The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed.
Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need correct information from a truth source like our websites.
We have to track each and every one of these problems down, investigate and evaluate whether we can reproduce them, give them a "thumbs down" to then be able to submit "feedback", with no assurance it will be fixed in a timely manner and no obvious way to opt ourselves out of it entirely. For something beyond our consent and control.
It's worse than when Google and Yelp would create unofficial business profiles on your behalf and then held them hostage until you registered with their services to change them.
Of course slow, shitty web sites also cause a massive drop in clicks, as soon as an alternative to clicking emerges. It's just like on HN, if I see an interesting title and want to know what the article is about, I can wince and click the article link, but it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer the info I want from the comments. That difference is almost entirely from the crappy overdesign of almost every web site, vs. HN's speedy text-only format.
Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile:
* Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent
* If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking
* There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. Upon pressing the tiny X in the corner it takes 1-2 seconds to close or multiple presses as I am either missing the x or because there is a network roundtrip
* I scroll down a screen and get a popup overlay asking me to signup for their service or newsleter, again messing with the x to close
* video or other flashy adds in the content keep bugging me
This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often it is not).
If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.
I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon), and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing good work that people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of people over four decades.
A year ago my ad-supported website had 100,000 monthly active users. Now, like the article says, traffic is down 40% thanks to Google AI Overview zero clicks. There's loss of revenue, yes, but apart from that, I'm wondering how people can find my work, if I produce more? They seldom click through on the "source" attributes, if any.
I wonder, am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Arguably because I'm among those that built this dystopia with ever-so-helpful technical content.
A lot of the comments here are along the lines of "websites are often hostile, and AI summaries are a better user experience" which I agree with for most cases. I think the main thing to be worried about is that this model is undermining the fundamental economic model the internet's currently based on.
If I create content like recipes, journalism etc, previously I had exclusive rights to my created content and could monetise it however I wanted. This has mostly led to what we have today, some high quality content, lots of low quality content, mostly monetised through user hostile ads.
Previously, if I wanted to take a recipe from "strawberry-recipes.cool" and published it on my own website with a better user experience, that wouldn't have been allowed because of copyright rules. I still can't do that, but Google can if it's done through the mechanism of AI summaries.
I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing content on the web altogether. The most likely one is that search/summary engines eat up money that previously came from content creators. The best one is that we find some alternative, third way, for creators to monotise content while maintaining discoverability.
I'm not sure what will happen, and I'm not denying the usefulness of AI summaries, but it feels easy to miss that, at their core, they're a fundamental reworking of the current economics of the internet.
At some stage Google will need to be accountable for answers they are hosting on their own site. The argument of "we're only indexing info on other sites" changes when you are building a tool to generate content and hosting that content on your own domain.
I'm guilty of not clicking when I'm satisfied with the AI answer. I know it can be wrong. I've seen it be wrong multiple times. But it's right at the top and tells me what I suspected when I did the search. The way they position the AI overview is right in your face.
I would prefer the "AI overview" to be replaced with something that helps me better search rather than giving me the answer directly.
Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes
6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?'
First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"
Why is this being framed as a problem? People are obviously happier with the new feature, duh
Of course they need to make the AI overviews suck less, but saying it’s unfair to sites is crazy talk because your site now just generates less value than an AI response if that’s what stopped you from going
If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site
Related, but to whichever PM put the "AI Mode" on the far left side of the toolbar, thus breaking the muscle memory from clicking "All" to get back from "Images", I expect some thanks for unintentionally boosting your CTR metrics.
What I don't understand is how do you square that with google still reporting growth in ads revenues. Surely google's business should tank by that much (not even taking into account the additional cost of processing a seach with AI).
The clicks in question: "Here's a thirty page story of how grandma discovered this recipe... BTW you need to subscribe/make an account/pay to view the rest of the article!"
If Google just copied and pasted the content from my blog and put it on their own website which had ads that paid them, preventing customers from going to my blog (and thus seeing my ads which I get paid for), that would be obviously wrong.
people forget why users search - to find what they are looking for. as the saying goes, “No one wants a drill, they want a quarter inch hole.”
the first time i realized Google had a problem was when i used ChatGPT to search for Youtube videos, and compared to Youtube’s search, it was an order of magnitude easier to find the exact videos i was looking for.
Hallucinations are not a problem in a query like this, because i have what i need to evaluate the results: did i find interesting Youtube videos to watch? did i find what i was looking for?
generally speaking, users seek to minimize the effort required to achieve their goals.
A lot of startups like Profound are going after the "AEO" (basically SEO but of AI engine) space and absolutely blowing up. Marketers are freaking out. It's crazy to see the search juggernaut finally getting threatened.
Liberating me from "search clicks" is not a bad thing at all. I suspect many of us though don't even go to <search engine> anyway but ask an LLM directly.
My site never got much traffic from Google and I never wasted time on SEO. So I find it hard to care about losing clicks I didn't have.
But I do find it concerning that Google is effectively stealing the time I spend on research and not offering proper credit. I'm always careful to credit people and provide extensive links to the work of others on my site. But here Google and others are simply stealing that work, getting it wrong, and then claiming they did all the effort.
For some (unknown to me) reason the web pages that used to sustain themselves on very small, quiet ads that were shown on sides of the page, now require full page, annoying, shouting, focus stealing, one-minimal-x-closing-after-few-seconds ADS. Therefore AI summary is a panaceum for this sickness.
However I understand that pages that have articles written need money to pay for those articles. For some another (unknown to me) reason reading something by AI and summarizing it is not a copyright violation, but the work that has been done to prepare the valuable content (article) will not be rewarded, therefore extrapolating it to future I can see that the 'dead internet theory' is coming right up.
People will stop writing because they don't get rewarded, so AIs will start speaking and discussing with other AIs and the entropy might lower (as in the amount of information present in the internet) leaving us to AI generated content only.
In a sense this is similar to what Amazon has been doing in few countries. Find top selling products, get them cheaper from somewhere, rebrand them, rank them higher and sell them. They don't need to invest in market research like their competetors, they get all data from Amazon.com
At big tech scale, this is clearly anti-compete and piracy IMHO.
There is (IMO) still a lot of value in having a searchable Internet index. If AI summaries were the only option it would be very difficult to know whether something is influencing the AI.
The problem is, of course, that we've already lost that battle with Google and other search providers. We know they're influencing the results. There is no open Internet anymore, but at least we can check the different search indices against each other. Checking different AI summaries against each other seems a pretty fruitless endeavor.
Google introduced its Google Knowledge Graph in 2012 and for sure it caused the drop in website clicks but I would say not that significant. People want quality content and they will always look for quality websites with or without AI overviews. My digital marketing professor once said that customers who look beyond first page results are the most valuable ones, because they are dedicated users and customers. People who read AI overviews won't be your first class users and customers.
Knowing that your content is unlikely to be seen by many humans, and is mainly just feeding an AI is pretty discouraging. AI is great at detecting patterns, if content creations is discouraged, and more AI content is generated, AI content is likely to become so homogeneous that the internet becomes more of an echo chamber (than it already is).
I have replaced SEO with Perplexity AI only.
It isn't a chatbot but it actually search for what you are looking for and most importantly, it shows all the sources it used.
Depending on the question I can get anywhere from 10 to 40 sources.
No other AI service provides that, they use the data from their training model only which in my experience, is full of errors, incomplete, cannot answer or altogether.
I think it's a google problem. The AI summary is often times wrong so I don't bother. But the pages are garbage as well, so normal users won't click on that looking for information. Dark forest and all that. Pages started to optimize for Google and not humans. Humans don't visit anymore. Duh
I feel like there should be two modes - search and answer. It's helpful to get an AI summarize answer like 90% of the time. But the other 10%, I am searching for something specific.
I use Perplexity's Comet browser part-time now. I feel like what makes me annoyed about AI overview summaries is that sometimes I really just need to get the actual site itself and not a summary. For example, I needed to find EC2 pricing information and Perplexity's default search gave me a summary answer. I was looking for Vantage.sh's instance info site.
What current incentive is left for people to publish on the internet?
Discovery mechanisms are less effective than before, people no longer visit your website, copyright is dead and in the end we're just feeding an insatiable machine with slave labour.
Or am I missing something ?
I've written a bit about this issue as well, coming from someone working at a company that partially relies on organic search results. It's been interesting (And slightly worrying) to see the shift and layoffs happening here already.
I have to say that the comments here do offer a great alternative perspective as to how terrible the web has been to navigate before AI Overviews became a thing.
I pay 20$/mo for chatGPT. I find searching through websites for information feels very outdated. I have some websites I specifically visit (e.g. aggregators like HN, journalism like WSJ), but if I want information I am going to have chatGPT present it to me in a manner tailored to my specific investigation. I do still google things when I want to find a particular thing, such as a product link, but for general information I am going to use an LLM.
I hope the small web will thrive again once the profit incentive for putting content on the web ceases to exist so SEO/dark-pattern heavy players will give up and stop suppressing valuable (altruistic?) stuff.
To be fair, Google's actual search couldn't be much worse than it was lately. It's like they really try to get all the spam, clickbait and scams right at the top.
The AI overview sucks but it can't really be a lot worse than that :)
And thank God! It does.
I’m done dealing with bazillion shitty websites with bad, slow, performance, bad ui and dark patterns. All I need is an information in a convenient format and that is what AI tools provide to me.
For the most part there really is no need to use search in the traditional sense for knowledge. For information it’s still the only because llms are not reliable. But ChatGPT must have taken a huge dent in google’s traffic.
As one of the creators whose entire business relied on website clicks for long-form, high-quality content, which is now being amalgamated into AI slop, I can confirm that search clicks are WAY down. I write a free bi-weekly newsletter/blog, which has been the primary lead gen for my consulting business. No particular effort at SEO, but up until 6 months ago, I was highly ranked on many terms. Now, my newsletter signups and leads are almost at a standstill.
> So more people could be walking away from a search with the wrong information.
I'd actually be very interested in some real research about this. My impression is that in general, SEO-optimized sites are (intentionally) so bad at transmitting information that the difference between an average person "doing their own research" on these sites vs reading the AI overview would either be negligible, or in favor of the AI summaries.
We (Geostar.ai) work with many brands and companies that have experienced near-death situations caused by Google's AI Overviews. The negative impact this feature has had on people's livelihoods is heartbreaking to witness.
Just today, I met with a small business owner who showed me that AIO is warning users that his business is a scam, based on bogus evidence (some unrelated brands). It's a new level of bullshit. There's not much these businesses can do other than playing the new GEO game if they want to get traffic from Google.
Who knows if Google will even present any search results other than AIO a few years from now.
This means searches are still happening, just being routed elsewhere?
I noticed Google's new AI summary let's me click on a link in the summary and the links are posted to the right.
Those clicks are available, might not be discovered yet, curious though if those show up anywhere as data.
Google being able to create summaries off actual web search results will be an interesting take compared to other models trying to get the same done without similar search results at their disposal.
The new search engine could be google doing the search and compiling the results for us how we do manually.
As I understand it they are saying users waste significantly less time on search if there are AI overviews. Is it really bad? Not from users perspective.
AI Overviews are great for users but brutal for publishers. Studies show sites lose roughly 40–50% of clicks when these summaries appear. It feels like another step toward Google keeping users on the SERP, instead of sending traffic out.
If this sticks, creators will either need to optimize for being included in the AI answer or focus more on direct channels (newsletters, communities) to survive.
If searchers (people, I assume) are not clicking on content links like they used to, it's safe to assume that they are not clicking on ad links as well. Google is digging their own grave here. That being said, given the zeitgeist, they really have no choice but to offer AI summaries at least on par with the competition.
I feel like the discussion here is missing the point. It doesn't matter if the AI overview is correct or not, it doesn't matter if you can turn it off or not. People are using it instead of visiting actual websites. Google has copied the entire World Wide Web into their LLM and now people not using the web anymore! We have bemoaned the fact that Facebook and Twitter replaced most of the web for most people, but now it's not even those, it's a single LLM owned and controlled by a single corporation.
I find I read the AI summary then realise I prefer and trust ChatGPT’s answer more so copy my query into that and go from there. Having below average “chat” suggestions in a non-chat interface with loads of SERP cruft feels pointless.
This situation makes sense since everyone wants quick answers, and AI summaries are really convenient. A lot of people just read the summary without clicking through to the original content. But this can be a real problem for creators who rely on traffic. Does anyone have ideas on how to balance both user needs and support for creators?
if AI will destroy the internet... what it will use to train the next generation on? If people go to AI instead of reddit and stack overflow, what will they train the next models on? They have used reddit extensively to train the first GPT models.
Maybe the future is "LLMO" instead of SEO, where pages are optimized to be more easily readable and navigable by LLMs and agents. Ironically this would make them better IMO, less Javascript bloat, faster load times, no cookies or tracking...
I'm going to call good old "supply & demand" at this.
There was a demand for information, and people made websites to make that information easily accessible. The market was working.
Then cheap/free hosting combined with Google Ads came along incentivized the market to SPAM the internet with SEO-optimized websites which makes that information just as inaccessible as the market could possibly tolerate. Basically the market converged on enshittification, rather than excellence.
The result of that was that users were forced to search, the first SEO spam, then the second, then the third and maybe somewhere along the line they found what they were really looking for, from a real website. The market just barely supplied what there was a demand for.
But thanks to AI and LLMs, the power has now shifted back to the users, and we can sidestep all the Google Ads SEO SPAM enshittification nonsense. If this is done via ChatGpt, DDG Chat or Google AI overviews, I don't really care.
Once again we have gained easy access to information without any ill-incentivized middle men making the process cumbersome. This is absolutely a good thing. If this means the death of Google Ads funded content farms, I'm all for it.
The niche sites which contains real information was never funded or driven by Google Ads in the first place, so hopefully they won't buckle under during this minor AI apocalypse.
The AI overview doesn't (for me) cause a big drop in clicking on sites.
But AI as a product most certainly does! I was trying to figure out why a certain AWS tool stopped working, and Gemini figured it out for me. In the past I would have browsed multiple forums to figure out it.
This is most definitely because AI is first thing on the top. If it was the last one, the situation would be much different. Nice tactic to further hype AI.
It's unfortunate, but websites now make content for AI. We used to use a browser, to view a site, to gain information. Now we use an AI, to tell us the information.
My question here is: why would Google try to actively sabotage, possibly even devastate the very backbone cash cow that is all those spammy, SEO-laden search and ad results right below its own AI overview, that's displacing them for engine users who don't bother with the rest (I thing I personally avoid because fuck you hallucinating AI overview)
Anyone have any ideas?
EDIT: Also, the irony of Google, which for years harped on and on about working to fight incorrect, erroneous and also even "misinformation-laden" search results, now making a hallucinating AI that often makes up outright bullshit with authority as its primary, first-line result for information. Truly a company that bathes in an ever deeper pool of shit the bigger it grows.
This is all nice while the AI overview has no ads in it. Wait until it gets enshittified, and I have a feeling AI overview would be so infested with ads that people would rather block it and proceed to reading the actual links.
All this said, I am guilty of using this a lot these days - while it is still ad-free. I just ask chatgpt.com to give me a recipe of "XYZ" and it gives it immediately without any annoying repetitive content.
Several factors are at play here, which are somewhat contradictive:
1. Publishers feel entitled to traffic, because Google send them traffic in recent years. See [1] for example:
> "Google's core search engine service is misusing web content for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss," the document said.
> "Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google's AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google's general search results page," the complaint said.
I have zero pity for these publishers.
2. Not all traffic is created equal. Does a business really lose customers, just because traffic goes down? Maybe that traffic wouldn't have converted anyways. This is basically the old piracy discussion revamped with businesses arguing that every single copy of a movie or a game would've been a customer. It's idiotic.
3. But: Google is now a content provider and different rules apply for those than being merely on a comparable level like an ISP. This has been discussed for years with social networks in minds. Hence, Google needs to be held accountable for providing harmful information (such as in another story here: the temperature for heating pork and when food safety is affected).
My Google feed (the one that shows up on some Android phones) is 90% articles that could be answered in the headline: "This one ingredient improves the taste of your potato salad." Of course you have to click through and read, read, read till you find it.
More and more it seems the internet is headed to the outcome seen in “Altered Carbon”: populated by AI almost exclusively, full of slop, invisible by the humans that created it originally. An abandoned outpost on a long line of things humans have abandoned.
The enshitification of search engines is driving me more and more to LLMs for all their warts. I can usually force them to provide sources and do my search that way.
AI systems still struggle with hallucination, especially when your intent of the query is to obtain the latest information. These models have become very good at handling stored information, but their ability to stay updated remains slow. There is a large volume of queries whose responses and underlying concepts don't change much, and the current AI systems, through innovation and user-friendly interfaces, has managed to cast a wide net over such pre-learned responses.
However, unless these AI base model businesses create strong enough incentives for information owners to provide updates and engage in information pipelines that provide fresh data, the current moat of AI might not extend far enough to cover the full spectrum of queries.
The “fossil fuel” of LLMs-static public internet data-is running out.
Current efforts in RL help systems answer queries beyond their pre-learned knowledge by expanding on the user’s prompt, wherein the system ventures into unknown data territories through agents and self-talk, resulting in action-result memories. These, in turn, serve as a large enough context-rich prompt to have all the needles-in-hay-stack that form the final answer or response. This is made possible by large context windows.
For live internet queries, RL can work by expanding context with latest results fetched from the public web using a crawler. However, this is often done without the explicit consent from information providers and offers them little incentive beyond a link in the AI’s response summary. As a result, some providers have started withholding data, and many services now offer tools to block AI crawlers. Meanwhile, multimodal AI systems-capable of understanding text, visuals, and audio-are developing agents that can access content through simulated browser use, effectively bypassing traditional crawler firewalls.
This reality highlights the need for a good incentive system for information providers, one that encourages them to share dense, efficiently and ai-structured data. Certain domains have already begun embracing this and sharing their information in ai-native formats, since they have no moat in that information and rather see positive incentives - for example, certain documentation websites for tools and frameworks now provide formatted versions of their docs at /LLMs.txt links.
If the information is the resource exchanged on these internet pathways, businesses fundamentally operate either by generating this resource or by retrieving it once it exists, and the other businesses enable this whole endeavour. Ultimately, individuals and organizations will, seek, share and exchange information in ways that enables them to efficiently take decisions and their next actions. Therefore, the incentive to access the most up-to-date information becomes critical when those actions depend on accuracy and timeliness.
It saves so much time looking at slop websites like arstechnica. Those kinds of websites are already made up content anyway, so there’s no real difference in the factual content.
Warms my heart. Clicking ad-infested bullshit articles and wasting many minutes trying to find the line where the answer lies was the worst internet experience of the last decade. I am glad crappy ad-blogging is dying.
AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
(arstechnica.com)746 points by jonbaer 23 July 2025 | 829 comments
Comments
Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need correct information from a truth source like our websites.
We have to track each and every one of these problems down, investigate and evaluate whether we can reproduce them, give them a "thumbs down" to then be able to submit "feedback", with no assurance it will be fixed in a timely manner and no obvious way to opt ourselves out of it entirely. For something beyond our consent and control.
It's worse than when Google and Yelp would create unofficial business profiles on your behalf and then held them hostage until you registered with their services to change them.
* Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent
* If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking
* There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. Upon pressing the tiny X in the corner it takes 1-2 seconds to close or multiple presses as I am either missing the x or because there is a network roundtrip
* I scroll down a screen and get a popup overlay asking me to signup for their service or newsleter, again messing with the x to close
* video or other flashy adds in the content keep bugging me
This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often it is not).
If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.
A year ago my ad-supported website had 100,000 monthly active users. Now, like the article says, traffic is down 40% thanks to Google AI Overview zero clicks. There's loss of revenue, yes, but apart from that, I'm wondering how people can find my work, if I produce more? They seldom click through on the "source" attributes, if any.
I wonder, am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Arguably because I'm among those that built this dystopia with ever-so-helpful technical content.
If I create content like recipes, journalism etc, previously I had exclusive rights to my created content and could monetise it however I wanted. This has mostly led to what we have today, some high quality content, lots of low quality content, mostly monetised through user hostile ads.
Previously, if I wanted to take a recipe from "strawberry-recipes.cool" and published it on my own website with a better user experience, that wouldn't have been allowed because of copyright rules. I still can't do that, but Google can if it's done through the mechanism of AI summaries.
I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing content on the web altogether. The most likely one is that search/summary engines eat up money that previously came from content creators. The best one is that we find some alternative, third way, for creators to monotise content while maintaining discoverability.
I'm not sure what will happen, and I'm not denying the usefulness of AI summaries, but it feels easy to miss that, at their core, they're a fundamental reworking of the current economics of the internet.
I'm guilty of not clicking when I'm satisfied with the AI answer. I know it can be wrong. I've seen it be wrong multiple times. But it's right at the top and tells me what I suspected when I did the search. The way they position the AI overview is right in your face.
I would prefer the "AI overview" to be replaced with something that helps me better search rather than giving me the answer directly.
6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?'
First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"
And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.
Of course they need to make the AI overviews suck less, but saying it’s unfair to sites is crazy talk because your site now just generates less value than an AI response if that’s what stopped you from going
If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...
Google seach ranking already became so bad that finding the right query to produce a decent result became a craft in and of itself.
HN readers might not realize this, but I used to constantly have to search things for friends and family as they just couldn't find it with Google.
The AI result is a godsend fir them. I saw a massive drop in their requests to me.
How is this any different?
the first time i realized Google had a problem was when i used ChatGPT to search for Youtube videos, and compared to Youtube’s search, it was an order of magnitude easier to find the exact videos i was looking for.
Hallucinations are not a problem in a query like this, because i have what i need to evaluate the results: did i find interesting Youtube videos to watch? did i find what i was looking for?
generally speaking, users seek to minimize the effort required to achieve their goals.
But I do find it concerning that Google is effectively stealing the time I spend on research and not offering proper credit. I'm always careful to credit people and provide extensive links to the work of others on my site. But here Google and others are simply stealing that work, getting it wrong, and then claiming they did all the effort.
However I understand that pages that have articles written need money to pay for those articles. For some another (unknown to me) reason reading something by AI and summarizing it is not a copyright violation, but the work that has been done to prepare the valuable content (article) will not be rewarded, therefore extrapolating it to future I can see that the 'dead internet theory' is coming right up.
People will stop writing because they don't get rewarded, so AIs will start speaking and discussing with other AIs and the entropy might lower (as in the amount of information present in the internet) leaving us to AI generated content only.
At big tech scale, this is clearly anti-compete and piracy IMHO.
The problem is, of course, that we've already lost that battle with Google and other search providers. We know they're influencing the results. There is no open Internet anymore, but at least we can check the different search indices against each other. Checking different AI summaries against each other seems a pretty fruitless endeavor.
1. Use existing websites for training data
2. Replace search traffic with AI prompts, thereby destroying the economic incentive for websites to publish data
3. ?
I have replaced SEO with Perplexity AI only. It isn't a chatbot but it actually search for what you are looking for and most importantly, it shows all the sources it used.
Depending on the question I can get anywhere from 10 to 40 sources. No other AI service provides that, they use the data from their training model only which in my experience, is full of errors, incomplete, cannot answer or altogether.
I use Perplexity's Comet browser part-time now. I feel like what makes me annoyed about AI overview summaries is that sometimes I really just need to get the actual site itself and not a summary. For example, I needed to find EC2 pricing information and Perplexity's default search gave me a summary answer. I was looking for Vantage.sh's instance info site.
Discovery mechanisms are less effective than before, people no longer visit your website, copyright is dead and in the end we're just feeding an insatiable machine with slave labour. Or am I missing something ?
https://sasjakoning.com/blog/how-google-s-new-ai-overview-is...
I have to say that the comments here do offer a great alternative perspective as to how terrible the web has been to navigate before AI Overviews became a thing.
The AI overview sucks but it can't really be a lot worse than that :)
Well, doh:
"Do I just read the AI summary? Or click past five pages of ads and spam to maybe find an organic link to something real?"
I'd actually be very interested in some real research about this. My impression is that in general, SEO-optimized sites are (intentionally) so bad at transmitting information that the difference between an average person "doing their own research" on these sites vs reading the AI overview would either be negligible, or in favor of the AI summaries.
Just today, I met with a small business owner who showed me that AIO is warning users that his business is a scam, based on bogus evidence (some unrelated brands). It's a new level of bullshit. There's not much these businesses can do other than playing the new GEO game if they want to get traffic from Google.
Who knows if Google will even present any search results other than AIO a few years from now.
I noticed Google's new AI summary let's me click on a link in the summary and the links are posted to the right.
Those clicks are available, might not be discovered yet, curious though if those show up anywhere as data.
Google being able to create summaries off actual web search results will be an interesting take compared to other models trying to get the same done without similar search results at their disposal.
The new search engine could be google doing the search and compiling the results for us how we do manually.
If this sticks, creators will either need to optimize for being included in the AI answer or focus more on direct channels (newsletters, communities) to survive.
That is pretty much as it should be.
if AI will destroy the internet... what it will use to train the next generation on? If people go to AI instead of reddit and stack overflow, what will they train the next models on? They have used reddit extensively to train the first GPT models.
I guess that's "tomorrow's problem" though
I believe there is a place for a new but totally different “pagerank”. Perhaps one where “likely to be human made” scoring is the central metric.
And figure out how to keep crawlers away.
There was a demand for information, and people made websites to make that information easily accessible. The market was working.
Then cheap/free hosting combined with Google Ads came along incentivized the market to SPAM the internet with SEO-optimized websites which makes that information just as inaccessible as the market could possibly tolerate. Basically the market converged on enshittification, rather than excellence.
The result of that was that users were forced to search, the first SEO spam, then the second, then the third and maybe somewhere along the line they found what they were really looking for, from a real website. The market just barely supplied what there was a demand for.
But thanks to AI and LLMs, the power has now shifted back to the users, and we can sidestep all the Google Ads SEO SPAM enshittification nonsense. If this is done via ChatGpt, DDG Chat or Google AI overviews, I don't really care.
Once again we have gained easy access to information without any ill-incentivized middle men making the process cumbersome. This is absolutely a good thing. If this means the death of Google Ads funded content farms, I'm all for it.
The niche sites which contains real information was never funded or driven by Google Ads in the first place, so hopefully they won't buckle under during this minor AI apocalypse.
Over the last years I've moved over a lot of initial search to Wikipedia, which either answers directly or provides useful links.
But AI as a product most certainly does! I was trying to figure out why a certain AWS tool stopped working, and Gemini figured it out for me. In the past I would have browsed multiple forums to figure out it.
People will go to museums to see how complicated pre-ai era was
Anyone have any ideas?
EDIT: Also, the irony of Google, which for years harped on and on about working to fight incorrect, erroneous and also even "misinformation-laden" search results, now making a hallucinating AI that often makes up outright bullshit with authority as its primary, first-line result for information. Truly a company that bathes in an ever deeper pool of shit the bigger it grows.
All this said, I am guilty of using this a lot these days - while it is still ad-free. I just ask chatgpt.com to give me a recipe of "XYZ" and it gives it immediately without any annoying repetitive content.
innocently googles 'flour bread'
half the screen, CONTINUE WITH GOOGLE - stay in browser, click
COOKIES We and our 917 partners CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY, click, click,
NEWSLETTER, NEWSLETTER, click, rotate screen because the overlay is to big, click Im sad person who's doesn't want daily bread in his mailbox.
APP APP APP, install APP, click click, can't hit the x, let it be
LOG IN WITH YOUR FOOFLE ACCOUNT, click
5 pages with autoplay video and SEO slop
I'm enjoying AI, while it lasts.
1. Publishers feel entitled to traffic, because Google send them traffic in recent years. See [1] for example:
> "Google's core search engine service is misusing web content for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss," the document said.
> "Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google's AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google's general search results page," the complaint said.
I have zero pity for these publishers.
2. Not all traffic is created equal. Does a business really lose customers, just because traffic goes down? Maybe that traffic wouldn't have converted anyways. This is basically the old piracy discussion revamped with businesses arguing that every single copy of a movie or a game would've been a customer. It's idiotic.
3. But: Google is now a content provider and different rules apply for those than being merely on a comparable level like an ISP. This has been discussed for years with social networks in minds. Hence, Google needs to be held accountable for providing harmful information (such as in another story here: the temperature for heating pork and when food safety is affected).
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/googles-ai-overview...
It's why things like /r/savedyouaclick exist.
things like "gemini said" and "gpt said" will enter common lingo like "google it" did in the 2010s
To be frank, good riddance. Information sites were being manipulated on such levels it was ridiculous.
Anyways, I expect e-commerce CTR to get SO MUCH better, so overall it'll just be a shift away from SEO over to PPC, or maybe a little bit of both.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Your default search engine. AI overviews begone.
However, unless these AI base model businesses create strong enough incentives for information owners to provide updates and engage in information pipelines that provide fresh data, the current moat of AI might not extend far enough to cover the full spectrum of queries.
The “fossil fuel” of LLMs-static public internet data-is running out.
Current efforts in RL help systems answer queries beyond their pre-learned knowledge by expanding on the user’s prompt, wherein the system ventures into unknown data territories through agents and self-talk, resulting in action-result memories. These, in turn, serve as a large enough context-rich prompt to have all the needles-in-hay-stack that form the final answer or response. This is made possible by large context windows.
For live internet queries, RL can work by expanding context with latest results fetched from the public web using a crawler. However, this is often done without the explicit consent from information providers and offers them little incentive beyond a link in the AI’s response summary. As a result, some providers have started withholding data, and many services now offer tools to block AI crawlers. Meanwhile, multimodal AI systems-capable of understanding text, visuals, and audio-are developing agents that can access content through simulated browser use, effectively bypassing traditional crawler firewalls.
This reality highlights the need for a good incentive system for information providers, one that encourages them to share dense, efficiently and ai-structured data. Certain domains have already begun embracing this and sharing their information in ai-native formats, since they have no moat in that information and rather see positive incentives - for example, certain documentation websites for tools and frameworks now provide formatted versions of their docs at /LLMs.txt links.
If the information is the resource exchanged on these internet pathways, businesses fundamentally operate either by generating this resource or by retrieving it once it exists, and the other businesses enable this whole endeavour. Ultimately, individuals and organizations will, seek, share and exchange information in ways that enables them to efficiently take decisions and their next actions. Therefore, the incentive to access the most up-to-date information becomes critical when those actions depend on accuracy and timeliness.
Then they came for the search engine clicks, and I said nothing, because monetised search contributed heavily to the enshittification of the internet.
Great so far. Can AI kill off social media and internet surveillance next?