Mountain to Muhammad…

“If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain”… a saying around for centuries – attributed originally to both Turkish folk-lore as well as being re-told by Francis Bacon almost 400 years ago.

In March 2023 theworldtravelguy.com’s monthly search traffic stood at 700k – one year later it was 50k…Google algorithm updates happened…instead of clicking on a search-engine-directed page and reading through an article, users could now extract the most important information at a glance, staying on the Google main page solely.

AI is helping Google – and others – to transition from search engines to primarily, answer engines. A recent study shows that Google AI Overviews are now visible in 47% of Google searches – that is a phenomenal 125m Google AI servings in the UK each day. AI Overviews mention an average of 5 sources per instance, but the AI Overview Click-Through Rate (CTR) is only 38.9%. This means that around 60% of the 125m eyeball pairs in UK Google daily search do not see any website after an individual Google session.

Even though smaller website search returns would traditionally only have been seen much lower down Google’s pages, there is a big difference between a 100% chance of eyeballs somewhere and 60% chance of no eyeballs anywhere.

It is supremely ironic that the search phrase : “is there a future for small websites with google ai”, in itself renders a Google AI Overview that fully and adequately answers the search query…therefore no need to consult any of those small websites further…

So – if search eyeballs do not come in volume to theworldtravelguy.com or to the thousands of other small UK travel blogs, webmasters will have to go to the eyeballs.. mainly through more frequent and intense ad campaigns…which – ironically – again benefits Google.

Vreeslik champions small websites. Small websites often contain localised kernels of web source that get drowned out by AI amalgamation. Vreeslik built a 9m URL repository of almost exclusively smaller UK websites, of which 1.8m sites that update at least once every 3 months are kept in dynamic store, feeding text updates into custom feed streams.

In the end, Vreeslik truly brings a mountain of website text updates to Muhammad…and to John….and to Mary…..and to Jane…..and to thousands of users UK-wide.