You will find a lot of threads on this forum and others where people say that their websites survived the March 2024 update.
Others even say that they got even more traffic.
The truth is, whenever there is a massive update, it doesn't knock out all the sites that it is intended to punish.
This was true with Google Panda, Penguin, and RankBrain.
And it's gonna be true with every update.
But it's only a matter of time until those sites that are intended to be punished by these updates eventually get penalized.
Now does this mean that there is no hope?
Of course not!
If your website survived the update, that's your clue to level up your content.
Maybe have an editor go over your materials.
Make sure that things are tight and appeal to actual flesh-and-blood human beings.
You have to understand that the March 2024 update clobbered sites that basically just copied and pasted or automated the pasting and publishing of AI content.
These sites had almost no human editorial input.
If you fix that with a higher level of human editorial supervision and management, things may turn out better for you.
The bigger issue here is not whether AI content still works.
The bigger issue is whether there will be an online publishing industry in 10 years.
Remember, the reason why we have an industry that generates passive income is because Google's search results produce a list of sites.
They offload the responsibility of finding the right answer to the user.
The user has to click through the results to find the right answer, and this makes Google win because there's more ad space with that type of result.
It makes you win because you get free traffic, and some people from that free traffic may click on ads, fill in email forms, buy something from you, or otherwise put money in your pocket.
Everybody wins.
Well, that all goes down the toilet if people who use search engines expect only one answer.
So even if Bing or Google says, "Click on this link to see the full list of sources," people are not gonna do that because people are lazy.
Eventually, all that traffic dries up, and even worse, search engines will be even more selective as to where they source their data from.
You can have a blog about diet and exercise, but unless you're a doctor and you're part of a large data warehousing organization that sources its data from actual institutions like universities and colleges and health research centers, good luck getting a piece of that pe.
Do you see where all this is headed?
As scary as it may be, believe it or not, there are opportunities here.
Now, pay close attention to GPT agents.
Pay close attention to data training.
There's still a lot of space for opportunity, and every time there is a shift in technology, there is always a crop of new billionaires.
For example, the dotcom came and went, and a lot of rich people were created by that.
A lot of them got wiped out.
Then social media came and went, and there were a lot of millionaires created by that.
And I can go on and on.
So AI is no different.