I invited Gisele Navarro onto Unscripted SEO after watching a conversation about her ricochet around X for the better part of a week. She is the Managing Editor of HouseFresh, an independent air-quality review site that buys every product it tests, and she is usually asked to retell the part where Google took her traffic away. We got to that. But the thing you should stay for is a number she has never published anywhere, which she pulled off her own site and which flatly contradicts what most of the industry has been saying about AI traffic all year. Forty-seven minutes, and the receipts are hers.
The number that argues with the industry
Visitors from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini spend about two minutes on HouseFresh. Visitors from Reddit and YouTube spend six to eight, and they open more than one page.
“people who come from ChatGPT, from Claude, from Gemini, they spend very little amount of time on the site – like around two minutes. And then people who come from Reddit, YouTube, they spend six to eight minutes on the site. And they will go to multiple pages.”
Her explanation is what makes it land. An LLM referral is somebody finishing a decision, not starting one.
“Whereas I feel like the traffic we’re getting from LLMs is people that are coming maybe to check, but not necessarily to find. They already found, because the LLM told them.”
She is aware this cuts against the sales pitch, and she says so on tape:
“I have seen the claims that actually traffic from ChatGPT is more engaged and it performs better and it stays longer – and it doesn’t match with what I see, comparing to something like Reddit or YouTube, or actual social networks, where I know the traffic coming from there is more likely to be a human being.”
One site, one vertical, her own analytics rather than a study – she offers it as what she sees, not as a law. What raises it above a hot take is that she acted on it. The pages got restructured so the first two scrolls carry everything a two-minute visitor needs, and their videos on YouTube got built so the first three or four minutes do the same job. The finding changed the product, not just the talking points.
September 2023 to March 2024, told from inside it
The collapse took four months. Traffic started dropping in September 2023, kept dropping through January 2024, and the March 2024 core update finished it. HouseFresh had been doing everything the guidelines ask for. They buy every unit. They run no ads, take no sponsorships, and when a US-only product cannot reach their UK office they pay its price to a charity the manufacturer chooses rather than take a free sample, “just because we want to be very clear that we have no connection.”
When independent publishers compared notes, the pattern was the same regardless of what any of them wrote about:
“How can it be that I’m reviewing an air purifier, and you are reviewing a pair of trainers, and you are reviewing a Star Trek show, and we are all competing with Forbes?”
They published that argument in February 2024, one month before the update that took them to nearly nothing – and for a while the article about losing their traffic was their traffic. Nieman Lab covered it, journalists who had worked in product reviews started talking publicly about the same thing inside their own newsrooms, and the story stopped being one small site complaining. Gisele kept writing through all of it, and her author archive on HouseFresh is where that record lives.
A day at the Googleplex, and the question nobody could answer
Google called. First a video call with HouseFresh, Retro Dodo and a group from the search team, then an invitation to spend a full day at Google’s HQ with 19 or 20 other websites from different corners of the web and a room full of engineers. They were not there to be placated. They were there to brainstorm the hardest question in the room:
“The question was: how can the robot figure out that this is a real human piece of content?”
Nobody solved it that day. What she was told was straight: “it’s going to take a long time, it’s never going to come back to where it was.” And a lot of people did not wait around for it. “A lot of sites closed. A lot of people just went into getting jobs while they waited to see whether something did change.”
Some ground came back. August 2024 was when searching the brand name started returning HouseFresh instead of a Reddit thread about HouseFresh. March 2025 brought another lift, arriving around the algorithmic side of site reputation abuse, which cleared out a lot of large pages renting their host’s authority. Since then she has deliberately stopped checking rankings at all: “I don’t look at analytics, I’m not checking where we’re ranking.” She watches traffic and behaviour instead, because “If I see it again it’s going to just kill me. I don’t think I can do it twice, of going down to nothing.”
The subreddit has a birthday, and it lines up
Ask her why r/HouseFresh exists and you get a ranking answer, not a community one.
“when we started the subreddit, we did it because our website wasn’t ranking”
She sat down with the search results for her own topics and asked what she could still reach. Images, yes. The social posts Google was pulling in, yes. Reddit, yes. She tried Quora and walked away from it. So the first posts were the reviews that had nowhere else to go – the critical ones, on products where “every other review of this product is bought and paid for right now.” Post the unflattering data where it can actually surface, and let people decide for themselves.
The public record backs the story. Their subreddit was created on 15 March 2024, days after the core update that flattened them, and it held 897 subscribers when we checked it against Reddit’s own API on 9 September 2026. One thing to keep straight if you go looking: r/AirPurifiers is not theirs, and she says so herself – “There is a subreddit that is called r/airpurifiers, which we are not part of and we don’t post there – they are their own thing.”
What grew there was not a broadcast channel. It became a place where other members answer the questions, backed up by a team that replies to everything: “We are the human LLMs.” She is also completely unsentimental about who owns it:
“Right now they are all walled gardens. And tomorrow, from Reddit to YouTube to X, all of them can turn around similarly as Google did and drop us all. None of this is ours.”
The AI Overview sells the unit and links somewhere else
She can watch it happen on her own reviews. Google will run their video, use their images, name them repeatedly – and then send the click to a shopping panel.
“And we sold that unit, because we are the ones that said it’s really cool, the data shows this, blah blah blah. The images that they use are ours, the video that they show is us, the name that they use to say “according to HouseFresh” is us. But then the link, it’s obviously a shopping partner.”
Which makes their next decision the surprising one. They discussed blocking the AI crawlers, and chose not to. Not for traffic. During a New York wildfire, while HouseFresh was ranking nowhere, people bought purifiers that did nothing for them and wrote in afterwards to say what they had bought.
“no, I would rather they eat our information. It’s fine, but at least recommend something good.”
I brought up the slop backlash during that stretch of the conversation, and how much of it comes from being beta tested on in public at the pace this all arrived. She did not take the bait. She is not defending the models, and she is not fighting them either. She wants somebody sheltering from smoke to end up with a filter that works, even when nothing about that visit shows up in her numbers.
Listen to the full episode
The last stretch is the one that has nothing to do with search: new product categories driven by reader requests, an app they have a V1 of, and a workshop program where schoolchildren learn enough physics and electronics to build an air purifier, so that every classroom ends up with one. Her closing line is the whole posture in a sentence.
“We just have to make them happen instead of just waiting for them to happen, basically.”
If this is the thread you follow, the rest of our interviews on it are collected in AI & The Future of Search.
Find Gisele: Gisele on X – Gisele on LinkedIn. HouseFresh, her author archive, r/HouseFresh and the YouTube channel are all linked above.
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is brought to you by Ignitvio. Ignitvio studied 1,824 businesses and found 68% never respond to an inbound lead within 24 hours. See the work at Ignitvio.
