Will Artificial Intelligence Kill Authority Sites?

Making money from blogging by sharing your thoughts and your adventures has been dead for quite a while.

It is hard to get traffic when you are writing about things and thoughts nobody or a few people are searching for.

That’s why building niche or authority sites became a thing.

People wrote about things they care about or didn’t care about because they just wanted to make money from display ads or affiliate marketing.

Some site owners even paid others to write for them

Niche sites are mostly dead now.

Artificial Intelligence changed the game as we know it and these are my thoughts about what we should do.

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The Beginning of the End

I used AI content generators such as Jasper, I considered them helpful but certainly not a threat to niche or authority sites.

Then ChatGPT came and I immediately thought that an AI chatbot was a revolutionary tool and definitely a threat to niche or authority sites.

ChatGPT kept growing in popularity; publishers used it to create more content.

I used ChatGPT to write code and that moment I knew we were screwed.

Then “You” incorporated AI features into its search engine and showed us what most Search Engines might end up doing eventually.

Perplexity became another popular option

Publishers keep polluting the internet and Google nuked us all with the helpful content update.

Google introduce Gemini then Gemini 2.0.

Claude came along.

ChatGPT Search came to grab a piece of the Pie and might pose a threat to Google.

I still get some visits but I lost like 90% of my traffic

I don’t know if the traffic is lost to:

• Google HCU
• Google AI overviews
• ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini

But I seriously wonder if there is place for content sites anymore.

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Users Love ChatGPT, Not Search Engines

Most users love ChatGPT, even the publishers, who are whining about how Artificial Intelligence pooped the party we were having, use it for all sort of things every day.

I use ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini every day for coding and preparing lessons.

ChatGPT search is now available to everyone for free.

I think that people will get used to using language model chatbots and forget about traditional search.

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Big Search Engines Making Massive Changes

Something we know is that nobody is gonna give a crap if a small search engine adds an AI chatbot to its search engine. “You” proved that point.

AI Capabilities didn’t make much of a difference for Bing.

I hate Google AI Overviews. To get chatbot answers, I rather use ChatGPT or Claude.

I like Gemini 2.0 but Google doesn’t make money from people asking things to their ChatBot.

As far as I know, Google makes money from Search Engines by:

#1	Showing ads in the search results
#2	Getting 30% of the money from the ads shown to your visitors.

it is not on their best interest to tell its users to stop search and start asking questions on Gemini.

At this point, all search engines and AI Chat Bots are playing chess.

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Sites will keep Losing even More Traffic

We don’t know if search engine users are ready to adopt AI Chatbots.

In case, people start using them, there will be some keywords that will lose their search volume and some keywords will keep it.

If what your blog provides can be easily provided by an AI Chatbot, your blog’s traffic will probably die.

If your blog provides something that chatbots can’t provide, your site traffic will diminish but your site will still get visitors

Fortunately, AI Chatbots have limitations, they can’t provide:

#1	Great Reviews
#2	Online Tools
#3	Great Video Content
#4	Reliable Content
#5	Opinions I care about

I still want to read an honest Perfmatters review than one created by a chatbot with no feeling or experience with the plugin

Do you think that sites like Swim University, Epic Gardening will die when AI chatbots are massively adopted?

If people care about your thoughts on different matters, you can create a newsletter type of website or use a platform that people can subscribe to such as Substack, Medium, or Ghost.

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Video Platforms

Video content has become increasingly popular on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

We are also seeing the growing popularity of live-streaming platforms such as Twitch.

Videos are engaging, easily consumable, and offer a more dynamic form of content compared to text and images.

Everyone wants to pump content but not everyone will be ready to create video content so that opens a window for well-rounded content creators.

Now we think that a channel could complement a blog. As years pass, blogs will complement channels.

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AI Content Generators are Dead

Expensive AI Content Generators might soon go out of business now that we know that ChatGPT will remain free and that the PRO version is only 20 bucks per month.

Do you think that people will keep paying a monthly subscription when ChatGPT is free or cheaper?

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Make Money as This Business Model Lasts

I am gonna squeeze every dollar out of my niche or authority sites for as long as this lasts.

In the worst-case scenario, I don’t think that site traffic will go down to zero overnight so I have time to figure out what I want to do in the meantime.

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