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The advice show for creators that tells it like it is. Host Stephanie Woodin takes calls from web creators grappling with the big questions: burnout, branding, revenue, and keeping up with AI and SEO changes. Each episode, an expert guest or fellow creator joins Stephanie to answer your questions with research-backed, practical advice you can put to work in your own business.
Brought to you by Raptive, the full-service creator media company that empowers creators to turn their passions into thriving, profitable brands.
Do you have a question? Record yourself on video or audio, or write it up and email it to ctrlaltask@raptive.com. Anonymous questions are welcome!
Addison LaBonte:
Yeah, Google cheated on me with Reddit and Quora. Not nice, Google.
Stephanie Woodin:
Today we're talking all about traffic. For many of you, this has been top of mind the past few years. Why did my traffic suddenly take a dive? Where did all my clicks go? And is all that work I did on SEO best practices for nothing? Today on the show, we're talking to a creator facing those questions and getting a game plan on what she and you can do about it. I'm Stephanie Woodin and this is Ctrl Alt Ask, the advice Show for creators.
Today I am joined by Tom Critchlow. He and I work together at Raptive, where he serves as the EVP of audience growth. He's truly a pioneer in the search industry, so he's the perfect person to take us through all things SEO and traffic.
Welcome, Tom.
Tom Critchlow:
Thanks. It's exciting to be here.
Stephanie Woodin:
Yeah, we're so happy to have you, especially today with the topic that we're going to discuss. So Tom, I start out every podcast with a fun just kind of icebreaker, and today is very applicable to our topic. What's the last thing that you Googled?
Tom Critchlow:
Oh. I mean, I probably Google about 5,000 things a day. I remember last night I was Googling how to make a spiralized zucchini salad. I was trying to make a quick dinner for the kids, and spoiler alert, I ended up eating all of it, but it was tasty.
Stephanie Woodin:
I'm very impressed because I've tried to do that before, and it's not as easy as it seems, and there's a lot of water in the zucchini when you make it.
Tom Critchlow:
That is the pro tip.
Stephanie Woodin:
Pro tip, squeeze the water out. Okay, so without further ado, Tom, let's get into today's question.
Addison LaBonte:
Hi, my name is Addison LaBonte and I am the blogger behind Organically Addison. I have over 800 gluten-free recipes on my blog. I started it back in late 2018 after I had been gluten-free for a couple years. And I was working in finance at the time, felt very unfulfilled and wanted to kind of do something fun and for myself, so I started the Instagram account Organically Addison. And then people started asking where they could find the recipes, so that's how my blog was born.
In the very early days, I truly had no idea what I was doing when it came to blogging. Then, in 2020, when I was working from home, I was able to dedicate a little bit more time to learning SEO, and keyword research, and best practices when it came to blogging, so I really dug in deep when it came to keyword research and saw my traffic soar.
And then, in September of 2023, I remember hearing about a big Google core update that was going to get released. And I was not concerned at all, and then I started checking my earnings report and pretty quickly saw that my earnings had just about gotten cut in half. I lost about 50% of my traffic, and almost all of that was coming from Google. And so I started looking up all of the keywords that I had ranked highly for previously, and I could see that there were search forums that were now ranking ahead of me.
So the two biggest ones that I saw were Reddit and Quora, and that's pretty confusing when you have a recipe blog, because if somebody's typing in a recipe for, let's just say, chocolate chip cookies, I don't necessarily think that they're going to be looking for a forum style where everybody's posting about cookies. I think that they're probably going to want to come upon a blog where there's real images, and somebody has made this in their kitchen at home, and here's the recipe.
I was truly shocked because SEO and keyword research, at that point, were such a focus of mine, and I've listened to all the podcasts, watch all the YouTube videos, all about keyword research, especially for food bloggers, and I really thought that I had done everything by the book. I've always played by the rules. I'm not a rule breaker. And so to get penalized that heavily, I was frustrated, I was upset. It honestly felt like a betrayal.
So it's been about two years now since that happened, and while I have recovered some of my traffic, my blog is still not where it used to be. It's still down about 30% overall. So my question is, how do I get my traffic back?
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow. Addison, thank you so much, first of all. I feel like she articulates her problem so well, but I was pretty shocked to hear she lost almost half her traffic. It's a lot, right?
Tom Critchlow:
Yeah.
Stephanie Woodin:
But does that story sound familiar to you, Tom? I mean, obviously that's a lot of traffic, so I don't know if that's kind of a extreme case, or does that seem like commonplace right now?
Tom Critchlow:
Honestly, not that uncommon. We've heard a lot of stories like this over the past couple of years. And just to kind of lay some context, Addison points to the rise of Reddit and Quora as kind of being things that have changed in the search results, but there's really three big things that have really hurt traffic over the last couple of years.
One is Addison mentioned these kind of big updates that Google's been making. There was an announcement a couple of years back called the helpful content updates that Google announced, which was a massive change to how Google ranked search results, the kind of content they were featuring, which sites were winning, which sites were losing. And despite the kind cutesy name of helpful content update, most of what that did, and what we've seen over the past couple of years from the helpful content updates and the core updates from Google, is that they've rewarded bigger, more authoritative sites over smaller, more independent sites. So that's kind of one big trend.
The second big trend that Addison calls out is the rise of Reddit and Quora. So we've seen, across all search results, Reddit and Quora appearing far, far more prominently than it used to. Obviously, Reddit has an actual bespoke deal with Google, so they have a direct relationship, and obviously we believe that that's a direct result of what's happened with that increased visibility appearing across the board.
And then the third big thing that's happened is the rise of AI overviews. So these are the kind of AI summaries at the top of the search result that Google shows that, again, a lot of industry studies have repeatedly shown that there's a 20% to 40% decrease in clicks when those are showing up at the top of the search results. And so those three things have all happened over the past couple of years. It's been a really challenging time for traffic for creators.
The one thing I would say, and probably the big takeaway, is yes, we feel like we've been betrayed by Google. A lot of sites that used to get a lot of traffic get a lot less traffic. But I wouldn't consider it like a penalty. And so Addison used that word, which she's been penalized by Google. Obviously, some sites have been, but I think the more common situation is that traffic had declined from the peak, but that doesn't mean that you can't grow traffic again, it doesn't mean that your site is in the bad graces of Google necessarily. As long as you're still getting some traffic, there's still the potential to increase and grow from there.
Stephanie Woodin:
Breaking down those three areas, I think, could be really helpful for creators to really wrap their brains around, so if we could just go back for a second to the helpful content updates.
Tom Critchlow:
Sure.
Stephanie Woodin:
Because I think a lot of creators may know what that means for their sites, but some may not.
Tom Critchlow:
Yeah, for sure. And it's confusing.
Stephanie Woodin:
Right, exactly.
Tom Critchlow:
So the helpful content update, this was an announcement that Google made in... I think the first one was in 2022, when Google said, "Hey, we've got this new system as part of our ranking algorithm called the helpful content system." And they made these big announcements. They were like, "Hey, the helpful content update just rolled out." And they do these, roughly, quarterly. As those started to roll out, we saw radical changes across the search results landscape, not just in the food space, across all spaces. Not just for small creators, for all kinds of sites. This was a radical reshaping of how Google works, one of the biggest shakeups we've seen, honestly, in the last decade.
Stephanie Woodin:
They're saying they're helping the user. Is that why they're saying they're doing this? It's helpful to the user?
Tom Critchlow:
That was the PR spin that Google put on it. And the label, helpful content updates, that naming obviously is pretty provocative.
What we've seen in the data over the last couple of years, one is, as I said, bigger sites have benefited and smaller sites have lost. The trend is just startlingly clear. It used to be that there was a long tail of smaller sites that were able to get a bunch of traffic, and that long tail is less long than it used to be. Smaller sites have been hurt much more than bigger sites. And certainly for Addison's site, for example, in the middle of that kind of independent content creator, small business size, a lot of those small businesses have been very negatively impacted by these updates.
The second trend that's come out of the helpful content system is this trend towards authority and expertise. And so some of the sites that we saw that really did kind of get penalized or really disappeared off the face of Google were the sites that were trying to write about everything. They write about sports, they write about food, they write about travel. They were just chasing clicks. They had a site that had some kind of authority in Google's eyes and they were using that authority to write about whatever they wanted to write about. And so, again, the trend that we've seen is sites that have some kind of specific topical authority, expertise, and reputation, those things kind of make the site more resilient, more robust.
Stephanie Woodin:
So the second thing that you mentioned is the Reddit, Quora message board situation. I would love to dig into that, because when Addison mentioned that, my Spidey senses started going off. Why would Google prioritize message boards? Like she said, if someone's looking for chocolate chip cookies, I don't really need to read on Reddit everyone's grandmother's chocolate chip iteration. I want a real, tried and true recipe. Why would Google start prioritizing Reddit and community message boards? What's the point of that? What's behind that?
Tom Critchlow:
I mean, there are some conspiracy theories for why Google's doing that around monetization of content and so on on the web.
Stephanie Woodin:
Oh, really? That's not this kind of podcast, but we love a conspiracy theory.
Tom Critchlow:
Let's maybe not go down that path. The stated reason that Google has talked about, and I think is mostly true, is that users like first-hand perspective. And so when I Google something like, to go back to that spiralized zucchini example from the beginning, I'm Googling spiralized zucchini. I have a real problem. I'm trying to do something. I want content that is real content, from real users, with real perspective and point of view. I don't want just a Wikipedia article on spiralized zucchini. I don't want all of the facts and the science of zucchinis. I want people's experience, people's ideas, people's thoughts.
And in a lot of niches, that first-hand perspective has been eroded as the web has professionalized, as content has professionalized. And so you can think about this, a good example is something like best headphones for runners. And you might Google something like best headphones for runners. You'll get a lot of media publications with a lot of, essentially, professionalized content. You've got content writers, content editors. It's all very slick. It's all very glossy. It's not necessarily bad content, but you lose a lot of that magic of the web, of some random personal Reddit being like, "I love to run in Chicago, and my favorite loop is this, and these are my headphones. I love them because they don't fall off my ears when they sweat and blah, blah, blah."
Now, that isn't as in-depth as a full Wirecutter article, for example, where they're like, "Hey, we've tested them, and we've done studies, and we've done 15 different headphones." But I think what Google realized is that people love that first-hand perspective. Even if it isn't as thorough, we don't want to lose that magic of real people, real point of view, first-hand perspective.
Now, in the food space in particular, it's a little more nuanced, I think, because a lot of the content in the food space is written from first-hand perspective. A lot of bloggers, a lot of creators are sharing that first-hand perspective. They are sharing their own ideas, their own photos, their own perspective, and so we haven't actually seen the Reddit and Quora, I would say, as an issue as much in the food space. They obviously show up a lot more than they used to, but they don't show up at the top of the search results page as much as they do in other industries.
Stephanie Woodin:
Oh, that's really interesting.
Tom Critchlow:
So I think the commerce space in particular has been very, very heavily impacted by this, where you might Google something like best headphones for runners, and you might see Reddit literally number one. In the food space, you'll see Reddit showing up a lot, but it's usually kind of towards the bottom of the page or underneath the recipes that are showing up.
Stephanie Woodin:
Okay, that's good to understand. Do you think... And not to put Addison on the spot, but, I mean, we are talking about her problem. Do you think that Reddit and Quora were really the issue behind her traffic drop, or was it an amalgamation of a bunch of different things and that happened to be part of it?
Tom Critchlow:
I mean, the trend for everyone is that it is an amalgamation. Almost every site has been impacted by one of those three levers. But I would suggest that, for Addison's case in particular, the helpful content updates and the core ranking changes that Google's made is almost certainly the biggest factor in determining her traffic losses. And again, it isn't necessarily that she's being penalized, and it's unclear whether getting back to the traffic level she had before is the right goal. I would anchor more to, for the traffic she has today, how can she grow that? And it sounds like she's done some good work recovering and growing since those updates. But again, the old world may not exist anymore. There isn't necessarily a way to go back to 2022, 2023. We're in a new paradigm, new world.
Stephanie Woodin:
Right, because they've changed the playing field and you have to adapt and adjust to that.
Tom Critchlow:
Totally. Yeah.
Stephanie Woodin:
And then you mentioned a third, which is AI overviews. How has that really impacted search? What, in your experience and your expertise, have you seen?
Tom Critchlow:
I would say in a summary, it's incredibly straightforward. When AI overviews show up, click-through rate goes down. Multiple, multiple industry studies have confirmed that and backed that up. Order of magnitude negative 20%, negative 40% clicks.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Tom Critchlow:
The math isn't hard. These things show up a lot, and when they show up, clicks go down. That's been really bad for creators and publishers. And again, I think Google has, if I'm being honest and frank, I would say they've been lazy in a lot of the ways they've rolled out AI overviews. They're doing it very quickly. It's been a hammer to kind of solve a problem and they've just rolled it out en masse. I do think that we will see AI overviews get better and smarter over time. They'll integrate more of the things that we expect from search, like the recipe cards and the images. They'll do more of that integrated into the response as it gets smarter, I think.
Stephanie Woodin:
Yeah, and hopefully, in a perfect world, it would still lead you to want to delve more into an actual site to get the full experience.
Tom Critchlow:
For sure.
Stephanie Woodin:
Do you foresee that, with it getting better, new iterations, them talking to creators, getting that feedback? "This is helpful, this isn't helpful." What is truly helping users and thereby creators?
Tom Critchlow:
That is a great question. And again, we could probably spend the whole podcast episodes talking about the public relations.
Stephanie Woodin:
I know, and I want to get into the advice portion, so yeah.
Tom Critchlow:
Public relations and comms strategy from Google is a whole other thing. Yes, in a nutshell, Google has solicited feedback from creators. They've hosted a bunch of creator summits, they've flown creators out to Mountain View. The degree to which any of that feedback makes it into the places it needs to go is a totally different question.
I want to really anchor back to that word that Addison used, betrayal. And so what's especially interesting about the helpful content updates, it's been the first one of these in 2022. We're in 2025, spoiler alert.
Stephanie Woodin:
Oh god.
Tom Critchlow:
Danny Sullivan publicly said in 2024, middle of 2024, Danny was like, "Hey, these helpful content updates have not been good for a lot of creators. We went too far. Through no fault of the creator sites, we have turned our dials and it's been bad in a bunch of ways. We don't want it to be bad." That was 2024. Google has admitted that it was their fault and have done nothing to fix it.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wonderful.
Tom Critchlow:
They have done nothing to fix it. Now, the only little, little, tiny glimmer, sliver of hope? So the June, 2025 core update that just rolled out, that was the first core update we've seen since 2022 that reversed that trend of bigger sites winning and smaller sites losing, the first update where actually smaller sites grew more than bigger sites in our networks, and that's huge news.
Stephanie Woodin:
And why is that?
Tom Critchlow:
Who knows, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Yeah.
Tom Critchlow:
Either what Danny Sullivan said was happening and what Google wanted to happen, which is finally giving traffic back to some of the creators that they took it away from unfairly, or it was a mistake, right? Again, they twiddled a bunch of dials, and surprise, this one happened to reward a bunch of smaller creators. We don't know.
Stephanie Woodin:
And I think that leads me to the questions about what creators can do, because you can't rely on Google doing what they're going to say they're going to do, and so creators have to protect themselves. So let's get into Addison and creators, and what can they do? She said, "How do I get my traffic back?" Obviously it's more complicated than that, and you did allude to earlier, you don't know if it can get back to where it was. But what can they do today, tomorrow, in the immediate to help get some of that back if they face what Addison is?
Tom Critchlow:
Yeah, I think there's two ways to structure this part of the conversation. So there's a couple of things that I think should talk about that are kind of foundational, so things that you can do in terms of reviewing the whole site, and then there are some things that you can do about how you publish content and how you move forward.
And so if we focus on the site review part of it, what we have encouraged our creators to do, and what we work with some of our creators on, is going back to all of the archives and reevaluating, "Does this content need to be here? Is this content high quality? Does it meet my standards? And does it align with the authority and expertise that I have?" And this isn't talking about Addison in particular, but we see, for example, a bunch of food sites who are producing really good quality recipes, but back in the archives, they have a bunch of content around their trip to Vegas and a poker weekend, or interior design content, or whatever it might be.
And there's a ton of that content still sitting around in the archives that is not relevant to the current site's focus. Authority. Expertise, which is a big thing that Google cares about. And again, this is what we've seen from the helpful content updates is Google really cares about this authority and trust profile on a site by site basis. And so what we've been encouraging sites to do is go back through the archives, clean things up. Typically, this is content that isn't getting traffic, so this is typically content that is getting zero or very, very few clicks from search.
Stephanie Woodin:
I see.
Tom Critchlow:
The basic methodology you can use is just take all of your pages, stack rank them by Google page views, and just look at the bottom 1%. So all of the pages that add up to the bottom 1% of traffic, you'll typically have a few hundred, maybe a few thousand posts, depending on how big the site is, that collectively they're getting less than 1% of their traffic, but account for a large amount of the site by volume. And take those pages, go through those pages, clean up what needs to get cleaned up, delete what needs deleting, and really slim the site down to its current focus on authority and reputation profile.
Stephanie Woodin:
So if it's not related to gluten-free baking, and that is what you do, delete.
Tom Critchlow:
I would certainly say reevaluate. And so you don't need to delete everything, and certainly some stuff might have real sentimental value. You don't want to erase...
Stephanie Woodin:
Humanity.
Tom Critchlow:
You don't want to erase every trace of humanity from the site, but where things are really off-topic and it's not getting any traffic today, and so you should feel permission to go and aggressively delete that content. But again, it isn't about getting rid of every single page. It's more about cleanup, right? It's about rebalancing the site and getting rid of the stuff that's really problematic.
Stephanie Woodin:
Very Marie Kondo of you, Tom.
Tom Critchlow:
Totally, yes. The second part of that site audit, the review that I would do, is on the same theme. You want to beef up the author reputation, author profile, and expertise on the site. Typically, the format on the site is that you would have an about page, which is an about the site, which obviously talks about Addison as a person because the website and the person are kind of the same thing. But in Google's eyes, they are still separate entities. And so you have the about page for the site, and then we also are encouraging our creators to make an about page for the author.
And so even if that feels somewhat redundant a little bit, again, a lot of sites do have multiple authors, especially in the archives, and so going back and making sure that byline specifically links to the author page, making sure that author page lists all the credentials you have and the expertise that you have, and really showing off that kind of authority, those things really matter as well. And again, we've seen sites that do that being more resilient through some of these algorithm updates than sites that haven't done that.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's so interesting. So Google is looking at them like, "Okay, there is a real person behind this content. It's authenticated in its own way because there is a bio for this author." And it will prioritize that. Is that what you're saying?
Tom Critchlow:
Yeah. And we've seen direct signals from Google that they care about this. So for example, Google Discover has tested showing the author name as well as the site name. Google's made public statements about making sure that your author pages and your author reputation and so on are clean, well-structured, et cetera, et cetera. So we know this stuff matters.
Stephanie Woodin:
And you mentioned the signals to Google Discover. I would love to talk quickly about Google Discover and if that's something that can play into this diversification that you're talking about, other things that creators can do. And maybe just quickly explain what it is, because I recently even found out what it was.
Tom Critchlow:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, especially if you're an iPhone user, you probably don't use Google Discover or interact with it as much, but on Android, it is natively integrated into the entire operating system. It is much more common and prevalent.
Stephanie Woodin:
Okay.
Tom Critchlow:
So Google Discover is this surface area. Shows up in Chrome, shows up in Android, it does show up on iOS inside the Google app, and it is essentially a feed of recommended articles. So there's a feed of things that Google thinks you might be interested in based on what it knows about you, what searches you've done, topics you're interested in, what sites you visit, et cetera, et cetera. And Google Discover, quite shockingly to understand, is about twice as big as search.
Stephanie Woodin:
Whoa.
Tom Critchlow:
So I'm going to say that again. The clicks that Discover sends, they send about twice as many clicks via Discover as they do via search for publishers, news, entertainment, content sites. So this is not true for e-commerce sites. Search is still the dominant. But for news, entertainment, publishing style sites, media style sites, Discover sends twice as many clicks as search.
So it's huge. This is sending a ton of traffic. And showing up in Discover, there's a couple of things to talk about. One is you need to meet a certain threshold of quality in Google's eyes. What we see is, in search, as sites get bigger and more authoritative, they get more search traffic, and that relationship is essentially linear. The more authority you have, the more traffic you get. That's also true for Discover. So the more authoritative you are, the more Discover traffic you get.
But there's a cliff. So at a certain point, when you get less trusted, you don't meet some threshold, you don't get any Discover traffic. So it's kind of binary on the low end, But assuming that you're getting some Discover traffic, you're kind of eligible to show up in that surface area, there's relatively simple things you can do in them. If creators take away one thing from this podcast episode that they can do, by far and away the biggest thing you can do that most creators today are not doing is writing a social title.
So this is a little bit nuanced, so I'm going to get into it for a second. So the social title is a thing that shows up inside WordPress or inside the CMS that you're using. Under the hood, it shows up in the source code as an open graph title. So sometimes you'll hear it referred to as an open graph title, and this is essentially a meta tag that sits on the page that is typically a more verbose version of the post title itself.
So to use Addison, for example, I was taking a look at Addison's site before the podcast, and a really good example. She recently published a recipe called Baked Peaches. And so the title of the post is Baked Peaches. It's about baked peaches, as you can imagine. It looks delicious. And the title that will show up in Google Discover just says Baked Peaches, but you can rewrite that title to be more enticing. And because Google Discover is not a keyword-based, search-driven surface area, it is a recommendation. It's a feed of content. You need to stand out and you need to entice the click.
And so you have a lot more room to write a longer title that's more descriptive, more enticing. And so it could be these delicious baked peaches dessert are my favorite for fall, or the gluten-free baked peaches dessert is what I'm eating right now, or yummy, creamy baked peaches, or baked peaches with only four ingredients. Whatever kind of spin you want to put on it. And this isn't necessarily about clickbait. It isn't like, "This one dessert will blow your mind. Number three is peaches."
Stephanie Woodin:
It's about descriptions, it sounds like.
Tom Critchlow:
It's more about description. It's just about enticing the clicks. Literally just, when somebody shows that up in their feed, can you make it seem more enticing? And so, again, specifically for Addison, but also for a lot of creators, it's very, very common, not writing distinct social title tags, those open graph titles. And so rewriting those for the post that you're writing. Nothing changes about the rest of the page that you're writing, but writing that descriptive title helps you show up in Google Discover, helps you get a higher click-through rate.
And Google Discover is a very tight feedback loop. So if a piece of content shows up in Google Discover, Google sees that the metrics are good, so people are clicking on it actively, then it will show it more. So that higher click-through rate, then, triggers more promotion, more impressions, drives more clicks, and so it has this kind of self-reinforcing loop that happens.
So it's incredibly straightforward. You can just write the content you're already writing today, and you can add social titles. That will help. Same for images. You want to make sure that the open graph images that you're adding to the post are the right size, and we will put a link to the help article in the show notes so creators could follow up with some of the technical details. But essentially, this is a very small thing that you can do to help you show up on Google Discover.
Stephanie Woodin:
Tom, I feel like you're kind of blowing minds right now because I think this is something someone could literally do today that probably a lot of our listeners do not realize. I think this is one of the most applicable pieces of advice I've had since interviewing experts on this podcast, which is awesome.
Tom Critchlow:
And in the food space in particular, it's a really... No pun intended, but it's a low-hanging fruit. This is a thing that is easy to do, a lot of creators are not doing, and has a good chance of driving more traffic. And the good news about this, what I like about the Discover advice and this keyword targeting advice is it's about writing for the reader.
Stephanie Woodin:
Yes.
Tom Critchlow:
It's about being human. It's about being enticing. It's about being descriptive. The old SEO world of whatever the tool spits out is the keyword. I got to write about that keyword. I got to jam that out. That isn't what works in 2025. That hasn't worked for a while. And so increasingly I'd really encourage creators to think about writing for the reader. Those are the things that really anchor success for 2025.
Stephanie Woodin:
Tom, these are such good tips. I cannot even tell you. But it's kind of answering my question I had for you, which is is SEO still worth focusing on? And it sounds like yes, if you're doing it in this way.
Tom Critchlow:
A hundred percent.
Stephanie Woodin:
Yeah.
Tom Critchlow:
I mean, SEO has been dead for 15 years now, right? SEO's not dead. Organic Google traffic is still by far and away the number one traffic source for creators on the web, and it's not even close. It's not even like, "It's kind of a number two." There's no number two.
And so this is good news and bad news. The good news is growth in Google traffic is still absolutely possible. Lots of creators in our network are seeing really great growth. They're doing the right things. They're doing some of the things we mentioned around author reputation, cleaning up the archives, writing new content in new ways, focusing on the reader, and they're seeing huge traffic growth. Not all creators. It's been a rocky time. But it's definitely still possible. And so you may not anchor back to the traffic you had in 2020, 2021. Maybe those days are gone, but from where you are today, growth is definitely still on the table and Google is still the best channel to drive that through, again, if you're doing things in the right ways.
Just to touch on the others, for example, building an email list? That's a great idea. You should do that. Email is incredibly valuable, but isn't going to match the size of Google search traffic. Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, all declining in outbound clicks. So if you think there's another alternative out there, I hate to break it to you, but there kind of isn't. Google is really the big game in town still.
And that word that Addison used, betrayal, I think that is true. I think Google went too far. I think they betrayed a lot of creators and a lot of sites. The one thing I will give Google credit for is there is not a lot of AI spam in their search results. When you compare that and contrast that to Pinterest and Facebook in particular, whose feeds are overrun with AI-generated content... It's the kind of AI slop that I mentioned that I spent a lot of time looking at earlier.
Stephanie Woodin:
Oh, yes.
Tom Critchlow:
Yes. And so I think, in hindsight, what I think really happened with the helpful content updates, despite the name, was I think Google just turned the dials on authority and kind of reputation to protect themselves. They saw the coming rise of AI slop, and they thought, "here's no way we can let this in our search results. How do we keep it out?" Well, one way to keep it out is just raise the bar. You raise the threshold of sites that are able to get traffic. Throttle the little guys. I actually think, maybe I'm naive, but I feel optimistic that actually this is a big opportunity. I think those platforms will clean themselves up. We will realize as a... Is it two grand to say as a society? I think we'll realize that links and content have value...
Stephanie Woodin:
As a digital society.
Tom Critchlow:
As a digital society, we'll recognize that links have value. And the world we're in today where ChatGPT doesn't link out very much, AI mode from Google doesn't link out very much, I think those trends will reverse. I think we'll see more links out, more surfacing, again, of this firsthand perspective, original, unique, engaging visual content that people have wanted forever and will continue to want. And so although maybe traffic will go down some, maybe it'll continue to go down, some maybe different surface areas will come and go, but fundamentally, I don't think the web is dead. I don't think content is dead. There's plenty of growth left available.
Stephanie Woodin:
Yeah. And I was going to say, it sounds like... And this has kind of been a through line, I think, with other experts I've talked to, whether it's about this, AI, don't chase the fear and don't chase the trends or the fads. Keep your eye on them, but keep your head down and do what you're doing. Slight tweaks can actually make a huge difference in this landscape, but you're not going to veer too far off the course that you're on. Is that kind of accurate?
Tom Critchlow:
Yeah, and I would go even further to say we know that Google uses user engagement signals and real traffic data to understand what pages are really getting traffic and which pages are really engaging with readers. So we kind of always suggested this as an SEO industry, but we now know for sure. All the DOJ trials from Google the last couple of years, all the unsealed documents. We now know that Google is using all those signals, those user signals to rank content and to be able to say, "This page is good. People like it." And so if you ever needed or reassurance that making your page better for readers is the thing that will drive SEO results, now is a better time for that than we've ever had. Now again, it doesn't mean you can completely ignore keywords, and search volumes, and how your page shows up in search results, and optimizing some of those things. There's always things you can do, but by far and away, I think the north star or the driving force should be writing for the reader, writing things that readers are going to want to read, engage with, stick around with, spend a lot of time with. Those things are absolutely going to matter.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's amazing. Perfect note to end on, Tom. We so appreciate this. I feel like if you weren't taking notes, that's okay. We'll provide a transcript. But I'm sure people were taking notes because this is all really applicable, tangible things people can do today. Thank you so much for joining us. This was such an enlightening conversation.
Tom Critchlow:
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's fun to chat. Anytime.
Stephanie Woodin:
For more information on everything we talked about today, visit the show notes or our website, raptive.com/ctrlaltask. And if you have a question, email us. You can email us at ctrlaltask@raptive.com, that's C-T-R-L alt ask @raptive.com.