From 23.6M to 11K: How Google Killed the Rent-a-Domain Era

Forbes Advisor. CNN Underscored. WSJ Buy Side. Time Stamped. AP Buyline. Between 2022 and 2024, these sites dominated Google for every "best X" product query. DR 90+ domains, outsourced content teams, hundreds of millions in affiliate revenue.

Then Google killed most of them. I spent a week pulling Ahrefs data on all seven to see how bad it actually got. Here's what the numbers look like.

Scoreboard: February 2026

How the 'Rent-a-Domain' Model Worked

The industry called it "Rent-a-Domain": take a publisher with decades of trust and a DR above 90. Bolt on a product review section. Outsource the content to freelancers or a third-party vendor. Go after "best credit cards," "best mattress," "best VPN." Collect affiliate commissions. You weren't building authority. You were renting it.

Forbes Marketplace was reportedly pulling in $300-400 million a year doing exactly this. Time and AP both partnered with Taboola's Turnkey Commerce to run the same play. For a while, these Rent-a-Domain pages owned page one for every "best X" query you can think of.

The Timeline

• March 5, 2024
  Google Announces Site Reputation Abuse Policy
  Bundled with the March 2024 core update and spam policies. Enforcement delayed until May. Most publishers ignored it.
• May 5, 2024
  SRA Policy Takes Effect
  Google starts manual enforcement. First actions hit smaller sites. The big names think they're safe.
• September 2024
  Forbes Gets Hit
  Manual action against Forbes Advisor. Traffic starts its collapse from 23.6M. The /advisor/ and /health/ subdirectories are specifically targeted.
• November 19, 2024
  The Nuclear Option
  Google expands the SRA policy. Manual actions drop days before Black Friday. CNN Underscored: deindexed to 10 URLs. Forbes health section: wiped. Lily Ray: "Pretty wild how Google waited until days before Black Friday."
• 2025
  Shutdowns
  Time Stamped and AP Buyline cease operations. Zero traffic. In June 2025, staffers from both launch InMyExpertOpinion, a startup built on the premise their old employers' model was broken.
• February 2026
  Final Count
  Forbes.com: 65.9M to 20.1M. CNN Underscored recovering from 945 to 1.26M. Wirecutter: 8M. The market didn't shrink. It moved.

Forbes: 69% Down and Counting

Forbes.com had 65.9 million organic visits in April 2024. By February 2026, that's down to 20.1 million. A 69% decline on a domain that most people would assume is untouchable.

Key detail most coverage misses: Forbes Advisor isn't actually run by Forbes. It's operated by Forbes Marketplace, a separate entity with different staff and a completely different content pipeline. Google treated it accordingly.

The domain-level chart understates it. Isolate the /advisor/ subdirectory:

23.6M to under 11K in three months. That's 99.95% gone. It has partially recovered to 2.28M after restructuring, but Forbes is now spending heavily on paid to compensate: the /advisor/ subdirectory was pulling 3.2M in paid traffic by December 2025.

Google carved out /advisor/ and /health/ specifically, deindexing those sections while leaving the newsroom intact. I keep going back to this because the precision is what makes it interesting.

WSJ: Collateral Damage

WSJ wasn't as dependent on its affiliate section, but Buy Side still took a 77% visibility hit. (Honestly not sure why this one gets less coverage.)

That April 2025 spike is tariff coverage, not affiliate recovery. If you strip that out, the trend is steady erosion. Buy Side got hit in the same November 2024 wave that killed CNN Underscored. Gabe documented it.

eMarketer reported that Buy Side moved from freelancers to full-time staff after the hit. Hard to say yet if that's enough to recover.

CNN Underscored: 3.2M to 945

November 20, 2024. Glenn Gabe reports CNN Underscored hit with a manual action. "Just 10 URLs indexed."

3.2M to under 1K in one month. CNN Underscored has partially clawed back to 1.26M since then, which suggests some re-indexing happened. But the paid traffic that used to supplement it (593K in July 2024) dropped to near zero.

Time Stamped and AP Buyline: Gone

Time Stamped and AP Buyline were both powered by Taboola's Turnkey Commerce. Taboola provided the content. The publishers provided the domain authority.

Time Stamped grew to 3 million monthly users. AP Buyline launched in March 2024, days after Google announced the SRA policy. Both are now at zero. I almost feel bad for AP on the timing.

Why Wirecutter Lived

Wirecutter does the exact same thing: product reviews, affiliate links, "best X" keywords, major media brand. Not affected by SRA enforcement.

Here's what happened to Wirecutter's traffic in November 2024, right when Google was nuking CNN Underscored and Forbes:

14.8M visits in December 2024, the same month CNN Underscored was deindexed. That traffic didn't vanish, it moved. Wirecutter peaked at 15.9M by April 2025, then AI Overviews started hitting all product review sites through mid-2025. At 8M it's still healthy.

Strategist: Same Pattern

NY Mag's Strategist surged to 3.82M in December 2024, during the same kill wave. Then the same AI Overviews decline hit them too through 2025.

Peaked at 3.82M, now sitting at 662K. But the Strategist wasn't hit by a manual action. Its decline came from AI Overviews eating product queries across the board, which is a very different problem than getting deindexed to 945 visits overnight.

Aleyda Solis confirmed it: Wirecutter and the Strategist were unaffected because they manage content in-house. Their editorial teams are employed by the publisher. Nobody is renting out the domain to a third-party content operation.

All Seven Sites, One Table

Where the Traffic Went

Specialized review sites picked up a lot of it. NerdWallet, Bankrate, GoCompare, MoneySupermarket. Sites where product reviews are the core business, not a side hustle bolted onto a news domain.

But even the specialists are feeling the pressure. NerdWallet's organic traffic went from 25M to 7.8M, though that's not from SRA. That's AI Overviews eating the queries that used to send clicks. Worth separating the two problems:

Yuval Halevi

Helping SaaS companies and developer tools get cited in AI answers since before it was called "GEO." 10+ years in B2B SEO, 50+ cybersecurity and SaaS tools clients.