbreaking story👇

Why is Danny Sullivan (@searchliaison) not engaging with the X community?

Hey @Marie_Haynes want to prove that reducing excessive ads can recover a site? I have fantastic news for you -- you can do that without having to publicly drag small site owners through the mud against their will! Your site AskaVetQuestion(.)com is loaded with aggressive display ads -- sometimes 100% density! -- and has been hit by Google It would make the PERFECT recovery case study -- and you already own it! Go recover it Prove your point without bullying small site owners Win-win, right?

Complicit in destroying thousands of sites, millions of lives. Can't handle X, and instead engages with AI bots and suck-ups on LinkedIn. Coward.

Danny Sullivan has not tweeted a single time in October. He hasn’t engaged meaningfully on Twitter since August 8th — which was two and a half months ago. Danny’s role is to “engage with the outside community to hear feedback on how search can be improved.” The current state of Google Search is the worst it’s ever been and its “public liaison” is nowhere to be found. Where’s Danny? 🤔

4 months ago I switched my default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo It took a week or so to get acclimated, but it has dramatically improved my digital life It only takes 15 seconds to improve yours and to save the open web

A select number of creators. This is now the future of the search monopoly. Only the luckiest will be selected based on agreements/deals.

Listen to Nate. The other day, I was told that stories about Google have already been told, so it's not important to share ours. That's not true. Do not underestimate what happened. Do not be bullied. Do not be made to feel bad. What happened was not right. Regardless if it happened a day or 12 months ago, it's still important. In years to come, this will still be important. Stay in the conversation.

YOU basically removed my site from your search engine with no explanation overnight and replaced me with Reddit, who, you made a deal with right before their IPO. YOU did the same to thousands of other small publishers. YOU used to invite me to your headquarters you said you had my back. I guess that was only until I was no longer helpful as your pawn. That’s how YOU impacted THIS American business. YOU are the reason I’m currently in THERAPY. You’ve done emotional and financial harm to myself and my family. DOJ if you are listening I hope you show the same treatment to Google that they showed me and my small business. My only regret is not testifying against you.

🛑 Get ready small publishers: our moment to act is near. We just learned the DOJ wants to break up Google (such as by making them sell off Chrome and Android, or by restricting Google's AI businesses). Expect that Google's comms team will be pushing back HARD on this in the public sphere, trying to argue that Google is a force for good that should be left intact. It's important that we insert ourselves into this public conversation and make sure journalists, regulators, politicians, and constituents all know the harm Google's monopoly has and is causing to the open web. In the coming weeks, I will be sharing specific threads that I believe are important to shaping the public conversation. When I do, I encourage you to join the conversation and make your voice heard. Share your first person experience. Keep it honest, raw, and real. Use hard facts, specific examples, and personal stories where you can. Bear in mind not everyone is as familiar with the background or jargon (like "HCU" or "SEO"), so try to talk like you would to a normal person who might be sympathetic. Avoid talking too much about rankings. Focus instead on topics with broader appeal that are easier to understand: abuse of power, monopolistic practices, theft of data and copyright, corporate greed, the AI scam, etc. These are the winning topics in public forums. I'm telling you, this is a critical moment. And your stories can actually make a difference in shaping the future of the open web.

Hey @searchliaison, honest question for you: Why should human creators keep creating at this point? Considering: 1) Google just hired the man who stole YouTube creators' videos for OpenAI's Sora model 2) Google is literally productizing and selling creators' content at scale via its Vertex AI cloud business 3) Google offers creators no way to opt out of #2 above, except de-indexing our content from Google Search (so our choices are to be visible online or to let Google sell our content to competing AI applications via Vertex's "grounding" feature) 4) Google's own CEO brags about how they are "relentlessly" reducing the costs of creating AI content (thus making it easier to spam the open web) 5) Google is cutting licensing deals with big companies like Reddit, but 2 years into this AI madness and there is not a peep about compensating small publishers Like seriously, Danny -- why should any human creator even bother anymore? I don't mean this sarcastically - can Google give us an actual answer to that question? And, if not, what does that say? Because, from my vantage point, it seems like the only reason we are told to "keep creating" is so that Google has something to "ground" its AI products in ☹️

(The website is still in construction, but for those that read this far feel free to take a read and look around. If you like what you see sign up to the newsletter and i'll try my best to share helpful advice while I dig my business out of the trenches). algoproof.com/

There you go. The real purpose of the HCU. Make room for AIO ads. I'm so tired of SEOs lying on the behalf of Google. It's blatantly obvious what's happened here. Real people's work taken away for the purpose of lining pockets of people who wouldn't care if you died right now. That's who you support. techcrunch.com/2024/10/03/go…

I am sick and tired of the narrative that small publishers were just "collateral damage" in Google's efforts to crack down on AI spam content Buckle up as I debunk this narrative and show why small publishers are not bycatch, but rather the latest meal Google decided to catch for itself👇🐟 Understand the "AI collateral damage" narrative is the one Google wants you to believe -- now that their original preferred narrative (that they were just promoting "helpful content") has been utterly debunked The "collateral damage" narrative gives Google way too much of a pass though -- and ignores the obvious monopolistic practices going on: First, as an initial premise, it's laughably false to suggest that Google doesn't want AI content on the web. Come on folks - Google self identifies as an "AI company". Google literally invented the tech foundations of genAI content. And Google continues to pitch AI content as the future of the web. Seriously, listen to any Google investor call. You will hear almost zero discussion about human creators. It's literally "AI, AI, AI, AI, AI" in every Google meeting. That's where their focus is. Google 100% wants a web FILLED with AI content. Google just wants the web to be filled with their AI content, AI ads generated for their advertisers, or AI content on their licensed partners like Reddit. Which brings me to my second point: Google made a conscious decision to clear independent publishers out of the SERPs to make way for: -AI Overviews -Its own properties (like Google Travel) -Google partners like Reddit -more ads Seriously, zoom out for just a minute and forget any individual site's rankings. The fundamental makeup of the SERPs has shifted so much. You can't seriously think its just about Google trying to keep a new flood of AI content out of the SERPs Google is clearly targeting a category of websites -- specifically WordPress blogs Why would Google do this? Money, of course! Google needs to keep investors believing Google is growing, and thus deserves the ridiculous P/E ratios that support its stock price How does Google do that? Well, we know from interviews with Google execs that Google has become obsessed with "queries" as its KPI (kinda a weird KPI for a search engine, and one that ought to be immediately suss, but whatever) We also know that WordPress blogs tend to have more relevant answers that "stop the search" (and thus don't generate another query), particularly for the longer tail queries where Google has suggested AI is likely to play the strongest role Court documents have proven beyond a doubt that Google has in the past made search results worse in order to meet quarterly revenue goals (because when the organic results are worse, people are more likely to click the ads) And a United States Federal Court has ruled that Google has a monopoly over online search -- and has acted illegally to maintain that monopoly Another federal court is likely to soon rule that Google also has a monopoly over the adtech space -- and evidence presented in that case already proves that Google has made a habit out of gradually steering the web towards an ecosystem that makes more money for Google's search ads at the cost of less money for display ad publishers Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself here, and this tweet is already too long. I'm hoping to write up something long that will lay this all out with details, sourcing, etc. But for now, I just really wanted to get this out there so y'all would stop buying into this false narrative Google is subtly pushing. The bottom line is that the demotion of small publishers was intentional. Space in the SERPs had to come from somewhere for this new AI-first web Pichai is pushing. And it obviously couldn't come from Forbes or the 16 media companies that control the web, as their lawyers would catch onto this and sue in a heartbeat. Those 16 companies are too big of fish to go after so crudely and directly. So the only remaining target was obvious - the many small guppies out there. Small publishers were not bycatch They were the entire meal

If you've wondered why Forbes appears EVERYwhere in Google now, it's because it has a parasite SEO program. The whole thing is insane: larslofgren.com/forbes-marke…

I bet y'all forgot this, but the *original* "Helpful Content Update" was released in 2022 with the explicit goal of surfacing content made "by people, for people" 📅 Flash forward to 2023: -ChatGPT enters the picture -Pichai triggers a "Code Red" alarm -Google goes all in on using AI to vacuum up all the value on the open web -Google throws human creators to the curb in Sept -Google gaslights those human creators into thinking it's *their* fault 📅 Flash forward to 2024: -Google declared a monopoly in court -Court docs show Google intentionally makes organic results worse in order to boost ad revenue -Google pays news orgs to publish AI content -Google has Twitter accounts actively encouraging the use of AI for SEO and content creation -The "by people, for people" slogan disappears, along with many human creators📉

Hey @mediavine some crawlers crash my sites performance since a couple days. My Hoster has blocked: „Criteo, Ahs-va, sirdata and proximic“ user agents. Does this negatively affect my sites ad performance?