On one hand, I don’t generate ad revenue for anyone in the first place and would love to see the ad-supported web model collapse. On the other hand, I don’t like that AI is destroying things. I’m conflicted.
Hadn’t thought of this before.
The AI summary stops people from going to the website, which means the website the AI used isn’t getting any page views.
On a long enough timeline, it would kill webpages, then the AI has no new info to steal.
You had one job.
We do not need to worry. The amount of scraping and traffic those ais are doing are already killing every website. At least they all have full backups of the whole internet by now… Right? Righttt?
I’m surprised nobody thought at this before. It was the fairly obvious outcome, inevitably this will lead to the collapse of the information environment we rely on, if nobody puts a stop to this. Ai doesn’t seem to care, neither improvements seem to target this. Small websites were already struggling, now they’re dying.
People have been talking about it since Google debuted their instant answers years ago.
Nobody listened or cared.
It seems they’ve been deprioritised entirely, years ago i was able to find actual blogs and forums. But this is going to hit them even harder.
I switched to Kagi for this and they have “small web” and fediverse search.
They are a US based paid search engine and so far have not enshittified.
They’re one of the few US services I kept (low switching costs, low lock in, and a company I like) despite otherwise boycotting most other US products.
AI literally produces better answers than 99% of ad supported, SEOptimized websites.
That’s saying not a lot about AI though. It tells you how utterly awful searching the web is thanks to those sites.
I’d say AI search summaries are somewhat useful for me 30% of the time. And I click through to the sources to confirm its summaries anyway, because they’re often oversimplified.
Often though, they’re goddamn useless.
All that ad revenue won’t be surrendered without a fight. Just wait, there will be ads you have to click through to read all of the AI summary.
While the stats vary depending on who’s measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.
The top result is always some AI-gen, 2000-word essay response to a simple yes/no question like “Can a dog eat onions?”
I swear they do it to train us to just use the shitty AI summary of the shitty AI essay.
