Answers Are Everywhere
At its peak, teknoloji.org had around a million visitors a month.
Today Cloudflare says it gets about 100 a day, and I don't fully believe that number either.
We built it on keywords. Evergreen posts, 2,000 words long, getting organic traffic from Google. Then Google started answering the questions at the top of its own page, and ChatGPT started giving faster answers that got to the point. All our 2,000-word articles became useless.
The traffic declined, and the AdSense and affiliate income went with it. We tried to fight it, but it wasn't working. With five editors, $1,000 for hosting and all the other monthly expenses, we had to stop.
It would be easy to say Google stole my traffic. But we wrote for Google more than for readers, and that's an honest shame. I complain about junk on the internet, and I helped make it.
The funny part is that I've become the reader who skips a site like mine. I don't search for news anymore. I ask AI to gather the information, or I go straight to The Verge or The New York Times.
I tell myself those articles are written by humans and fact-checked. I don't actually check. I trust the name.
That's why I've started to feel that direct traffic is becoming more valuable than organic, which for me means search engines and chatbots.
I'm not saying organic is dead. Google still sends far more visitors than any chatbot, and chatbots are less than 1% of referrals to publishers. But in early 2026, 68% of US Google searches ended without a click,11SparkToro's 2026 zero-click study, based on Similarweb data from January to April 2026. and small publishers lost 60% of their search traffic in two years.22Chartbeat data, reported by PPC Land, for both the chatbot and small publisher figures. "Small" means 1,000 to 10,000 page views a day.
So I looked at my own numbers. Last week teknoloji.org had 710 visits, and 632 of them were direct. That's 89%. On paper, I already won.
Except it's a Turkish site and only 100 of those visits came from Turkey. Singapore, the US and China sent 434. Only 52 visits landed on the homepage. I can't prove it, but I think most of my "direct" readers are machines.
"Direct" is just where analytics puts the visits it can't explain. I don't want to install Google Analytics to find out more, so I'm building a simple tool called BoneStats.
Maybe direct versus organic is the wrong question anyway. There are people looking for an answer, and there are people looking for you.
Answers are everywhere now. Opinions are what I think is still worth something. A machine can give you an opinion. It can't give you mine.
But nobody types the address of a site they've never heard of. So how does a stranger ever find us?
I don't know. Probably through communities and word of mouth, which is slow. And I doubt anyone ever sent a friend one of our 2,000-word keyword articles.
I see teknoloji.org now as something my son might enjoy later in his life. I also want to improve it, for people and not for machines. I want people looking for teknoloji.org, not for answers.
I don't know if that's enough to bring anyone back.
AI helped with this post: Claude did the research and turned my answers into this draft. The story and the opinions are mine.
- SparkToro's 2026 zero-click study, based on Similarweb data from January to April 2026. ↩
- Chartbeat data, reported by PPC Land, for both the chatbot and small publisher figures. "Small" means 1,000 to 10,000 page views a day. ↩