If you’re a regular visitor of this site, you’ve probably noticed that I’m publishing a lot less recently. Here’s why.
Don’t worry! I haven’t gone away! I’m still updating this site, but I’m focusing more on my YouTube channel these days, so catch me over there.
A peek into my site Google Search performance
This is a graph from Google Search Console, which is a tool that sites like mine can use to track their site’s performance on Google Search. The blue line represents the users who click through from Google to my site, and the purple line represents the number of impressions, or the number of times my site is shown on Google Search in some form.
There are a few things happening here, one very obvious and one more subtle. Let’s dive in…
Google’s August 2024 search engine update
Google periodically makes updates to its search engine algorithm which can dramatically impact the traffic sites receive. It made one of these updates in August 2024, which dramatically reduced my site’s traffic—This site lost greater than 95% of its traffic from Google overnight.
Not all topic areas are created equal. Topics relating to personal finance, safety, social wellfare, health, and the like get special treatment. Google terms these topics as “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics. Google states that they place treater emphasis on what it calls “E-E-A-T” or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
So, for these Your Money or Your Life topics, large, established, well-known sites get an advantage in Google search rankings. There can be good reasons for this, but it puts small content creators like myself at a massive disadvantage.
What I believe happened in August 2024 is that Google turned the dials way up in its preferencing of large sites for YMYL topics. I’ve spoken with several other independent content creators who saw similar drops in Google traffic, while the editors at larger sites I spoke with (Forbes Marketplace properties notwithstanding) saw their traffic stable or increase.
Decoupling of impressions and traffic
But the massive drop-off in traffic in August 2024 wasn’t the only thing that happened. If you take another look at the graph, you’ll notice that the purple line (impressions) and the blue line (site visits) diverge throughout late 2024 and 2025.
Increasingly, Google is using the data from my site to generate its AI Overview answers, which generate an “impression” but very rarely results in a clickthrough to my site. And what the graph shows is that Google is using the data from my site more and more, but feeding my site less and less traffic.
AI plagiarism is a huge problem
Historically, the bargain that content creators made with search engines was simple: We produce content, we allow them to index our content for their service, and in return we get traffic. By extracting data from this site and presenting it as an “answer,” Google and companies like Open AI keep users on their platform, and content creators are seeing less traffic on their sites.
If you want good content, it needs to be paid for somehow. No matter how much you love your job, you wouldn’t do it if you weren’t paid. I and other content creators are the same. In my case, I’ve historically paid the bills on this site through credit card affiliate links. However, when Google, Open AI, and others extract information from my site, repurpose it, and then don’t send me traffic, I’m unable to do this. And when I’m not getting paid, I can’t justify spending my time making great content.
In addition, traffic from scraping bots imposes huge costs on sites. Today, I’d estimate that fully half of the visits to my site are from AI bots. This traffic provides no value to me—but it imposes massive, real monetary costs on me and my business. Either I need to implement infrastructure that can filter out these bots or I need to pay for higher tiers of server infrastructure to support the bots so that my real audience can access this site and have a reasonably good experience.
Scraping data to feed an AI bot is stealing, but small content creators have no real recourse. AI scraping has caused a massive amount of damage to my business, but my only real recourse is to sue the tech giants using my data. That might work for someone like the New York Times, but that’s not a realistic option for anyone who doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend on a legal team.
What I’m doing with cardsandpoints.com going forward
So, the business environment has changed and I’m changing my business to adapt. Here are some of the ways that my business (this site and the other stuff I do online) is changing:
- Emphasis on my YouTube channel. Starting in early 2025, I shifted a lot of my efforts over to my YouTube channel. For me, at this time, YouTube seems to be the best platform to publish and grown my audience. Cardsandpoints.com probably ends up supplementing the YouTube channel, rather than being a standalone site.
- More content will be gated. I’ve done a bit of thinking about how I can continue to provide content for free, and the best solution is probably to gate some content behind an email sign-up. Some content that I can directly monetize won’t be gated, of course, but if I’m spending time researching and writing content, it needs to be for real people in my audience.
- Some subscription access and paid content. Deep-dive card guides and resources that take a massive time to build out might become paid subscription services. This model works for places like Consumer Reports, and there’s enough value in these guides to justify a nominal subscription fee.
- Consulting. I’ve had a number of people ask them to help me devise a strategy for using credit cards for their business or help with redeeming points for high-value vacations. I’m trying to frame up how to make this work.
I’m not done making content
I’m not done making content or helping you use your miles, points, and credit card rewards. 🙂 But the world has changed and I’m adapting. Thank you to all of you who continue to read this blog, subscribe to my newsletter, and watch me over on YouTube. Being able to build a business creating content about cards and points has been a wonderful journey and I am grateful to all of you who enabled that to happen.
