My side project was annihilated by Google

If we assume a YMYL label, I can't guarantee this will fix your problems, but here are a few immediate steps you could take.

- Byline your content and include biographical information. "Lilouartz Smith is a supplement researcher in Anywhere, USA, focused on delivering top health-supplement information to blah blah blah" or whatever. Something along those lines. Google wants to see that you're some kind of authority and not some nameless faceless SEO hack or charlatan.

- If you have sources you can cite for anything (even if it's just a backlink to, like, a New York Times article relevant to some tangential point you're making), do so.

- Make sure your entires are dated and there's some kind of trackable update history in your content.

The only other thing I'll say: It's also possible that SGE is killing your site (i.e., the Google Gemini summaries). That's been happening with MANY sites for a while now; people aren't clicking through anymore on Google results because the AI search gives them a high-level overview in a sentence or two. There's not a lot you can do about that.

You could aggressively pursue an AIO strategy by posting regularly about your site and information in sources that AI loves to reference (Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.). But that won't get you site visitors necessarily; it will just maybe get you more citations in GenAI.

A lot of the innovation happened in how we analyze every supplement by extracting the ingredients, normalizing them, and then doing the same with research papers. It has been a very exciting product to work on from the technical perspective. As far as I know, we are the only database to have this level of insight about the supplement market and research. However, it all does not matter if people cannot find it and use it.

I am in between of (1) Trying to get coverage and hopefully revitalizing the SEO (However, all attempts over the last 6 months didn't move the needle) (2) Finding a buyer who would benefit from the underlying technology. (3) Just reflecting on everything I've learned and moving to another project.

I am pretty stubborn so (1) is what I am pursuing, but it is hard to ignore the monetary loses. I was not thinking about it while the project was growing (I always thought I will grow it big and then monetize using referrals or by licensing the data), but that increasingly feels unlikely.

Just need advice from someone with more experience.