Running and Writing Sites for People, Not Bots (Including Search Engines)
googlebot's rug-pull (slop as the "new" or "honorable" non-fungible token mania)
Recently, in light of push-comes-to-shove changes in Google Search (google.com, google.de etc), many people spoke of what search means to them, seeing many disturbing changes on the Web. Many people wrote about it last month, as did we (in Daily Links and editorials).
The core issue is, many sites made a mistake. It was a fatal error. They wrongly assumed that Google was crawling and indexing to send them "traffic" (which they associated with "ad revenue" or "revenue sharing").
Now, however, more sites realise that the above-mentioned "crawling and indexing" is for training plagiarism engines. LLMs are leveraged by Google to make low-quality copycats of pages and present these to people as "artificial intelligence" rather than deficient imitation.
Had those sites spent more time focusing on RSS feeds (not social control media "games") and less on SEO (trying to game search engines), they wouldn't be sobbing now.
The Web predates search engines. The Web was made for people, not bots. Sites that rely on GAFAM (et al) for their relevance are missing the boat. █