I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself.

The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.

As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).

What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.

If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.

I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.

The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.

Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.

The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.

From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.

I think the author intended the title to be,

"Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?"

When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).

They mention running ads on tiktok or instagram but no mention of youtube ads...

Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.

So my next steps would be,

  Reddit Ads
  Youtube Ads
  Instagram Ads
  Increase AI Visiblity

Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser.

As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.

Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.

I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective.

My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.

The web is dead, we replaced with portable cable TV where you scroll up to change channel.

The way people get information online is changing rapidly.

I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based.

For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore.

How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.

Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control.

Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.

A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).

Are there existing projects like this?

The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.

I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not.

Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers.

Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?

I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way.

I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result.

I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.

> I am AI assisted, very fast!

I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by AI "very fast"... I don't need you anymore. AI provides a generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn't have so long as they can describe it well.

I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used AI to make this!" Great! Next time I'll use AI to make it and save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem to you so that you can then re-explain it to an LLM.

When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.

Is this being on top of HN part of the writer's new non-google marketing strategy?

A blog post lamenting the demise of Google Adwords.

Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now? We used to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to reign them all back. I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to afford nice things anymore.

Most people now conduct searches through AI chat. We never trusted Google with our search terms, IP address linked to WiFi and cell towers surveys with Google trucks for cross referencing on Google map, browser fingerprinting, time of day pattern detection, mouse reaction time measurement for age estimation, cross referencing with economic profiling of neighbourhoods, income bracket estimation algorithms, interest profiling based on search terms, browsing breadcrumbs, social network tracking, etc. Now imagine the new powers of AI chat adding reasoning patterns, deep thinking and complete trust to the equation. Let us organise a disconnect day where you turn off your phone and Internet router and ISP box just to confuse the algorithms! Where do we go from here? We stay home and invite disconnected friends for a rare moment of statistically insignificant privacy.

It’ not Google that’s dead. It’s the economy in North American markets. I am finding conversion way down, clicks and impressions I’m still getting. People are just being way more fussy before handing over cash.

Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal.

Winter is coming.

Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic content.

Googles ad business is riddled with fraud in all levels.

Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.

Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care.

The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated.

It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.

The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.

Reminds me of a quote I once read of "marketing being a game of diminishing returns".

When you find a working marketing solution, it's just a matter of time when it dries out, because of competitors and overall saturation.

They recently changed the max results per page from 100 to 10 and they're suing serpapi. They've basically killed their google newspaper archive.

Not happy with google.

And it's become clear to me how little of the open web, and top 100k sites they've fully indexed, I used to have a lot more faith in them.

I don't know if Google is dead, but what I know is this:

For the first time since 1995 my default method to research information on the web does not involve any traditional search engine anymore.

I can't find it, but there's a good graph that shows Google search decline in share to GPT, but it excludes Gemini. With Gemini, it stays relatively on par. That's pretty much the answer with where one goes. LLMs are higher intent than search could ever be, and they are closer to you selling to yourself than a store selling to you since they have all of your user context

If you believe markets to be a future discounting mechanism, then they're sure as hell saying Google "figured something out" in the last year, even vs OpenAI [1]

[1] https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1993464859376468102/photo/...

The old decentralized Internet is dying out and being replaced by a few apps under the total control of a few companies.

I'm not sure much can be done about this. At least the physical world is still the same.

Just trying to find out what this guy actually does is hard. It’s a page of links linking to another page of links, repeat. Where is the thing? The content? The product? It just feels a bit disconnected from patterns users expect and delivery mechanisms users are comfortable with in 2025. It’s almost a 1995 style pastiche of intent with no payoff.

Hugged to death right now, therefore: https://web.archive.org/web/20251229204141/https://www.circu...

Oh no, adtech is dying. I guess we'll all have to compete through quality of products and services and not gaming a rigged system designed to reward anything that maximizes the profit of the global surveillance adtech machine.

This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but this is better than it was.

Isn’t it just AIs that have an agenda? That lie to you? That use a directive to persuade you to do / purchase something under the guise of authority?

ChatGPT, etc. right now is the early web where everything was free and everyone wondered how it would make money.

Soak it up because it won’t last long.

Your business seems well suited to advertising through short form content so I wish you lots of success with transitioning away from Adwords.

Seriously, one random website getting less traffic means "Google is dead"? I imagine if you hit your toe, you call it "end of the world"? This sort of posts should be illegal. Flagged.

“Google is dead” feels overstated. What is actually breaking is the click based retrieval and attribution model once answers start getting synthesized upstream.

When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on.

You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization, teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather than how pages will rank.

Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether their content shows up across different models, and tracking inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers while smaller, better structured sources surface.

From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away into latent knowledge.

Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands. Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.

Googles Search Ad revenue is dead, but the business is diversified and positioned for change. As of 2024:

Search Ads and Partner Revenue = 230bn Youtube = 36bn Cloud = 40bn

Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI.

I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.

Such thick tension in the air waiting for the first courageous company to place ads on their LLM chats and tools.

They can spare their ad income falling for a while, but making the first move is always risky. Should they let openAI go first and fail?

Where do you go now? You go make sure LLMs know about your site, you welcome the herds of bot crawlers and pray someone breaks the standstill before your business falters.

Watching other people use Google, the predominant method of searching for information involves a query followed by getting their answer from the AI summary that appears above any search results.

I'm not sure what impact this would be having on Adwords, but another commenter mentions that Google isn't hurting in the ad revenue department.

I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would Google search three word terms: “best Chinatown dumpling”

But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?”

So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing?

I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.

Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".

The real story isn't that Google Ads stopped working, it's that attention moved somewhere ads can't follow. You can't buy placement in a Discord server or an iMessage group chat. If this is the new normal, the entire ad-supported internet is running on borrowed time.

This post and these comments give me low confidence in our HN community. No one here seems to understand ad platforms.

Google is far from dead. It still has the majority of the world’s online ad revenue, with Microsoft coming in second, then Meta at a far third. People assume that TikTok and Insta _must_ have the most since they assume that’s what all of their friends use, but even though they’re growing, they’re still not there yet.

Video ads on YouTube and others have a lot of play also, and everyone thinks of the TV commercials played during the Super Bowl.

But Google is still f-ing everywhere.

It’s fine to call them dying, but are they really when they are best positioned for ads in AI? OpenAI or Anthropic don’t have the data about users that Google has. There’s a reason that Buffett invested in Alphabet recently.

Here's the business model in a nutshell: If you want AI to recommend your business for some purpose, you must pay to have it included in the training corpus. And you will pay fees every time those vectors get used for outputs. And if you don't pay, you don't get mentioned.

Instagram (one of the potential targets of the author to replace Google Ads) became unusable for me with this last update, where they make you wait for ads to finish.

Not that I ever used it much (in fact, after all these years, I still didn't wrap my mind around anything but simple posts), but now, I basically only go there to do a post about a group I have (and that I had to remove from Meetup because Meetup is equal shares of terribly bad and terribly expensive) and answer some messages.

There's a generation (in fact several) of people that still want to meet in person, and the platforms that allowed us to create and join groups for it (Meetup was great for that during a golden period of 3-4 years) are all turning into garbage.

The AdWords platform is extremely complicated nowadays, and try as I might I can’t get any impressions from it. I then went through a period with an AdWords specialist from their team who also couldn’t get any impressions. It’s like they don’t want or need my money.

Google Ads started charging me $5 per click on low traffic search keywords this week, meanwhile YouTube ads are still 20 cents a click (presumably to keep up with Meta)

They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for no actual leads.

Anecdotally, this article seems to match with what I am witnessing regarding browsing habits. I am planning a big trip with others and everything is being found via social media apps; destination ideas, experiences, cafes, accommodation, etc.

I think it's time for a new way of discovering products. My ideal would be some sort of site that I can go to, to find services and products in my local area. There could also be national and international sections, with user ranked news of new interesting products in given categories.

For example, with video games I can go to sites like www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games, to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can, on my terms, go and check out the new products.

Is this really about Tiktok or about AI and how people are consuming the web? Used to be all web, then web+Tiktok,etc, now only AI+Tiktok, etc? I think I go to normal websites way less than I used to. Maybe everyone is doing that?

> I am AI assisted, very fast!

This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real person. I can't put my finger on why.

I do feel like it's maybe time to rewatch BSG.

Logged on to say Kagi[1]

[1]not an employee, sponsor, or autonomous agent of the above company

“Research shows” Lool!! Ask anyone in their teens or 20s even 30s. They’ll all answer what you did in the article. Short attention spans are ruling and so are those social media applications you mentioned.

Google is not dead in this case; what is dead is Ads on top of Google. I think the best way to fix this is to ensure that your website is optimized for searches in Google and in the new AI world.

There is always chaos when a central authority fails, and the "main home page for the Internet" model has definitely failed. AI killed it.

How long before we see sponsored ads placed alongside prompt answers?

Chegg’s decline is a concrete example of how AI search is changing the web

There’s been a lot of debate about whether Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are actually harming publishers. One publicly traded company’s timeline is worth looking at: Chegg.

What happened (with sources):

2021: Chegg launched Uversity, a platform for educators to share academic content. (Wikipedia)

2023: ChatGPT emerged as a serious competitor in homework help. Chegg responded by launching CheggMate, its own AI product built on OpenAI’s models. (Wikipedia)

Late 2024: Chegg reported accelerating subscriber declines, widely attributed to users shifting to free AI tools instead of paid study platforms. (WSJ, company filings)

Feb 2025: Chegg sued Google, alleging that AI Overviews reduced traffic to Chegg by answering questions directly in search results, harming acquisition and revenue. (Search Engine Land, Reuters)

May 2025: Chegg laid off ~22% of its workforce (≈248 employees), citing competitive pressure from AI and changes in search behavior. (Reuters)

Oct 2025: Chegg announced another round of layoffs (~45%, ≈388 employees), explicitly referencing “the new realities of AI” and reduced traffic from Google to content publishers. (Reuters / SF Chronicle)

What the data suggests (more broadly):

Independent studies show that when Google AI Overviews appear, users are significantly less likely to click through to external sites.

“Zero-click” searches (where users get answers directly on the results page) have increased, especially for informational and educational queries.

The impact isn’t uniform — some publishers report minimal effects — but content that answers how-to, homework, or factual queries appears most exposed.

Why this matters:

Chegg isn’t a small blog or SEO-driven site. It’s a public company with audited financials, legal disclosures, and incentives not to exaggerate under scrutiny. Its filings and lawsuit don’t claim AI is “bad” — they claim that traffic flows are structurally changing.

This doesn’t prove AI search is “killing the web,” but it does show:

AI answers are substituting clicks, not just competing for them.

Entire business models built on informational content are under pressure.

“Build better content” may not be sufficient when answers are synthesized upstream.

Curious how others here see it:

Is this a temporary transition problem?

Or are we watching the unbundling of the open web’s traffic economy in real time?

Apparently you should be getting ready to buy ad campaigns from LLM companies because they are going to inject ads into the responses soon. Young people are using LLMs like crazy in my experience.

That site loosing revenue mentioned in the post (https://bigtop.co.za/) doesn't even load for me.

As it should be with all things.

I pivoted away from google search (duckduckgo instead primarily) but even then, the majority of "information" I'm looking for goes instead to chatgpt.

You’re definitely not alone in this, I’ve seen similar drops from Google Ads recently. It feels less like bad optimization and more like the ground shifting under everyone.

The very concept of people going to a private digital plaza was very problematic in the first place and arguably still is. Humanity's drive towards convenience is the source of marvels but also many ills imo. Google's decline is a chance for change. Change towards something better. Not that I am optimistic that we will get there imo but the opportunity window is opening now. Don't look for a new digital overlord. Embrace the new age

It wouldn't surprise me if physical advertising, as mentioned in the post, makes a comeback. Especially coupled with magazines etc apparently making a comeback too.

Also, a lot of ads now have QR codes so you can tell which physical ads are driving versus traffic versus those that aren't.

e.g. the "half of my advertising is a waste but I don't know which half" is not true anymore if you are using specific QR codes per location/advertisement.

Kagi

Anecdotally it seems like a lot of people go to whatever LLM they have access to and ask it what to do. Surely the next frontier of advertising products is directly injecting recommendations into the response from the LLM. Or at least make the answer incorporate products and services somehow, similar to how influencers do paid content in a seamless way alongside their main content.

I'm not a marketer (anymore), but as an end user, I feel that Google has shot themselves in the foot with the horrendous search experience they provide these days. This notion and topic of discussion is becoming more commonplace online.

"Google results are just AI and sponsored content anymore." We've all seen it.

One anecdote, but I have a brick and mortar business and Adwords leads have fallen off a cliff year over year. Since AI stuff started getting pushed harder we've gotten fewer impressions and fewer conversions. Some of it is economic headwinds but also Google is just a black box we throw money into and pray it will send us business.

I thought SoMe replaced google for this sort of stuff like 6 years ago? GoogleAds are prob fine if you have a big retail business or something, but for anything creative some has been the marketing route I have seen everyone doing for years.

And looking at their site… Hacky creative coding. Mate, AI replaced you like 2 years ago.

The author should try Google Local Services Ads instead of Google Ads. I think Google cannibalizes Google Ads with LSA.

For posterity, if anyone can ever find this comment amongst all the others:

We went with Instagram ads, where we have the most followers. The result: 4 paid bookings in 48 hours - all confirmed leads from the new Instagram ad campaign.

Blog post updated.

This is impolite but it might be that the services you offer are in decreasing demand in general.

Your return customers know what a great show you do and it becomes tradition and they obviously love it.

But the difficulty finding new clients (something we all face) may be partially due the world moving on.

If google is dead, I sure hope they won't sell my gmail and google drive data to the highest bidder.

I think this article title misled me a bit... Google seems to be fine but it's no longer driving traffic through Ad Words. I think that in particular is really getting messed up by AI since people often don't go to any Web site once an AI agent answers their question.

Is there such a thing as a good ad? I've always blocked them on all platforms.

Looking at instagram where I don't block anything, most of what it suggests to me are soft porn or soft scams (generic chinese dropships marketed as a unique innovation).

Google isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the single answer. Even Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged how fast Google is improving, which explains why Meta is pushing AI harder. Still, competing shouldn’t mean replacing what already works.

psa, "is comprised of" is almost never correct. "comprises" means "is composed of". so when people say X is comprised of Y they really mean "X comprises Y" or "X is composed of Y"

Try contacting YouTube creators in your area. Much more cost efficient than any other kinds of ads especially if you pick channels with your target audience IF you can actually get creators to promote you (most won't reply).

Google has drowned in irrelevance for me. I barely use it (i use DuckDuckGo), and it has massively de-indexed my websites for no apparent reason. I don't even bother to look at Google Search Console

Well, the cycle is over.

I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine.

I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers. Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank algo.

Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that, eventually, destroyed Google search).

Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you check it, this seems to be working fine...

For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry Nvidia GPUs.

But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this will benefit society in a big way.

I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others who will devour whatever they find.

I'm amazed people on HN still use Google tbh. What for? Do you expect them to get better or treat your eyeballs and attention with more dignity anytime soon?

There's Kagi, Brave Search, even DDG would be better.

Judging by the post this guy advertises his kids entertainment business to young people. With recent crackdowns on age verification etc. it could be his ads are no longer reaching the audience they used to.

I work in private events and the answer is definitely Facebook. Facebook ads have been better for quite some time. Targeting is a harder but also the CPCs are a lot lower so you can spray and pray a bit more.

It's only going to get worse from here. Everything is trending towards zero for any kind of online service as it gets easier to make software with LLMs. There just simply won't any moat left.

Ironically, Google’s Ads division and CEO have blame for this. The Ads division forced the search division to weaken the quality of search results and Google’s CEO sided with them.

No matter which new technology arises on the horizon... what is tainted is not internet, not AI. Is the entire purpose on follow dollars.

I hated when needed to see Google reports for ads. And be in a rush for SEO. This was a game of rats, no real knowledge, just attempts to satisfy an Algorithm that changed on weekly base.

I quit Facebook / Instagram / Google ads 6 years ago. Why? Because my advertisement was feeding the system on who show concurrent advertisement, collecting habits of MY customers.

So the system is broken. Stop pursuing the american dream and the wild capitalism. This new generation is building immunity to many of these things, at least until their engineers find a way to take control of these minds.

About where to go... I think we need to be satisfied with less, in the sense we need to buy a new car every year, nor new clothes just for fashion, neither gadgets just by compulsive appeal.

Buy the best you can, use it the most before discard it. Exchange fast food for what your granparents used to be fed. Know that you can be happy by yourself, not by what they said you need in the last 100 years. Life is that, the way is that. But many fall in the western system propaganda.

The mainstream leaving Google search and the general web would be a chance for both getting better again. A new equilibrium will establish itself one way or the other.

You become a trusted source of data for AI chatbots (hopefully in somewhat ethical way for end users). Look into generative language optimization.

It is fantastic to see how a research paper by Google fueled the force that might kill Google. Attention is all that is sold by google. It is an attention broker. Now that very attention is thinly distributed, Attention as the most precious food for businesses, is under fierce struggle. Google has ruled the city center area will all the attention sinks, the billboards. But AI is the new mafia on the scene that kidnapped all attention and hoarded it inside the AI data centers.

We don’t know any details on OP’s ad campaign. Did they happen to make any errors? Is holiday the most competitive time? Bids?

Google is a waste of brainpower.

I wish it would actually die so that all those talented engineers could move on to solving non-ad problems.

As a game theorist and a cynic, my go-to response when I hear of non-zero-sum games is “yipee, both sides can lose!”

-to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

The traffic goes to mobile and AI. Google is much stronger than ever before, in mobile and AI, not just web.

you wrongly assumed about tiktok or shortform content. In last 6 months I only visited google for 2 things. Searching and looking at reviews of restaurants or shops. And of course navigation in maps. Other than that I never use google now a days. I'm sure there are a lot like me.

Wait I know Google search to content sites is largely dead, but I thought Google ads still worked fine.

I would say Kagi but they need to start doing their own indexing for that to be a real future

An instant drop in 50% means something else is off. The shift to llm's has been happening already for the last years.

Its more likely their your ranking dropped. Or a competitor got ahead of you. Google is still main source of leads for service businesses.

If you are old & previously ranked well the LLM's will also mention you similar to how Google did.

Well, there used to be altavista but it seems Yahoo bought them out. So I guess Yahoo?

GOOG +65% YTD. Opposite of dead.

A few things to determine if what you're experiencing is actually Google "being dead"

1. Check your search volume. Use Google Trends or the method I will share below. 2. Check how you spent in December vs how you spent during a previously great time. Understand if it's a volume issue or a conversion issue 3. See if anyone new entered your auction. If they did, find out what they're saying

-- 1a) Search Volume

Checking search volume: In the era of broad match, this is one of the most underrated approaches to diagnosing issues. Take a look at your `search exact match impression share` relative to your impressions on a few of your top keywords. Then measure out if search volume for your business is actually decreasing. Then, use the following rubric to diagnose futher:

1. Not decreasing. Move on to the next item 2. 5-10% decrease and competitive auction. If you have a decrease AND a competitive auction, a 20% drop in efficiency could be explained. 3. 5-10% decrease and a not-so-competitive auction. If this is the case, the drop in volume may not be what's causing your issues.

-- 1b) Click volume

Check your exact match impression > click rate. Similar to the last approach, this helps diagnose if there are SERP feature changes which could decrease the amount of clicks you're receiving despite demand remaining flat.

If this is the case, take a look at the SERP and find the new winners.

-- 2) Segment comparison

Compare December YOY and see what changed. Are you serving to a different age range? Different search term mix? Increased spend to search partners? Are the headline combinations which are serving different?

-- 3) Auction changes

Have you checked your auction insights? Are new competitors being more or less aggressive? If so, what are their headlines? Are they offering an easier booking experience than you are?

And... if Google is actually dead, you might try:

1. Meta ads. Turn off audience network, make sure you've got the conversions API set up, and see what happens. Expect leads to be lower intent. Make your creative dead simple. "If you're looking for kid party entertainment in Northdene..." Start with $20/day optimizing for leads.

2. Improve your form. I see typeform-style-forms do better than the long one you have.

3. (Maybe) If you don't already track `closed (won)` conversions into your google ads account, that could help. I find when I start tracking which searches turn into deals, I can restructure my account to de-prioritize the junk leads.

4. (Maybe) Add a soft form to each of your service pages. Basically an embedded form which starts by asking people softball questions like "How Old Are The Kids At Your Party." Once people start a form they're much more likely to complete it, even if the questions are very basic.

5. (Maybe) Add a way to give a phone call. Phone call leads convert 30-50% better in my experience. But, this isn't an option for every

Perhaps, click fraud?

Is there any new powerful platform/aggregator in your market?

maybe the issue is that you site bigtop.co.za literally does not load

you can buy ads on instagram, fb, tiktok, reddit, youtube, amazon, apple iOS apps, the M$ windows start menu (apparently), and soon OpenAI (gemini gotta be following right)!

Genuine question: how is Google not losing a tons of money yet?

Gross clickbait title, do better with your article titles.

Sorry in advance if this comes off as hostile, that's not my intent. I am genuinely wondering: You're in the business of advertising? And you're upset that Google isn't your golden goose anymore?

How long have you lived in Durban? Nice surfing pics.

Because everyone asking AI to do websearch for them

Where do you go know - maybe realize that ads make everyone around miserable and with this bitter understanding go through painful but necessary process of finding other means of earning money.

PS. Seriously.

It never really worked. Most businesses just paid for customers that were going to or already found them anyways.

Not saying ads don't work at all, they definitely increase awareness.

> Right now, though – I’m broke. Anyone need a website or IOT project built? I am AI assisted, very fast!

Oh wow, this author is tone deaf to the entire situation that is occurring in the world right now. I just had a conversation with my 70 year old Aunt (no tech skills) about AI and its impact on the labor market and I used the example of how for the first time ever I actually believe she could build her own iPhone app by just talking to her computer. This is an hypothetical app that would have cost her $10k-100k or more in the very recent past. I really think the market for the very services this author is selling is evaporating or at least on hold while everyone is at least trying to diy it with AI.

The response is ChatGPT.

They're going to add ads to their responses (if they didn't added it already), and people use it as search engine.

Maybe someone should tell Google.

Your campaign on Google is dead.

Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try some contextual one too.

It is not just Google Ads that are dead. Advertising in general, is dead.

No one wants this shit and no matter where you go, people will find a way to block your ads or leave the platforms they cannot easily block ads in.

As soon as you advertisers moved to the internet, you gave users the power to delete you, so thanks for that.

my vote is for ATProto

let's take back the interwebs and have a single account where all apps store their data about you, which you can move around and also swap out clients for any data without companies blocking you

It’s not the advertising or eyeballs.

GenAI allows everyone to build their own stuff and find their customers without ads.

The ad business is doomed.

And if you think Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha are a capturable audience, I gotta bridge to sell you.

You have one slim hope. Engage with smart young people that are savvy at today’s comms and can create and edit their own content.

is this about the second single from Good Riddance?

I consider ads to be a cancer I hope it will die in every possible way.

the site is loading forever now. hn crashed it hehe

Can someone explain why GOOG is still sky high despite this?

Great, now my server is crashing again. I thought Cloudflare was supposed to take care of this stuff

Google and Google Ads are not one and the same.

The jump from the op's "i screwed up my google ads campaigns" to "Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok"....

i mean, c'mon

Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty useless.

Another explanation is that when the cost of living is high, people reduce their spending on entertainment. If that's the case, no amount of advertising will materially shift your bottom line.

Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads, and with shitty content because of people trying to game them just like they've been gaming search engines.

I am glad to not be the only one to come to a similar conclusion. But we need to go one step further: I believe that Google has become harmful to the world in its present form. I'll skip listing all reasons, as there are many other websites that detailed this already, as well as (ironically) youtube videos. The problem goes much deeper than "merely" Google's monopoly in regards to all that ad-money. This is indeed probably the biggest reason why Google sucks so much nowadays, but the problem really is much bigger than that; it also taps into politics, what with the orange King meta-protecting these mega-corporations and the tech-bros ruthlessly abusing the rest of the world. We need real change, substantial change. Fixing Google is one important step but not the only one - but let's focus on Google mostly here, to simplify things a little.

The big underlying problem is that Google has no real incentive to change the way how it operates. Its search engine, which they crippled, is not really that important to Google anymore compared to the ad-revenue and other business ventures here. AI is the current insanity rage and Google went for it too. When you cripple the search engine, you can sell more bullshit to people, fake-generate and hallucinate a world wide web that is controlled by these walled garden corporations (Facebook is probably the best example of a walled garden, but there are many similar; twitter run by a crazy oligarch too, "bla bla bla log in to read news bla bla bla" - never going to do that, so they cut off my access to an open world wide web here).

I do not think Google can be fixed with the current setup though. It will just continue to steal money by taking our data and interconnecting this with other greedy private interests, now represented by lobbyists running the USA (and also other places, of course; just the USA being bigger than the other places, economically).

Google has to be split up and removed. There is no other way to fix it anymore. They want down a path from which they can not change anymore, because any change means less revenue, and no corporation wants to do so on its own.

> Research shows that many young people are getting their information from short video platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We are trying ads on there.

Well - circusscientist adds to this problem. They depend on ads, so they contribute to the overall problem. The issue is not just Google here; it is also commercial interests who think they have a right to pester-harass people via irrelevant crap (aka ads). Google killed ublock origin. Google controls the web virtually via chrome. We have a conflict of interests here. Google has no reason to change this, and many companies think they need to use ads. This is a problem. I believe in an ad-free world. I don't want to see any ads. Many years of commercial interests confused people into thinking ads are the way to go. I disagree. I think ads are evil and must die. And companies that have no alternative business model, who rely on ads, also have to go. Google is just sitting on top of it all, acting as a greedy parasite.

> We have an email newsletter

They still think anyone cares about email spam. I never subscribe to any "newsletter". A better model is to read up on things WHEN YOU VISIT THE WEBSITE. This works on many private websites too such as github. I can read when I want to, not when some bot spams me down with this irrelevant stuff (and admittedly I would not read ads anyway, but my point is about DELIVERY versus VISITING something here).

> We also plan to do some actual physical advertising

So he chose confrontation.

> I am AI assisted, very fast!

Why would I want to give my money to anyone using ads or wanting to lower the overall quality via AI? That makes no sense. Some people are beyond hope.

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Google is dead the day they remove their moto: Google is not evil

And by the way announced the world they are the source of evil!!

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Get a real job

Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.

Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.

Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.

Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.

I knew about duckduckgo for years and it was always too much friction to switch. I tried like 4 times but always went back to google when I had to research something quickly. Eventually the friction of using google became high enough though that the friction of switching was not that much higher. I’ve been using ddg and occasionally duck ai for over a year now.

Haha no wonder, check out the website its dodgy as f. https://bigtop.co.za/