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Ben Hart @pavlovforgoths.com · 26/03/2026

there's a discussion trending on r/Etsy right now between shopowners talking about how they've lost thousands of dollars in sales to AI

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2d ago
theshitakemushroom
116
My successful Etsy business is being erased by the AI, and I'm losing all hope -please help?
Seller Needs Help

I run a successful shop of well over a decade, with thousands of happy customers. For at least a month, my listings have stopped appearing in US search results, and nobody is telling me why.

Edit: I don't mean that they're being out-ranked by the competition. I'm saying they're completely gone, erased -nowhere to be found. I've gone as deep as 20 pages looking for a listing that was on page-1 in Jan.

I am exactly the type of seller that Etsy celebrates: 4.9 stars, 'bestseller' items, star seller, family business, fully handmade, no AI anything, 13 years and a proven track record, no cases, no violations, etc. My top sellers consistently rank on page 1, and they sell every day. Sometime in the last month or so, ALL of my shop's listings have been removed from the search results for US customers. I am still seeing returning customers, and sales from ads, but organic traffic has stopped completely. The support people are not willing or able to acknowledge that there is a problem -they tell me that the algorithm is evolving, and that I should touch up my SEO. Good advice in general, but I am unable to believe that their system is designed such that a page-1 bestseller today could completely disappear in the span of a month, without any changes to its titles, tags, etc. These are listings that have been highly successful for many years -thousands of sales. It's clear something else is happening here, but I am not being told what or why. I re-cropped my thumbnails in February, and that is the only thing I can think of as a potential trigger for this deindexing event. Deactivating then reactivating the listings bring them back for a few hours, but it doesn't hold -they eventually get removed again.

I haven't given up on my support ticket, but their replies are so infrequent and unhelpful, tha…

Ben Hart @pavlovforgoths.com · 26/03/2026

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