I am horrified by the state of today’s Internet and searches on it

Hey, I’ve been having trouble with a hobby project for the last few months. In June 2025, I noticed that the number of visits to the project website decreased and soon after that the involvement started to decline, which ultimately translated into my prospects regarding funding, subsidies, etc. At the beginning, I thought that the niche had simply been filled somewhere and there was simply no demand for what I had been creating since the end of 2022. In August I came to terms with it and thought it was nice, but it was difficult.

But then something interesting happened – while looking through offers on Linkedin, it caught my eye that the head of Januszex, for whom I worked during the pandemic, shared a post by a colleague of his, also Janusz in business. But what this businessman Janusz wrote seemed interesting to me. In a nutshell and very paraphrasing:

My new project, the seventh portal on a new domain – here are my earnings for the last 6 months. I have doubled the number of AI articles, all of them have links to thematically related artificially generated articles, each of them refers to each other and new ones are added regularly, which significantly affects my visibility in Google results.

It really made me think then. I reworked the project page – I changed my original text for the test to AI slop spat out by the chat, which sounded like cardboard corporate gibberish. I reworked all the documentation and got rid of my basic, slightly mocking and ironic style of writing documentation and replaced it with dry, repetitive chat text, and I didn’t have to wait long for the results. After just a month, more downloads, more discussions, more contributions, even the number of bug reports increased xD

This really blew my mind, because clearly in the case of my project, Google clearly lowered me in the ranking because I wanted to diversify my project’s website somehow, so that people would somehow remember my project from a whole bunch of projects in this field that look and present the same way… so what? nothing – fit in or you disappear.

At that moment, I had only two pieces of evidence that authenticity was no longer welcome – my project and that of Janusz the business from Linkedin, so no evidence at all.

But recently I came across this video with a similar situation – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc (The)

I recommend watching it, but tl;dw: the guy runs a business and repairs electronics/recovers data from disks. He had a website for his company where he described his method of operation. His statistics also started to drop, and he similarly experimented with AI SEO – and as a result he returned to the first page of results in Google.

Is this ok? I understand that SEO rules have always changed from time to time and I had to adapt to them, but to rely on AI to assess the sentiment on the website / the language used on subpages to assess who deserves customers and who does not is a bit of an exaggeration for me… why did a generic chat jig improve my search engine results?

How many companies has this happened to that weren’t as lucky as me? How many people have had to shut down their business/project/whatever just because the one internet giant they relied on to pick up customers decided that AI was a priority :/

The same applies to Google Maps – at least that’s what it looks like from this type of video.

Edit: I’m seriously not trying to be some radical anarchist, I’m not trying to force myself to look for these things. I complain about what I see happening – what I wrote above, the fact that my friends and family get lost in roller skates for 6 hours a day and there is no contact with them, the fact that AI makes my life difficult… I don’t want to be some kind of counter-trend by force.