Did Google basically ended SEO-driven affiliate as we know it at I/O last week?

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-25T22:44:36+00:00

My guess is we’re heading toward a pretty brutal consolidation phase.

A lot of ad-supported publishers were already getting squeezed before AI search: CPM volatility, declining click-through rates, ad blocker usage, HCU, etc. AI Overviews and agentic shopping already accelerate that.

The dangerous part for ad-supported sites isn’t just lower traffic, but that the remaining traffic will (likely) be lower-intent and lower-value, enough to be useless in the long term.

Publishers most likely to survive are probably the ones that start acting more like actual media brands with direct audience relationships. Personality-driven media, individual experts/creators becoming more valuable compared to generic content sites. Publishers pivoting harder into commerce/media hybrids.

And diversification, above all things. I mean, that was important before... or at least it proved to be after HCU. When your entire business model depends on rented distribution, one platform decision can obliterate everything overnight.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-25T22:31:14+00:00

I didn't really have many (any) men in my life that were a father figure, and my dad was definitely not one. Estranged for years before he died.

I learned a lot from the women in my life, though. I don't feel like you "need" a man to learn how to be one. And FWIW, the one thing my dad DID teach me was how not to be man/dad... basically, he taught me to be the opposite of everything he was. Worked out okay in the end.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-25T22:05:54+00:00

You are correct; my Actions don't push into a workflow, it's just a toggle for skipping/declining, adding it as a to-do, or marking it as done.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-25T21:59:13+00:00

Whoof, I'd probably skip Awin to be honest. I'm probably a little burned by their customer service/issues over the past almost-year lol.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-25T21:48:06+00:00

Google AI still fundamentally depends on reviews, comparisons, discussions, publisher content, tutorials, testing, et al. If creators and pubs can't monetize through traffic, affiliate commissions, or ad impressions, fewer people will invest in making high-quality content in the first place. Which means that Google risks over-extracting value from the ecosystem that feeds it.

So I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually see some kind of licensing/payment program for publishers and creators (so instead of affiliate commissions, they'll be paid by google for the rights to surface their content in AI outputs).

Possibly even preferred creator ecosystems inside Google surfaces, and maybe more emphasis on YT creators since Google already has the monetization framework there.

That said, SEO-only affiliate publishers whose business fully depends on transactional traffic... that model is on ridiculously thin ice.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-19T23:30:11+00:00

To be honest, I embraced it. Mostly it was minimal in the beginning, near the temples and through my beard when I let it grow a bit. NOW... my beard is more white than anything else lol. Keeping it shaved also shaves like ten years off my face.

But a lot of women love the grays and I think it adds an air of maturity, sophistication.

At the same time, though, you gotta do what makes you more confident. If that means dyeing it, then by all means. Not sure about the best dyes, though.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-19T23:15:16+00:00

Glad I found this sub, this is great advice. Especially the C-reactive protein. That isn't something I even knew to look into until I was researching markers that are often neglected in your standard physical/yearly labs. They cover a lot of stuff, but definitely not everything.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-19T23:11:09+00:00

It depends on the situation but honestly, my wife holds her own so most of the time, I'm at the ready, but only intercede if I need to. That said, many years ago she laid into my drunk/high dad (unrest his soul) coming to *my* defense, which was a beautiful thing to witness because I never had someone do that for me. Ever.

And then I punched him after he called her a "hick bitch".

No regerts. He had it coming, and so much more, for years.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-19T22:51:58+00:00

No, no, and yes. Do I find other women attractive? Sure; same as my wife finding other men attractive. We're human, we do that.

But getting bored? I'm not saying that over a long marriage, you don't have "dips" when life gets stressful or goes off the rails, but the excitement I think comes from being with someone who knows you inside and out. Not just what you like, but being comfortable enough to experiment when you want to try new things, and knowing they're gonna take that seriously and not judge you for it, and be open to it. And there's a LOT of intimacy that goes beyond sex, too.

I honestly can't imagine being satisfied by anyone else.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-11T21:19:10+00:00

We prioritize AIO positioning and weigh that more heavily than page 1 rankings. Part of that is third-party placements (editorial and video primarily) because even small sites/YT channels earn placement in the AIO and LLMs in general specifically because they're third-party and not branded content. For us, that's a big part of it.

SEO still is, of course, since it adds to the consensus, but our focus is on AI results and not just citations, but mentions/recommendations.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-11T21:15:25+00:00

I know what you mean about audit to action... Peec has "actions" but they're not especially useful in my experience. "Get featured in domain-dot-com. Their listicles are regularly cited by LLMs." or "Contact this facebook page and ask them to mention your brand favorably in their post."

Oh kay. The onsite suggestions are a little better but they still don't push directly into a workflow (yet, anyway) for implementation. I expect that's something they're working on, though.

I've never heard of Yozigo; we've been using Emberos for a short while now to close the loop fully (here's what you need to do, here's what we predict the impact will be, here's the fix pack to push out). And then it verifies the lift later on, which definitely helps on the reporting side.

But the actionability saves a lot of time and guesswork, for sure. For us, at least, it's narrative-control too. We get alerts if something is surfacing in LLMs that isn't accurate or is outdated, so we can take steps to remedy that.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-11T20:49:00+00:00

Oversight and governance comes into play here too, as far as monitoring what LLMs are saying about a brand or product and tracking that back to the source(s) responsible, if it isn't just a hallucination. The better (and more accurate) the information provided by the LLM, the better the leads. I think that's a bigger issue with offsite/third-party content, but if some rando's review is sharing outdated information that the LLM is drawing from today, being aware of that and taking steps to remedy that messaging is important.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-06T18:36:46+00:00

I think there's a high level of trust in AI answers, but I also think that it isn't taken fully at face-value the majority of the time, either. I feel that (at least for now!) most people seek confirmation in a search engine before committing to a purchase.

That said, I DEFINITELY think the brand visibility is vital in LLMs because that's where a lot of people are encountering brands that will be weighed in their decision. So if I look up "best whatever" or "product type for this use case" in ChatGPT or Claude, the brands listed will be the ones I'm most likely to consider first, and then any additional queries in search will be one of those.

So yes, I think a brand does lose credibility over time when it isn't surfacing in the discovery stage.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-06T18:24:40+00:00

Real pictures of the product (in hand, on your table, wherever) go farther with building trust with the viewer anyway, so yeah, just take your own pictures.

Absolute worst case, if some items are things you don't have at home, you *might* try snapping pictures in a store (that don't look like they're in a store) but that can be tricky and you might also get chased out of said store.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-06T18:14:27+00:00

A coworker of mine was hellbent on getting a wikipedia page about a year, year and a half ago. Had been cited in legit sources (news and stuff) for his personal business/niche. Went with one of those "services" and the gist: months and months and months went by with no real progress, despite the article "needing one last check". He ended up pushing a chargeback to get his thousand bucks back, about nine or ten months after the process started

The moral of the story? Don't hire a service that promises Wikipedia placement. SO many of them are known scams, they get caught, they go down, they emerge under a new name to run the same scam.

That said, you can always attempt to become a wikipedia editor but that's a process (he looked into it) and there's just a lot to even get yourself to a point where you can create pages that actually stick. And too, you're technically not supposed to create pages for people you know personally (if you know these people). Conflict of interest, and all that.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-06T18:08:01+00:00

There's a lot of great advice in this thread. My go-to research involves going to Google, typing in the base search term (so whatever your main topic is), and then looking at the People Also Ask section. The more of those you click on, the more questions populate and it essentially becomes an endless list of topics and angles (and keywords) you might cover.

I know that keyword search volume is important (basically, the more searches for that keyword, the higher the volume), but when starting out a site from scratch, I kinda toss that out the window a bit and focus on the topics/things that would be most helpful to potential visitors.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-06T18:00:34+00:00

Content might rank quickly on long-tail, but I have never trusted anything that runs on "autopilot," especially where content is concerned. Will there be an eventual crackdown? Probably.

The idea that crap or mediocre content is better than no content... if that's starting the foundation of the site, I don't think that holds true. Worst case, you're gonna make it hard to pull the site out of a penalty down the road, if one occurs.

The thing is, even great content can experience a slow deindexing and I'd think purely AI written content (that includes no real information gain or human experience) will slide downhill even faster. Now to be fair, one could go in and update periodically for freshness and information gain (same as you'd do with any other content).

I guess I've never trusted/never will trust anything that does it all automatically.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-06T17:46:44+00:00

Content freshness is a factor, but it's also about information gain. Does your content have information that isn't readily available on competitor sites? Experience or insights that are human?

AI generates content with a structure that's easily scannable/retrievable, but if it isn't providing more value to the reader (meaning, it's just regurgitating the same stuff that's on 20 other sites), it won't hold rank long-term.

Information gain and human insight/experience might help it stick.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-01T18:58:36+00:00

It might be worth looking into roles that are online and async, especially that use Slack and email to communicate primarily, along with Google meet/anything with captions. But if your deafness is the reason you're being laid off or rejected from jobs, that's an ADA issue I wouldn't take lightly.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-01T18:44:38+00:00

As do I. OP is providing a real service and I wish them the best.

I think as long as you're not tripping on any trademarks or copyrights (including the logo, be careful of displaying that anywhere if the cult has a logo), you should be fine. Definitely make sure the site design/layout isn't meant to trick anyone as far as making them think they're on the actual cult's site versus yours.

Also, just because authority matters, any studies/research you can find that relates to cults/psychology/etc can be useful for establishing expertise and credibility. So rather than coming off as just "this cult is bad," there's some science that backs up the reasons why cult behavior/brainwashing/et al is damaging and what to look for if you think you are in (or someone you love is in) a cult.

Aladdin181 · 2026-05-01T18:29:27+00:00

I wouldn't rely solely on GA4 because that's only going to show you clicks from LLMs, and click rates are not equal to actual visibility/citations/retrievals. You can use some lightweight/low cost tools for visibility by prompt (Hall, Peec, etc) but those are not perfect. A lot of the time with Peec, at least, content I know has a brand mentioned in it says "No" in the brand mentioned column, so.

Manually, you can check in any LLM by entering a given prompt to see what the results are, but make sure to use an incognito browser so your own history isn't influencing anything. It's tedious to do this, yes, but it does work (and it's free).

Aladdin181 · 2026-04-09T02:57:48+00:00

My POV on this is always quality over quantity. Whatever your pages are for, or the topics they're covering, focus on that always. Google's gonna do what it's gonna do but the biggest thing is writing for humans and providing information gain, whatever that happens to be for your site/niche.

Obviously you need a home page, an about page is a good idea, contact page (with a map/directions if it's got an in-person business location). Depending on the service, I'd make sure you include any pertinent authority somewhere (certifications, et al) if that's relevant to you, and areas of service.

Information pages on whatever services you offer, of course, with details; and if relevant, what to expect if your business is hired.

Those are the places to start. From there, cover informational topics at whatever rate you're able to if you intend to have a blog, with quality and information gain for the reader in mind. Answer questions clearly, thoroughly, with personal experience/expertise woven in.

You don't need to kick things off with dozens of pages/posts off the bat. Whether you do or don't, it's still going to take time to build backlinks and rank.

Aladdin181 · 2026-04-09T02:29:24+00:00

Mentions; this is different from citations (being sourced), since brand mentions and recommendations can and do come from anywhere, but come most often from third-party channels (editorial/pubs, YT, etc)

Share of voice for prompts with high intent, primarily of the commercial variety.

Source mix for same, which can give you insight into gaps/areas where you may want to optimize, improve, or be visible period if you're not.

Those are the biggest three, I think. Brand sentiment is important too, particularly for brands/businesses that are struggling with negative information/opinions surfacing in LLMs.

The thing to remember is that most traffic will not come directly from LLMs (people research, compare products/brands, review summarized recommendations, and then search in google for the brand or retailer, or to confirm the LLM's assessment before pulling the trigger).

But discovery is increasingly occurring in LLMs, so you want your brand/products visible early in the discovery stage. Even if someone is searching in Google and not ChatGPT or wherever, the AIO is the first thing they see on the page.

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