Traffic to my blog plummeted this year and you can never be entirely sure how it happened. But here are two culprits i identified.

1. Ai overview: my page impressions were high, my ranking was high, but click through took a dive. People read the generated text and move along without ever clicking.

2. You are now a spammer. Around August, traffic took a second plunge. In my logs, I noticed these weird queries in my search page. Basically people were searching for crypto and scammy websites on my blog. Odd, but not loke they were finding anything. Turns out, their search query was displayed as an h1 on the page and crawled by google. I was basically displaying spam.

I don't have much control over ai overview because disabling it means I don't appear in search at all. But for the spam, I could do something. I added a robot noindex on the search page. A week later, both impressions and clicks recovered.