In the autumn of 2023, the SEO landscape changed for good.
Google called it the “Helpful Content Update”, but for thousands of websites it felt more like a purge. The Helpful Content Update, or HCU, was designed to reduce the visibility of websites containing content that Google did not consider genuinely useful or that appeared to be created primarily for search engines rather than real users.
Google originally launched its helpful content system in August 2022. But the September 2023 Helpful Content Update was when the decline became very clear on the website I was tracking. It triggered a sharp drop in clicks that later stabilised into a continuing downward trend. Subsequent ranking changes took away even more positions.
Among the websites that were hit were heavily search-optimised sites monetised through advertising, traditional SEO-driven blogs covering a broad range of topics, but also completely ordinary blogs, often real blogs run by passionate creators. I’ll get back to why I think these kinds of websites were particularly vulnerable later in the analysis.
First, let’s look at some data.
The graph below shows daily organic traffic between 2021 and 2025 to a personal website I used for testing SEO optimisations. The impact is fairly obvious. At its peak, this website generated around 92,000 organic clicks per month. Today, it gets around 60 organic clicks per month.
The site was receiving around 3,000 organic visits per day during 2022–2023, before dropping towards 2,000 during 2023. There was no comeback after that. Positions continued to disappear slowly but steadily from the SERPs until the site eventually reached only a handful of organic visits per day.
Which websites weren’t hit by HCU?
The websites that took many of the positions lost by other sites often had an actual brand behind them. They sold something, offered courses or ran some kind of business or activity that engaged users.
They tended to focus on a broader subject area, but had built a clear vertical around it and stayed within that vertical. They continued building content within their clusters rather than constantly branching out into unrelated topics. Large, established brands seemed largely unaffected by the update.
And because websites backed by a genuine brand also tend to attract a certain type of backlink profile, those links provided another layer of security when things started moving in the SERPs.
Put simply, many of the small and medium-sized websites that survived had developed a certain degree of topical authority within their niche, strengthening the signals we normally associate with E-E-A-T. Large global brands could sometimes get away with much broader content because they already had substantial authority and were able to demonstrate experience and trust.
Why were these websites hit by Google’s HCU?
Because I was building this kind of website myself, I also kept a number of similar sites under observation in Semrush. What I saw was that every competitor I was monitoring dropped heavily in Google when the Helpful Content changes rolled out.
There was one particular website I followed that had a very broad range of articles, clearly fake author profiles (with a separate author page listing them all including fake bios) and a reasonably strong backlink profile that had quite clearly not been built organically.
That site became especially interesting to watch because I wanted to see whether the links would save it.
Shockingly, they didn’t.
That website had also reached traffic levels in the region of 100,000 clicks per month. Today, it sits somewhere around 10,000 clicks per month and shows no obvious signs of recovering. If anything, the trend still points in the opposite direction.
Analysis and conclusion
Broad, traditional blogs that published content across unrelated categories signaled weak topical authority and a low degree of subject-specific focus. They essentially signaled a lack of expertise. The website was not really an expert on anything in particular.
Those are not the kinds of websites Google wants to recommend.
Even if the person behind a site genuinely happened to know a lot about many different subjects and produced an excellent article among hundreds of unrelated articles, that individual article could never reach its full ranking potential. The rest of the website created too much noise.
Google had no clear guiding signal telling it what the website was actually about. You ended up with a site containing a lot of content, but very little authority within any particular subject area.
HCU as a warning before the AI era
When you add modern AI search and AI chatbots to the equation, the subject becomes even more relevant. AI chatbots are exceptionally good at producing fluff, and many of the websites I’ve described in this article already consisted largely of exactly that: fluff.
Google started removing the fluff before machines had the chance to fill the web with even more of it, and frankly, now it is out of control.
HCU wasn’t a penalty.
It was a warning that the future of web content would need to be both human and focused.