#3 - Google Announces ChatGPT Competitor, Site Growth & Domain Addiction

This morning, I’m feeling very fortunate to have sold my site in early January. Google has just announced its new AI tool, Bard to compete with ChatGPT and from what we can see so far, it doesn’t look good for niche site builders.

In today’s email, I’m going to give you my thoughts on Bard and what it means for niche sites.

First, let me give you a quick rundown of what I got up to last week on my sites…

Site Updates:

Currently, we have 3 main sites on the go all in different niches with different strategies.

This week I got out 5 posts on the travel site and 2 posts on my affiliate site. The biggest site on which I had planned to use AI content, is still just trickling along without any more articles.

Site #1 - Affiliate Site

Started - January 2023
Current Traffic - 26 Visitors
Total Posts - 7 Posts

With the google announcement yesterday, it has only strengthened my confidence that this site needs to be my main focus. Focusing on product review style content has a slight moat against AI vs evergreen informational content. More on this below…

Site #2 - Travel Site

Started - December 2022
Current Traffic - 60 Visitors/Month
Total Posts - 38 Posts

This week I brought on 2 new writers for this site who can produce some decent content. However, from what I have seen from Google Bard I’m less confident in this site moving forward as its main revenue source was going to be ads on informational content.

I was also outsourcing all of the content so it required a lot of upfront investment with no promise of return.

Site #3 - Aged Domain

Started - February 2022
Traffic - 4000 Pageviews/Month

This is in a great position to really put some time and effort in but I’ve been struggling to come up with a content plan for it that can use AI to push volume.

I’m torn between investing in this with real writers and trying to grow it or use it as an AI sandbox experiment. I think we could turn it into a site that focuses on informational content that is required to be up to date.

For example, content around new episodes of a Netflix series. I think AI will struggle to compete in areas where up-to-date information is required.

We could utilize a similar strategy to Inside The Magic where we try and acquire traffic from google news and discover, rather than the main SERPs.

Again it’s currently on the backburner while I focus on the other two sites.

Domain Addiction

Ooops I did it again…

This was the story of my week. I bought 3 New domains this week.

After selling my main site, I’m currently in a scattered brain space where I don’t know where to focus my attention. It’s easy when you have one site crushing it. Just put all your time into it and put fuel on the fire.

However, when I have a few different projects, all in the early stages it’s hard to be committed to any one of them and my shiny object syndrome is at an all-time high.

One domain was bought as a better brand name for my running site Gosub20.com. I’ve been training for the Paris Marathon and have really got back into running. I may just keep this site very long-term and review any marathon I do as they seem to rank well.

The next is for an AI site I’m starting work on today. I found a series of articles that can be produced well with AI and have low competition in the SERPs. I think within a week or two I could have 200 posts up on the site.

I’ll then just let it sit and marinate on google. It’s a short time investment for a potentially big win down the line.

The third domain was for a finance Newsletter idea. I’m not sure I will ever get this off the ground but the newsletter business seems to be a much better option than Niche Sites right now.

Anyway, the challenge for this week is to avoid buying any damn new domains.

Google Announces ChatGPT Competitor

Okay, now we’re into the fun stuff.

Google has announced its ChatGPT competitor, Bard. This is one of the photos they shared on how it is going to look in the SERPs.

They have also released an image of an interface similar to ChatGPT but it is this image which is of concern to website builders.

Screen Real Estate - On mobile the AI answer takes up about 70% of the screen and leaves no room for “Blue Links” even if you are in position #1. Not to mention there will also likely be ads in between this and the real SERP.

This is going to massively hurt Click Through Rate on informational queries. It looks like it is offering answers slightly longer than Featured Snippets.

For questions that can be answered in a paragraph or two, clicks through to third-party sites will plummet.

Attribution - Unlike a featured snippet, which can bring a lot of traffic to your site when people want to read more there is zero attribution here. No links to the sources. This is likely due to it being a summary of multiple sources.

This could potentially end up in some form of class action lawsuit as they are essentially stealing content and displaying it without attribution or reward for the creator.

While some readers may want to read more and end up on third-party sites, there is no doubt that this will massively decrease CTR across the board on queries that display an AI answer.

For sites that primarily chase organic traffic through informational queries, I think they will see a huge overnight hit to their site when this rolls out.

No Incentive To Produce Content - Website owners are incentivized to create content and provide information because they can earn money from it.

If there is no monetary incentive, people will not create content. Over time the information provided on google will get worse and worse as the AI has less information to pull from.

While it may have a lot of data to train on right now, in the future it may not if people can’t monetize their site.

In the long run, I could potentially see this hurting google and they may need to roll it back in some shape or fashion.

But one’s things for certain. I’m much less confident in informational sites based on an ad model.

How I’m Combating It

Personally, I think for review content on products, humans are needed. I want to see pictures and demos of how a product works. I’m not going to be able to get everything I need from a snippet.

I want video or at least images. More complex topics require more than a few hundred words to answer the question.

Also when I’m buying something, I don’t just watch or read one review. I look for multiple opinions from people. AI can’t give an opinion on a product.

Ultimately, review content is harder to produce and costs money giving us a little bit of a moat if we are willing to invest time and money however, competition is going to be fierce with info site guys likely moving into review content as well.

Wrapping Up

Over the next few weeks, I think we are going to be seeing a lot of content sites hit the market but buyers will be too spooked to purchase. I think we’ll see a rapid compression of multiples in the niche site space.

The whole business model just got a lot more uncertain and we are in for a turbulent year.

Google is moving very fast right now trying to release something to keep up with ChatGPT. This could mean big swings and moves in the SERPs as they break things during the rollout.

I’m sure this huge change will also present some big opportunities, I’m just not sure what they are yet.

In the meantime, I will be continuing to focus on my affiliate site and pumping out an AI site that is an extremely low risk whether it fails or succeeds.

I was considering purchasing a site or investing $10s of thousands in content for my travel site but after this announcement, I think I will be focusing on lower-risk plays.

That’s it for this week. I would to hear from you and your thoughts on this update. Just reply to this email if you have any interesting insights.

P.S. This week I released a new service. If you want a 15-20 Minute video teardown of your website, by me, check out this link.