I think Google is broken.

I have to admit that it seems I don't know how to do SEO in 2023. Yes, it's in a competitive market, but I swear that my techniques used to work just fine a few years ago. I never got massive traffic but at least it was trickling in in whatever project I worked on. Now it's not, only ranking for random keywords that my project isn't even focused on.

So either Google switched up their pagerank values a lot to avoid people gaming the system, or they don't deliver traffic anymore except to the top 1% of the websites.

And with the advent of AI generated splash pages where the user doesn't even get to see the content he was inquiring about, it's going to get worse.