Lily Ray shared a interesting article so she did it with her intern over here and basically this article

They look at a few examples of Serbs or many examples of Serbs shifting from displaying more affiliate product review content in 2023 to more e-commerce

and you know what one of our mutual friends just told me yesterday or two days ago that he spoke

with Danny Sullivan who now works at Google he used to be the editor or the lead editor

or what do we call that?

Editor-in-chief at search engine land.

And so Danny, I think Danny, I'm paraphrasing here,

but basically it was like, yeah, I don't know why we weren't favoring more

UGC in the past like it seems to make a lot more sense and I'll tell you when I do

when I evaluate things I tend to trust communities like Reddit more

because those people are in those communities and they're

they're typically they there's more buy-in I should say more incentive for them to

share the truth there versus like a someone that that's that's game their

their site from like an affiliate standpoint so check this out

so let's not use bird feeders but let's use the keyword laptop so laptops is another keyword that experience a major shift in search results year over year.

As seen at the image below all affiliate and review websites in positions 4, 7, 9, and 10 in May 23,

2023 were entirely replaced by e-commerce websites in May 2024.

The top 10 results now consist exclusively of e-commerce websites with some sites even listed twice.

So let's take a look at this, make it a little bigger. So you can see here in the past you had New York Times, the wire cutter, right? Which is affiliate website. CNET, which is affiliate too. The Verge, they get their affiliate kicked as well, PC Mac affiliate.

Those have basically moved out, and you can see everything now is basically e-commerce,

which makes a lot more sense to me. Like, why would you go to New York Times to read about laptops?

They're just leveraging their domain authority here.

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