“We are trying not to make it fail, I will keep the machine active until it is not at a loss. I don’t know in 2-5 years, but I don’t foresee any new phase: we are maintaining the pre-existing one”. Salvatore Aranzulla, 36-year-old entrepreneur and founder of the site aranzulla.it (one of the best-known Italian sites on IT dissemination), returns to talk about the crisis of his portal ‘engulfed’, like many publishers, by Google’s Ai mode: fewer traditional searches – with visits to sites – and more ready-made answers prepared by artificial intelligence. Aranzulla hypothesizes a rather dark future for its sector.
“We are on an inclined plane, profit has fallen”
He did it with Antonella Di Biase in the specialist newsletter Infinite Scrolling by Andrea Girolami (here to sign up and read the full interview). “Every now and then I make improvements to the site that save me cloud space or improve the user experience. But the benefits are limited,” he recalls. “In terms of financial statements: in 2025 we made 8.3 million euros and 641 thousand in profit, in 2024 7.9 million in revenue and 2.3 million in profit. As you can see, the turnover has grown, but the profit has dropped a lot: we are on an inclined plane”, he tells the journalist.
“I no longer invest 50 thousand euros a month in collaborators”
“I will keep the site active until it is not making a loss. Then I have no intention of closing it, maybe I will add some entries every now and then, but I will certainly no longer invest 50 thousand euros a month in collaborators”, he explains. What is your advice for someone starting from scratch? “It depends a lot on the business model. I have a friend who sells trips to Japan, and a percentage of people also come to him from the Ai Overview. So he decided to invest and translate the site into other languages. But I do not recommend a business model based on views of free content, like my blog,” says Aranzulla.
“We’re not interested in optimizing for AI”
Becoming an ally of the AI? “We’re not interested in optimizing for AI because we don’t benefit from it. Ai overview is a competitor for us, and other chatbots bring irrelevant traffic.” Ask for damages? “We are waiting to see how the European Commission’s investigation goes. The point is to understand whether Google is violating competition rules by using our content in Ai responses without paying us. As for blocking bots, until some time ago it wasn’t convenient for us. Now it seems to me that things are changing, but in any case blocking crawlers would not bring more visits”.