¶Did you just learn how to do something? Write about that.

¶Call it a TIL—that way you’re not promising anyone a revelation or an in-depth tutorial. You’re saying “I just figured this out: here are my notes, you may find them useful too”.

¶Gary Thompson’s Random Thoughts blog pointed me to this 2022 post from Simon Willison. I think I’ve seen it before, but I feel like I dismissed it previously as not applicable to my content because I’m not a developer per se, writing about things I learn as I work on various projects.

¶But I had a different thought when I stumbled across the post today. All of my content here, at least in the most recent iteration of the site, is Today I Learned content. It’s just not about programming or development or tech projects of any sort. No, it’s just about random stuff I learn every day. I love learning new bits about everything from history and culture to science and tech, and I like writing little bits about the bits I learn. It works for me and, I think, helps me learn as I go. So, it is applicable to my content after all. I’m mostly posting Today I Learned content, and it’s quite satisfying, really.

¶“At this pace, All About Berlin will not survive into 2027,” a guy named Nicolas Bouliane, the independent proprietor of website All About Berlin, tweeted last week. Bouliane has been frank lately about the realities of his dwindling Google-driven traffic. In a blog post written earlier this year—titled “AI Is Killing All About Berlin”—he pinpointed when he felt things had gone wrong: in 2024, when Google began tinkering with its search results design, aggressively pushing AI Overviews and pushing content providers like him ever deeper down the page.

¶Google is killing the internet. Its AI Overviews feature has relegated good ‘ole search results to “oh by the way” status. This has real consequences for websites that depend on traffic flow directed from those search results. Reduced flow will impact monetization efforts for publishers that care about such things. More importantly, though, the systematic blow to traffic flow that the internet is currently absorbing will undoubtedly force many web site publishers to ask whether they want to continue the effort.

¶We’ll surely see sites go quiet or even go dark altogether. This highlights the importance of the Wayback Machine. I don’t know if or how going quiet and going dark are tracked, but I hope someone captures that information. We’re going to need it for the final accounting of AI’s impact on the web.

¶I guess I can always Google it.