@build_in_public

Crunchbase's organic traffic has absolutely fallen off a cliff. Here's what the SEO community thinks happened to them. A few people think their traffic was coming from people searching for company names.

You'd search for a company name, you would get the Crunchbase profile, but not anymore. People think that they off walled a bunch of data points that used to be freely available. You think you're gonna learn about a company, it's behind a paywall or you have to give your email in order to get it.

You bounce. Then eventually the site declines in Google. It could be because funding doesn't carry the same prestige that it used to.

The bootstrapping movement has taken market share from the VC, the Angel movement. Interestingly, they got further hit around the launch of ChatGPT. ChatGPT was launched December 2022.

Since that point just goes down and down and down and down. People are going to ChatGPT to get information that maybe they used to get from Crunchbase. Same with AI overviews.

Someone thinks it could be an improper site migration. That's unlikely to have contributed to a decline for this long. Nothing happened.

Google just randomly chose another site to nuke. At this point, you can't say that it's always a website's fault. This is a crazy decline though, with no rebound.

What do you think caused it?