Recently Google’s Danny Sullivan did a presentation at WordCamp US 2025 in Portland, Oregon!
The full video of this presentation is available on Youtube! and during the question/answer session at the end Angie Drake who runs notyouraverageamerican.com confronted him and asked about traffic loss.
NOTE – I think Angie (person who asked Danny) sort of mis communicated when Danny asked her few things. She said CTR is low but more visitors on site! I think she mean to say CTR is low but impressions are up instead of it being visitors are up.
This was a long conversation but I think to Angie’s question “What are you going to do to compensate me?” if not many people are visiting my site, Danny’s answer is just
it’s well understood and you are not alone in people who are saying there’s this big revolution happening and we can see that it’s helpful for users, we can see it’s helpful for search engines. We want to go along for the ride and we do want you to go along for that ride too. And it’s still part of what we’re going to be figuring out.
And watching the exchange between two and overall what Danny said I think even Google don’t know what’s the future of economy of web and how web creators going to get compensated for the content that AI Mode/Overviews going to use for answer generation but in return sending less of traffic to the web breaking ads based revenue generation model (less visitors -> less revenue).
Here is the full transcript of the exchange and in the video its from 45:06 to the end of video.
In the transcript below I’ve added some relevant links by myself, these not something that Danny cited during the live presentation.
Angie Drake: My name is Angie Drake. Um I have a website where we write great content for people um called notyouraverageamerican .com about responsible travel in the Americas.
Danny Sullivan: Great.
Angie Drake: And my click-through rate has tanked since you guys have started doing AI Overviews.
Danny Sullivan: Right.
Angie Drake: What are you going to do to compensate me?
Danny Sullivan: Are you seeing the— are you seeing the the decoupling thing?
Angie Drake: I want to know what you’re going to do to compensate bloggers who don’t get clicks on their website because people are getting the information they need in the AI Overviews. I love AI. I love AI. I love Google, but you guys my click-through rate is just gone….
Danny Sullivan: Well unfortunately that’s all the time we have.
Angie Drake: Oh, I bet.
Danny Sullivan: I’m not gonna say it at all. Can I can I just ask, are you seeing a rise in impressions and a drop in clicks? You just seeing a click?
Angie Drake: Yes, I’m seeing a— well I have seen um a rise in impressions. We’re getting much more visitors. When everyone was complaining last year about how Google had ruined their websites, we were seeing an uptick in visitors. So we write really good content. We’re authoritative.
Danny Sullivan: So you’re seeing more visitors now?
Angie Drake: We’re seeing more visitors than we were a year ago but our click-through rate is down.
(this is where I guess Angie meant to said more impressions but click-through rate is down but instead mentioned more visitors – I’ve added a note about this above)
I understand, but click-through rate is something that sponsors are looking at.
Danny Sullivan: Okay, so… so a bunch of a bunch of things and I’ll and I’ll try to come back to that. So, um, first of all, that thing I said from what Liz was saying, I would hope will be encouraging to you that we know we’re going to have changes and we know people are going to be seeing changes. And and some of those changes are going to be changes that make sense.
One thing I often talk about is it used to be like you when the Super Bowl would happen, people would do a search for what time the Super Bowl happens. And all these different newspapers would all literally compete to be number one for it.
And at some point we just switched and we said the Super Bowl is at 3:00 p.m. Or it’s always at 3:00 p.m. Stop searching.
Or three, whatever. I don’t know what time the Super Bowl’s at.
See, I’d have to search for it again. And they lost traffic because we directly showed you what time the Super Bowl was happening.
And relatively unapologetic about that.
People want to know from the search engine certain factual information and they don’t expect that they then have to jump into a page that explains them 10 paragraphs on the history of the Super Bowl when it started.
I don’t want to take away from what you’re saying though. When people are producing really unique, valuable, helpful information and it’s, you know, we want to ensure that we’re rewarding that.
And we should be rewarding that. Because if you’re not rewarding it then that information’s there and like I said at the very base level, then we don’t get to be doing what we’re trying to be doing.
But at a better level, there’s a lot of people at Google who are like, we actually want the web to be thriving. So, but it’s… they’re going to be bumps along the way and there’s going to be all these changes happening.
So we need to understand that more. So the feedback, what you’re saying, is not lost.
We’ve we’ve heard those sorts of things. It’s one reason that we’re talking about, think about the— oh I really am going to get kicked off. Um, the think about the measurement aspect with it from there. We will keep looking at what else we can be doing to kind of help people. I’m actually glad you’re getting more people that are coming to you. That’s a good thing.
Um, and… I’m going to have to get kicked off and that’s not an excuse… but what I would say is, it’s well understood and you are not alone in people who are saying there’s this big revolution happening and we can see that it’s helpful for users, we can see it’s helpful for search engines. We want to go along for the ride and we do want you to go along for that ride too. And it’s still part of what we’re going to be figuring out. So Thank you.
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