The “Why” Behind Major SERP Traffic Dips in SaaS and Beyond

Website traffic drops can stem from a variety of causes, including keyword trends, rebranding efforts, and penalties. 

However, some declines are triggered by elusive search algorithm changes that leave companies grappling for answers, particularly in the SaaS space. These algorithm updates can have a profound impact, shaking the stability of organic marketing strategies. Recent discussions, like this Tweet highlighting ClickUp’s noticeable traffic drop over the past few months, underscore these concerns. 

According to Ahrefs, @clickup has lost around 50% of its organic traffic in two months.

They went from 1.9M in early February to 900K as of now.

🥶🥶🥶 pic.twitter.com/xUDOKkNieo

— Nico Cerdeira (Failory.com) (@nicocerdeira) May 2, 2024

SaaS companies and others need to stay vigilant and adaptive to navigate these unpredictable changes in search engine algorithms and maintain their online visibility. Understanding the intricacies behind these traffic dips is crucial for sustaining growth and avoiding the pitfalls of algorithm-induced declines.

Uncertainty (and Controversy) in SEOland

There’s lots of uncertainty, and more than a little controversy, in SEOland these days. This is due in no small part to the fact that there’s a noticeable dip in total web traffic across industries. 

According to Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, the total Year-over-year traffic change last year was -3.6%. The dip has been even more pronounced across industries like Services (-9.4%), Energy, Utilities, and Construction (-8.3%), and Software (-7.8%).

From social platforms and forums to industry events, marketers are particularly concerned about the golden goose of web traffic growth: organic search.  

Market analysts and research firms put the valuation of the global SEO industry around $70–80 billion. Major software companies, agencies, and countless professionals operate in this space — not to mention all the businesses that rely on this practice. 

It’s understandable that people would be so concerned about the trajectory of this industry. 

Digging Into the “Why” Behind Major Traffic Losses in Tech and Beyond

One of the major challenges for the SEO industry (and really any company that needs a digital footprint) is that search engines like Google are a black box. 

We can analyze the inputs (the queries, websites, and webpages) and track the outputs (the SERP position), but there’s no way for anyone on the outside to fully know everything that goes into ranking decisions. And, according to thousands of leaked Google Search API docs, ranking factors are something the tech giant isn’t honest about. 

Google does attempt to clear the air with feedback from Search Central or statements from their search liaison and spokespeople like John Mueller. But there’s still so much that we don’t know. Thankfully, with hundreds of thousands of SEOs out there, it’s possible to crowdsource some intel. 

There are a couple of main reasons why major sites across tech, media, and other industries are experiencing such major disruptions in terms of organic and overall web traffic, all of which tie into either actions taken by Google or the emergence of AI: 

• Helpful Content, Reputation Abuse, and Google Core Updates
• The increasing presence of user-generated discussion and forum content
• The rise of AI-generated content 
• The Search Generative Experience

Let’s take a look at each of these now. 

Google Core Updates

According to Seach Central, Google makes several “significant, broad changes to [their] search algorithms and systems” over the course of a year. It’s not uncommon for high-ranking websites to experience SERP volatility after a Core Update — even if “they haven’t violated [Google’s] spam policies, nor been subjected to manual or algorithmic action.”

Experienced SEOs have known for over a decade now that there’s a period of correction after a Core Update or other significant change and not to overreact. The collateral damage typically re-corrects over time (at least, theoretically).

But the updates over the last few years have been a different story. 

Helpful Content Update

The first Helpful Content Update (HCU) was launched in August of 2022 as an attempt to automatically identify and target content created primarily to rank well in search engines instead of helping users. This update was expanded beyond English websites to all languages at the end of 2022. 

In September 2023, Google updated the HCU again in a two-week rollout that aided an “improved classifier” with little in the way of specifics. This update caused significant ranking declines for websites across industries, many of which have yet to recover. 

Quick update about sites impacted by the September HCU(X): Now that we are two weeks into the March core update, I ran the visibility numbers for several hundred sites impacted the September HCU(X). I haven’t seen one that recovered yet. Actually, most were down even more (see… pic.twitter.com/MPFPGZdu9u

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 21, 2024

This March, Google incorporated the HCU into the core ranking systems with the goal of reducing unhelpful, low-quality content by 40%. Google has reportedly met that benchmark, but it’s clear that many innocent bystanders are caught up in the mix as well. 

Spam Update

To make dissecting the issue even more complex, the March 2024 integration of HCU coincided with another related change to Google’s Algorithm: the Spam Update. Google rolled out this update to tackle “spammy, low-quality content” by targeting three manipulative tactics: 

• Scaled Content Abuse — using automation (a.k.a. AI or content mills) to mass-produce content that targets popular search queries. 

• Expired Domain Abuse — purchasing expired domains and repurposing them to boost the visibility of low-quality content.

• Site Reputation Abuse — leveraging high site authority and brand reputation to host lower-quality content from a third party for ranking purposes. 

The Site Reputation Abuse update has received a lot of attention over the last month, particularly because it’s impacted a number of well-respected websites like Reuters, The Washington Post, GQ, and the Wall Street Journal. 

Glen Allsopp outlined the extent of the update’s initial impact in this Tweet:  

Since March I’ve been monitoring 2,500 coupon-focused terms to see what Google changes with their Site Reputation Abuse update.

Today the manual actions started, and here are some early insights.

I’ve been tracking a lot of non-coupon third-party content that I was going to… pic.twitter.com/dCbPgOTD9Q

— Glen Allsopp 👾 (@ViperChill) May 7, 2024

With post-update volatility reaching new heights over the last few years, it’s crucial that brands are vigilant about monitoring web and SERP performance. 

Discussions and Forum Content

Building a presence on forum platforms like Reddit and Quora is a key part of marketing activities like research, content distribution, and community engagement. Well, now you can add SERP visibility to that list. 

Over the last few years, Reddit and Quora have started to dominate the top SERP positions for several different queries. While organic traffic for business and media sites has stumbled in the last year, Reddit and Quora have seen exponential increases in traffic. 

Reddit alone generates over 560 million visits from organic search every month and now ranks in a top three position for nearly 11 million keywords.  

This type of steep incline suggests that there’s an algorithmic advantage at play for these types of popular forums. Google Search Liason Mike Sullivan admitted as much in an exchange with Lily Ray on X: 

That unit appears automatically if the systems think it might be relevant and useful. I’s not like someone said “put it first for that particular query” — which I know you understand, but others reading this might not. That said, I can appreciate the concern and issue, and I’ve…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 3, 2024

It’s certainly true that people gravitate towards forum discussions on these platforms, particularly when they are looking for unfiltered opinions on products and services. (I use Reddit and Quora in this way all the time.)

That said, there are plenty of examples of cases where the topic in question deserves a more experienced response than you get from (mostly) anonymous Reddit discussions. Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) queries about important health and finance topics, for instance. 

It’s also possible that smaller adjustments to the algorithm prioritizing this type of content are benefitting Reddit and Quora because they have such massive websites and levels of domain authority.  

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t look like Google will be shying away from forums any time soon — they just announced a major deal with Reddit where they will use the platform’s data to train their AI. It’s just another of the many reasons why you need to establish a presence on the platform.

AI-Generated Content

AI-generated content took the world by storm shortly after ChatGPT kicked off the generative AI boom a few years ago. Even some major SaaS brands like CNET have utilized this strategy.

In that time, there have been all sorts of marketing and business Gurus looking to use it as a growth hacking tactic by mass-producing SEO content. Across LinkedIn and X, there have been quite a few high-profile examples of people bragging about the results they’ve gotten by churning out a massive amount of AI-generated content. 

One of the biggest examples of this was the SEO Heist, where someone took the sitemap from a website called Exceljet, turned the URL list into article titles, and then used AI to generate over 1,800 pages on the exact same topics. This strategy worked surprisingly well, with the heist site bringing in hundreds of thousands of monthly visits at the expense of Exceljet. 

However, experts who have been tracking this strategy have found that the initial gains companies get from AI content often disappear.

Mark Williams-Cook, for example, has tracked the rise and fall of a number of websites that have engaged in SEO Heist or AI-scaling strategies. Most of these sites see a solid increase in organic traffic over the short term — typically a few months, but it could be longer in some cases — before experiencing a sharp decline that signals the algorithm has caught on. 

Nice @sistrix update of the “SEO heist” website that used AI to make content. Looks like its about to end up in a worse place than when it started. pic.twitter.com/SKY2ViXiwV

— Mark Williams-Cook (@markcandour) December 4, 2023

So, if you are experiencing a significant decline in search traffic, consider the following: 

1. Is your company using AI to generate a lot of (probably low-quality) SEO content at scale?
2. Are there new websites popping up across the exact SERPs you are trying to target? 

If it’s the former, and you are already investing in creating quality content, it will most likely solve itself over time. If it’s the latter, it’s time to level up your AI content workflow. 

You can scale content production with AI, but it should be about augmenting, not replacing, your team. Writers can use tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, or Gemini to streamline ideation, research, and intermediate steps, leaving more time for creative storytelling.

To avoid potential penalties and sustain long-term traffic growth, make sure that your AI-assisted content adds real value, offers unique insights, and maintains a high standard of quality. 

Check out our AI-Assisted Content Elevation Checklist for a step-by-step guide to creating high-value content at scale. 

Search Generative Experience

Spammy content and SEO heists aren’t the only impact AI is having on the SERPs. Generative Engine Optimization is poised to impact traffic numbers as people start using AI instead of traditional search engines. 

Google has already prepared for this. The company announced a new AI-generated summary feature, AI Overviews, powered by their own LLM. It’s currently being rolled out in the US to very mixed reviews. 

An early report from Tomasz Rudzki and Ziptie.dev shows that Google’s AI Overviews appear in over 80% of queries on average. 

In particular, the study highlights that some niches, like FinTech, may be safer from AIOs than others. But for the most part, SGE answers are dominating. These AI-generated answers appear in about one-third of SERPs automatically, while the rest of the time, users need to click in order to generate them.

So, what does this all mean for brands? It’s time to prioritize the search generative experience (SGE) — search journeys that are more immersive and personalized than traditional journeys, thanks to AI. 

While they look very different from the traditional Google SERPs, tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity include the URLs for sites they use to generate results. 

It’s still too early to tell exactly how different SGE/GEO will be from traditional SEO, but there are definitely some similarities. To optimize for SGE, companies should focus on providing clear, concise, and accurate information that can be easily parsed by AI systems. This includes structured data, well-formatted answers to common questions, and content that directly addresses user intent.

Rest assured, it’s something we at Foundation, and the rest of the industry, will watch closely going forward. 

Expand Your Reach Beyond Search with a Distribution Engine

The landscape of organic search is undergoing significant changes due to algorithm updates and the rise of AI — and concern is understandable. But what’s more important is action. 

On one hand, companies need to adapt by focusing on high-quality, user-centric content and leveraging new opportunities presented by AI technologies. Though with the impact of new AI Overivews just starting to be felt, it’s important to expand your reach beyond traditional search methods.

Invest in a full distribution playbook to ensure that you can maintain and grow your online presence in this evolving environment.