u/PlumberpartsOfficial

I've been running my YouTube channel for over 15 years now. In that time, we've built it to nearly half a million subscribers, had millions upon millions of views, and developed a really loyal audience. Overall, it's been a genuinely successful channel. It's my full time job.

We're in the how-to niche, specifically teaching people plumbing.

Since Google Gemini launched, though, we've noticed a gradual decline in our views and our subscribers (this time of year usually 2500 a month, currently 700 a month) Our video quality hasn't dropped—in fact, if anything, it's improved. We know how to edit for viewer retention, but we also respect our audience's time. We get straight into the content and give people the information they're looking for as quickly as possible.

I started running some tests on search terms that we used to rank highly for on Google. What I've found is that, instead of the traditional search results, users are now shown a Google Gemini AI summary at the top of the page. In many cases, that summary already tells people what's in our video, with only a tiny link encouraging them to watch it.

As a result, people can often get the information they need without ever clicking on our video—even though Google has effectively used the information from our content to generate that AI summary.

Sometimes, even when someone does click on our video, Google sends them directly to a specific timestamp. That reduces the number of minutes watched, lowers the overall percentage of the video viewed, and makes our audience retention graphs look worse. In turn, that could signal to the YouTube algorithm that the video isn't performing well, even though the viewer found exactly what they needed, got value from it, and then left to carry on with their plumbing project.

Personally, I think Gemini could gradually destroy channels like ours over time.

What I don't understand is why Google has introduced Gemini in this way when its core business model is built around advertising. By giving people the answers directly, Gemini often bypasses the very websites and YouTube videos where Google would normally serve adverts.

So I'm genuinely interested to know what other people think. Have you noticed the same thing, or do you see it differently?