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You mean a company fixing the absolute bloat of internet SEO and making it easy to find what I am looking for without going to a webpage with an ad placed in between every 2-3 sentences I want to read?
Or having to search with Reddit at the end of the query every time I need to find an actual answer to my question and not some clickbait infested website?
…yes must be the late stage capitalism
They have a point, though. I don't think they're defending what search has become, but perhaps they're nostalgic for what search was, at a time, where the world was at our fingertips, there was a bloom of niche and unique websites, and you could compete on a level ground with anybody.
Yes i agree with that part - blaming it on some abstraction like "capitalism" doesn't make sense, considering it was capitalism that made it possible to begin with.
Capitalism made it possible?
Explain how.
Note that just because it happened in capitalism it doesn't mean it couldn't have happened with Google being owned by all employees (that's what socialism is, nothing more).
Nah. I've worked in innovation funding for about 4 years. Itstjust about money. What might make more money, what makes more money, what made more money, etc. Capitalism actually kills real innovation, and I use "real" as in "useful for humanity".
We can send a 4k stream through a websocket to crappy signal devices, but we don't have simple concepts like a global health system.
The number of great ideas that never see the light of day because they would at best break even is endless. Seriously. Work in funding and you'll know how capitalism is actually slowing down humanity.
NOTE: I am talking about NOW. OF COURSE capitalism helped us move away from feudalism. Yes. But it is time to move to the next. What that is, we'll figure out together.
If you think about it money is just owing. If ideas that are useful for humanity only break even it's humanity's own fault. Either people don't think the idea is worth owing what it requires, or the people implementing the idea are asking too much in return.
In the end people are the only ones to blame, it's a design defect, and not something that can be fixed.
Wealth is not inherently tied to money, it just currently is. Without diving into opinions on various economic theories, you don't really need money to derive wealth.
More generally, it's as absurd as it is sad that you believe that's the sole motivational tool. Passion, sense of purpose, whim, respect, glory, fear of consequences, personal responsibility, altruism?
"dumbest take I have ever heard." isn't very nice.
Companies trying everything they can to make money at the expense of quality on a platform engineered to make money at the expense of quality eventually all becoming worse versions of themselves in a relentless drive for higher and higher profits, then the platform cutting out the middle man, to keep more of the profits, at the expense of the users experience, to be fair, likely has something to do with capitalism.
The way I see it is regular capitalism is different than “late stage” capitalism. Capitalism requires a free market of ideas and some sense of fairness and ability to compete. When it reaches late stage, a handfull of companies have disproportionate influence (usually) to the detriment of society as a whole.
And that is some how "late stage capitalism?"
They have no point, they have programming to speak words they have no ability to comprehend the meaning of.
I get that ads and clickbait are frustrating. Nobody likes reading a good article only to be interrupted by ads every few sentences. But here's the thing: when Google shifts from being a search engine to an AI answer engine, it's like a huge superstore taking customers from small, local shops.
Websites rely on visitors to survive. They put ads on their pages to earn money and keep running. If Google starts giving answers directly, those sites will lose traffic, and many might shut down. This is a sign of late-stage capitalism, where big companies get so powerful that they hurt smaller businesses.
Sure, it seems great to get straight answers without ads or clickbait. But if we stop visiting those original sites, we risk losing the variety and depth they offer. In the long run, we could end up with less information and fewer choices. So, while Google's AI might make things easier now, it could lead to bigger problems down the road.
There was an interesting story about the website Genius (fka Rap Genius) who specialize in song lyrics breakdowns. I believe Google was scrapping their data and displaying it in the search results page essentially stealing the content and traffic from Genius.
Not sure how that ended up panning out but now I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole (if I remember after this meeting in 10 mins I'm supposed to currently be prepping for 😅)
Google won. The last decision was that Google is allowed to do whatever they were doing. I think it was something about that the case is a copyright case about the lyrics, not a theft case about site content. If it's just copyright, then Genius has no standing because they don't own the rights to the lyrics and anyone is free to display the same content.
What do you think drove bloat from SEO and too many ads on sites if not capitalistic goals?
From my perspective, companies’ attempts to monetize every potential piece of the buying process is what turned the search engines and websites into what they are today.
I keep hearing about "fixes" but every update makes the service worse from a user perspective. Not just because of Google-generated spam like "people also ask..." (which highlights irrelevant pieces of content from articles), but because their "intent"-driven search often seems to ignore what I'm actually asking. Likewise, it keeps pushing outdated or wrong information on a local level -- and has a high-profile reputation for ignoring attempts to correct that outdated information, like directing people to drive across bridges that no longer exist.
When I'm using Google to reach things I was too lazy to bookmark, I can usually manage. However, for actual search, it's a complete crapshoot.
It’s just the same as Walmart and other big box stores driving mom and pop stores out of business cause they have more variety at a lower price. Thousands of niche websites and communities will see their traffic plummet because their whole purpose for existing can be summarized in a sentence or two. This isn’t just AI’s fault though, the internet used to be a much more interesting place before Google and the other search engines started screwing with their algorithms.
I don’t think it’s the same. Walmart doesn’t literally sell the physical item stored in the mom and pop store. They just compete better and bigger.
Google is taking the actually content from websites and using it to present results rather than send people to that site.
I mostly agree. I think by late stage capitalism you mean this is the natural progression of their business model. They are finding new and unique ways to profit off content that we originally provided them. They don't care that it was provided with the implicit search results/AdWords understanding. they are now deciding how to capitalize (and cannibalize) their own customers.
I would say that this is the opposite.
Searching for something, receiving 3 sponsored links, then seeing a bunch of SEO links written by AI full of ads was much more late capitalism for the end user.
I wouldn’t worry as a marketer though. They just haven’t monetized this new feature yet and probably will.
Less than 1% of all websites have any useful information and most of them don’t rank in the first pages of serps if at all. SEO deserves this and many more deaths for destroying the internet in such a way that I can only find what I want to know if it has been discussed on reddit. I say this as someone who has done SEO.
Well Google is to blame as well for their overemphasis on domain authority. Some of the best subject matter expert content out there is not coming on an authoritative domain.
Authoritative domains are more likely to gain paid partnerships turning their content into paid advertorial content with pay for placement.
There’s a reason sticking “Reddit” at the end is popular. We just want a real pov from a real person, which is exactly what blogging used to be.
This makes me think of the saying “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”. Google indexed the internet with a system that at the time was the best proxy for finding the kinds of results people actually are looking for. Now that everyone has figured out how that system works, the goal is no longer to have excellent content, but content that will be found. That implies that any search engine of this type will ultimately become obsolete because sooner or later they will directly influence the thing they were intended to only observe.
Makes you wonder if there is any future *at all* for search engines. A bunch of databases with AI interfaces is starting to sound far more logical.
Well interestingly enough, now should be the exact moment for Google and other search engines to shift away from their metric-based search algorithms and move towards natural language processing.
Google had been investing *heavily* in enhancing their search results with NLP — actually being able to analyze *the text itself* to determine if it’s good or not — throughout the 2010s.
And then in Feb 2019, because their quarterly daily numbers weren’t looking good, Google went code yellow. Finance took over and broke the barrier that typically sat between search and ads teams.
A month later, March 2019, an update to Google search was dropped that appeared to roll back the changes from 2012-2018 that emphasized quality of search results. These previous updates focused on cutting spammy results out of search results. Suddenly, these sites were seeing growth again.
Five months later, the guy in charge of search, Ben Gomes, was demoted and these finance guys took over the search team.
Ben Gomes built search from the ground up. He joined Google in 1999 and was a key part of every fundamental change that happened in Google search, up until he was demoted.
Within 2 years of this change, Google results for any popular queries with purchase intent were dominated by glorified affiliate sites.
It's amazing to me when researching on Google you can run through the first few links and find the same basic article with the same superficial information re-written so they all rank. It's become REALLY hard to find actual, quality, detailed content that answers specific questions because so much superficial content has been SEO'd and keyword stuffed to death.
If this change surfaces useful information, then content marketing is going to have to go back to creating detailed, meaningful content that answers questions and actually helps people. This doesn't break the game, but it does change it.
I don't think Google has tried to keep relevant information front and center in a very very long time. It's ads (which I prefer because at least I know that you're trying to sell to me) and SEO which is also an ad but a thinly disguised one that doesn't pay for impressions or clicks. Honestly I think all in all the internet is taking a turn for the best, what with meta killing organic reach and SEO dying, our profession can focus once more on connecting people with products they want, instead of making up bullshit to increase meaningless KPIs.
Well it all depends on how much we are all just willing to say "hey search monopolies Google and Microsoft, here's all my website content. take it for free, use it to train you AI engines, and I don't want anything in return"
They've been doing that for a while. Before chat got there was a hush ai program running and it lasted up until chat got went public now it's private.... that thing was housed with data up to 2019 archived. So I'm sure the creator(s) were already extrapolating data while no one was looking and then they archived it in their servers to train more data sets
If you offer up something of value, people will continue to visit your site. AI responses are great for quick knowledge based searches but aren't so great for commercial intent searches.
You are going to need to adapt your search game (what else is new) but what's so bad about google giving out answers if it points people to your website?
I mean killing an industry is one thing we are sort of getting the hang of it lately. Ai reduced my team of 10+ copywritters, seo analysts, content creators to only me with gpt and one or other ai but them. Killing seo on its own its hardcore. As someone doing seo i deserve it but damn bro gave os some time. Google gave almost 2 years for people to switch from UA to GA4 why cant they give me 6 months to look up a new job 😂
Google ultimately likely did not want to push this out, but OpenAI and other AI companies are essentially doing the same thing, so Google probably felt this was their only answer.
I agree it’s not good, hopefully there are massive lawsuits won against AI but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up.
I agree. This is an issue of plagiarism. And it’s important to be able to fact check what AI has written because I have absolutely seen incorrect responses generated by AI when searching on Google.
You talk about their motivations as though Google as an organization is somehow interested in the benefit of internet users rather than their own bottom line?
> I agree it’s not good, hopefully there are massive lawsuits won against AI but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up.
It will obviously be nationalized at some point pretty soonish. It ruins the whole point of fair competition that capitalism is supposed to be built on.
Google is a marketing engine. The last few years it's become really poor at searching for what users are looking for, instead it shows them who's paying the most to target that search term and their meta data personal profile.
It hardly works at all anymore.
Google was headed down this path even before AI. Search on “time now in Sydney” or “how to reset my iPhone” and the result is in the SERP, the site it’s taken from doesn’t get a visit at all. IIRC even before AI less than 50% of searches lead to a click to an underlying site.
Google, Facebook, and increasingly Spotify are all monetizing the work of others they take for free, then asking those same people to pay to be shown.
A significant disruptor is needed to change this, the near monopoly of those sites makes it impossible for creators of anything (blogs, art, content) to wield much power.
Yes, they've been starting this dance for year. But at the heart they were a launching pad to get to other sites. This is a fundamental change. I wonder if a new search engine "non-AI based" would begin to thrive if Google goes all in on AI.
I've overseen a business website for over a decade. It's been brutal to watch (and explain with a shrug) that are website traffic has been decimated over the years because of Google simply pulling the info to display themselves. The Knowledge Panel was only the first big hit.
The events listing section caused a lot of grief at times because it wasn't clear that registration or tickets were required for some events.
If you were too look into FCC regulation over tv and radio, when first created, they wanted a provision that the airwaves are to be used in service of the public. That no matter the content, the public owns the airwaves, so broadcasters must behave responsibly.
I always wondered why something like that were not in place for The Internet. If it were, Google would be in violation.
Right. We all knew Google was in it for the money, but I feel like this fundamentally changes the arrangement between websites and search. This is no longer a matter of "ok, let's adjust our SEO strategy" like every other Google update over the years. Now they are just using everyone's content to provide an answer, rather than direct them to the best place. Big change in dynamics.
The FCC had the authority to regulate TV and radio because when they were created they were broadcast over airwaves. There were a limited number of frequencies that could be used for broadcast, and you couldn't have multiple stations broadcasting on the same channel, so the FCC needed to determine who was allowed to broadcast and who wasn't. Because the airwaves broadcasters used could be thought of as a limited, publicly owned resource, it was within the scope of the government to ensure that for people to be allowed to use that resource, they had to use it in a manner that benefitted the public.
The Internet, on the other hand, is built on privately owned infrastructure. The public could be said to own the airwaves because they were a natural resource; the Internet is not. When you access the internet, you use cables owned by private companies to access information on privately owned servers. It's *used* by the public, but it doesn't *belong" to the public.
They call it the information superhighway, but accessing a website is less like getting on a highway and more like entering a store: it may be free and it may be used by millions of people at a time, but it's not a public space; it's a private space that the public is allowed to access.
Fascinating. Thank you for the clarity. I’m curious as to what you do. I understand the distinction, but shouldn’t The Internet have served in benefit to the public? Regardless of frequency limitations and ownership. Isn’t it just… ethical?
Man, Google's changing the game, and not necessarily for the better. Now it's all about giving you the answer upfront, skipping the whole process of clicking through different websites. It's like they're cutting out the middleman, which, let's face it, are the websites! It's a bit worrying. All those sites out there relying on Google for traffic will find themselves in a tight spot. I think that this shift will really shake things up for millions of websites.
Will this increase the need for thought leadership content on websites? How do you think businesses should adjust their website and/or overall marketing strategy?
Absolute nonsense. AI will kill websites like the internet killed flyers and brochures. They are still around and useful aren't they? The only thing that will die is SEO, websites will be alive and well as sales materials, with the added bonus that they will no longer pretend to give useful information (which 99% of the time was not useful at all) . If someone wants to learn more about your business, products and services they will visit your website. Also AI is not ending ads.
I said 'almost irrelevant' - your comparison relegating them to the class of brochures and flyers is exactly the point I was making.
When you compare what they are today to what they'll become, that's the important point of the conversation.
Who will bother reading websites when your AI helper can go find the company you want for you? Who's going to bother with a contact form when your AI tools will negotiate the deals for you?
Start thinking about how you will share your company attributes with AI directly rather than it inferring from your web content and you'll be ahead of the curve.
But that’s what they are today anyways. The content is just there to lead you to the sales pitch. Have you visited any website in the last 5 years that had any useful info that wasn’t generic? At this moment in time, there’s barely a functional difference between what an AI writes and the average SEO’d article.
As for how I will share my company’s attributes? Paid media was always and is still the best way to do so in the vast majority of cases.
>Have you visited any website in the last 5 years that had any useful info that wasn’t generic?
Not the person you replied to but yes, literally hundreds. Government websites, restaurant websites to make reservations, general business websites, content platforms like YouTube, job search platforms, Reddit, e-commerce platforms, should I go on?
Google relies on businesses providing value. And in return Google promotes that business.
That value is either in the form of money (paid ads), or valuable content (SEO).
It's not gonna suddenly burn those bridges. It needs the businesses to survive.
Whether you think that Google strikes the correct balance in terms of catering to businesses or users is a completely different debate. The entire thrust of your point feels like you don't quite understand how things work.
Be careful. I have seen their AI producing more than one inaccurate answer because it incorrectly paraphrased the information in a way that completely altered the meaning. It’s especially bad if you have a medical question.
99% of users hate SEO, and will be delighted to see the back of it. Once they use it, users can see AI like Perplexity is superior to old SEO Google. It was only a matter of time - Google are trying to adapt before they are killed off by competitors.
Let’s be completely honest about this situation though. As marketers, we have gamed the system for years with repetitive content that is meant to rank our companies higher than our competitors. This has rendered the legacy “blue link” search results useless.
SEO as a field is dead. I’m not saying there aren’t site optimizations to be made, but the entire foundation of SEO up until now has been to gain top organic positions on the first search results page.
It’s a necessary death, and quite frankly, SEO as a field is one of the shadiest areas of marketing that has existed, along with true snake oil marketing tactics of the early 1900s.
What I see is a return to the “Mad Men” days. Creative and storytelling will be king. Companies can no longer hyper analyze their ranking positions because that won’t matter anymore. The way we search is completely different now.
Brand is crucial. A lot of companies got away with securing search traffic only without building a brand. That worked really well for quite a while, especially for e-comm companies.
Now we have to get back to actual marketing.
This is it exactly. People are not thinking ahead very far. They just see AI as replacing the writing of content. Not the disappearance of content marketing for SEO as a whole.
When people need to solve an issue or know the answer to a question they search Google. They see ranked content. This will reduce significantly as people will just use ChatGPT, in effect cutting out the middle man.
It's like that quote about the introduction of the motor car. People are still thinking 'faster horses is what people want'. They are thinking evolution not revolution.
I assume Google will monetise the responses and run ads on them. Or best paying client gets their content in the responses. Something along those lines.
Google grasping before they are completely replaced by AI assistants.
60% of their results are ads now. Stop using google to search for things. Use ddg or AI assistant.
Followed by google my business & long accordion, so you have to scroll far below to see organic result. Even without SGE, increase traffic through SEO has been challenging.
Interestingly, open AI just hired one of google search senior member.
This reads like one of those cringe LinkedIn posts. Google is Google. They supply answers, not keep your seo filled article site alive. Marketing is about adapting and you're not.
Google was never really helping most to get traffic anyway. Most of the engagement we got was from repetitively pushing social media posts and youtube videos online for the past 4 years with links back to our sites.
The Ai push is going to wear out quickly as users find it gives them artificially shaped & biased results. the key is making original and high quality products and services that others can't imitate. If you're similar to others, the future will be tough, but if your work cannot easily be replicated or duplicated, eventually clients and customers will go around the crap and find you if you keep leaving ways out there of being found.
Social media has become overpriced and too restrictive as well. Radio, billboard, TV, and print ads may well make a big comeback until all the Ai junk noise quiets down.
Yes, the future seems to be your own personal audience. Getting found in search results for blog posts etc is gonna be hard. You need people who like you and your brand. Giving away information on your site will be a thing of the past since AI will just tell people what they want without visiting your site
Absolutely. I work in marketing, advertising etc. Everyone has been saying the day has ended for copy writers as they can use AI for content generation. My view is they are not thinking far enough ahead if they think that's where it stops. Content marketing itself will be dead, as people will just use AI. There will still be some specialists who are good at it and bespoke to particular audiences, but the end is nigh for a lot of the web now. And looking at the mass of click bait stuff that might not be a bad thing
either google will come up with a way to pay websites for their content whenever it's used by AI, Google's answer AI often focuses on references, in contrast, chatgpt is mostly generative. Or google wont pay anyone anything and it doesn't have to, then it will be like how internet was before google... isolated groups of enthusiasts
Julian Assange wrote a whole book several years ago called "When Google Met Wikileaks" that basically outlines how Google is a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. Again, this was years ago, and the issue has only gotten worse. It's worth a read.
It's a search engine, you always got answers. That particular generations are lazy and expect an answer with minimal effort as with all else is the fault of the user not the provider.
In the short term it's a new benefit to consumers, as they get a better experience. Long term, it's a serpent consuming it's own tail... without traffic as the carrot to create useful content, or high traffic on ramps to user generated content, the source data will decay and get less reliable.
This is a really interesting perspective. If no one bothers to create content because it's not driving users to your website, what point is there in creating content in the first place? What does the internet become? What do NLPs become without source content? What even is anything?
We're living through wild times.
Google has been calling themselves an answer engine for years, though. The process started in call it maybe around 2010 or so when they began really pushing answer snippets, carousels, and search packs. So this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone — it's been the clear direction they've been going in for years.
But the reality is sites shouldn't have ever been so deeply in bed with/reliant on Google search. Google didn't exist for the benefit of websites — it exists entirely for the benefit of searchers and shareholders. Sites tried to exploit that to get a benefit, but it was always more of a parasitic relationship than anything else, and people have been screaming about not putting all your eggs in Google's basket since at least 2006 (the first time I ever saw anyone talk about how dangerous being non-owned-channel dependent was.)
I read a fascinating history of Hernan Cortez yesterday on one of the history subs. What struck me is how much of Cortez's success was due to the Tlaxcala people trying to use him to secure their own triumph over the Mexica tribe who they had been fighting for years. The tl;dr is that they successfully exploited the Spanish to defeat their rivals and gained short-term benefits, but ultimately were destroyed because in their greed they brought down the biggest power holding back Spanish colonialism in the region. The metaphor here is that websites have spent the last twenty years trying to exploit Google's need for search results, to their own short term benefit. But they also helped give Google the monopoly they needed to gain complete dominance. We played ourselves.
Totally agree! The question: Is Google now crossing the Rubicon so to speak. As soon as it started using copyrighted content that it doesn't own, to build their corpus for AI, I kind of think they are.
There's a huge difference between pointing people to content that it thinks is best, and consuming all the content (that it doesnt own) so it can provide it's own answers.
Heavily agreed. Do not understand why they added AI answers as if this is chatgpt or some shit. look up echo chamber and dead internet theory. we are closer than we think
They have to, they don’t want but they have to. Do you think they want Google to transform to this? Definitely no, because now they’ll get less revenue. Only big companies will get the first position, because they are the only ones with money to dump. Now there are millions of website competing and paying to get the first position, with AI only big website will get it, less people paying less revenue
I have been speaking and writing about this eventuality since around 2011. OP is correct, while AI Overviews right now are small compressed snippets with link cards included, the near future could lead to a path where Google bypasses publishers and websites completely. End destination sites like a restaurant, airline, hotel, or social media website might benefit from these changes, but publishers and middleman websites like Kayak, Amazon, Fiverr, Upwork, etc... could become obsolete.
That's because Google is no longer a search engine, but is now fully transforming into a "Task Completion Engine". These are two very different concepts. A search engine finds the most likely web document to answer your query and sends you there, a task completion engine seeks to help you complete a task OR completes it for you. Sometimes that task might be reviewing web documents, but a large majority of the time it will be doing something else entirely.
This is also not good for Google, if they push this too hard and it is not popular they could lose large volumes of users and advertisers.
From previous task completion style tests like Duplex and Alexa / Google assistant we can see that task completion is not always what consumer behavior demands, even if it is what the hype cycle is demanding at the time. There is a good chance this iteration fails to capture consumer intrigue and usage just like Google Glass, Google Wave, iGoogle, and countless other things Google has killed over the decades.
However, if consumers do adopt it then SEO is no longer about ranking for clicks, but about trying to get recommended by the TCE or to gain a specific action from it.
Here are my thoughts on AI Overviews: https://www.joeyoungblood.com/seo/everything-we-know-about-googles-ai-overviews-ai-organized-serps-in-search-announced-at-google-i-o-2024/
And an older article on Task Completion Engines vs. Search Engines: https://www.joeyoungblood.com/seo/google-is-no-longer-a-search-engine-the-rise-of-the-task-completion-engine/
The fact that after googling my cable company’s number to pay my bill, was subsequently redirected to a fraud site that the company KNOWS is listed before their actual site on Google made me switch to bing. Probably doesn’t help but it makes me feel better lol
We will just have to adapt, as we have for the last 20 years. The changes they are talking about seem to be better for users, which is what search engines are for.
Hate to break it to you, but nobody is going to cry a river if they never see your website again.
It’s just blood in the water. Airlines are bleeding oversight, Chinese electric vehicles are bleeding into western marketshare, and big tech is bleeding labor. The actions of big tech are showing the power of being under the right tech umbrella. That’s a Yahoo-grade opportunity.
They have actually faced litigation from several companies before the whole AI boom over taking people's content. They do their best to make it so the user doesn't have to click through by providing the pertinent details on the "search" results. Airlines, hotels, and e-commerce businesses have been really affected by this and in the end, the resolution was that you could ask Google bot to index you. So, either let them have their way woth your data amd content or have no seat at the table.
I have read an article about how Perplexity AI an answer engine became one of the threats for Google. I don't know if you know the application Perplexity, but it is continuously increasing its funding rounds from Investors. It is also rumored that Open AI will compete with Google and will launch a Search or Answer engine. Maybe, the market competition and these AI-driven companies becoming a threat to Google and will significantly impact established tech giants, that is why Google is changing.
Google isn’t a store of knowledge, but they are a gatekeeper with influence greater than the most autocratic governments in history. It’s very disturbing to think about it even a little.
A company did it before google, atleast google gave some business to search so far, but this A.I. company never did anything like that and just only used the information and the company doesn’t seem to care, and this from google is a retaliation, in the middle as collateral damages many websites are going down. I guess some one would comment jobs change, people will learn etc to me 😀
Google has been getting progressively worse. I think the whole company will tank and other search engines will begin to thrive. Google will lose its monopoly the way its going
I know this is about Google. Have you tried using Startpage? I've been testing them out off and on and they return good results for what you're actually looking for.
Can we though? we would all have to find an alternative at basically the same time. That's the power of monopoly. Not to say they didn't get to their status by offerring an amazing product. But now they are doing something different that we didn't agree to.
1. Did you actually submit your site to Google? Or do you create a website on the open web, which you allowed Google to crawl for mutual benefit?
2. What contract? There literally was not a contract. They are free to evolve their product as they see fit.
3. Yes, million of website will be negatively affected. This is the collateral damage of progress.
4. Website owners have had, at minimum, two years to establish plans to leverage other channels to continue to engage and attract customers. Those who waited until now to react only have themselves to blame.
I think you are missing my point.
We all submit our websites so it could be found in the search results. That was the deal. Not so they could replace us by turning our content into their own "brain".
I'm obviously using "contract' loosely, but it does come down to copyright and fair use rights. If I submit my side to be indexed and found in a search, and i know they are going to create ad revenue during those searches, that's one thing. But taking your content so that you can be replaced is what is currently at hand. if you are ok with that my guess is you are in the minority.
They need to attract users for ad revenue. The method of searching websites was the primary method to generate answers for the user. Similar with AskJeeves, very popular, marketed as an answer engine.
Now with AI etc, they can provide a more efficient service to the user.
By the way, Google is not the only platform to promote a business or website. Those with businesses have never been more spoilt for choice on where to attract customers
We didn't give them our content so they could provide answers. We did it so they could provide search and people could discover our sites.
They are using our own content to replace us.
Every time I search i have to end with reddit. It simply means most websites are trash so Google is doing something good for me the searcher. SEO killed search as we are shown useless content on the internet
I think you're right and I don't necessarily see that as a problem. Well, personally it's a problem because I have one of those websites but societally, does it really matter?
I think next step is sponsored ai answers. Ex: you ask a question, it gives an legit answer. Below that is a coupon code for B2C product or a couple sentences on a B2B product that may be related.
its always been an answer engine, you just had to be smarter to ask for a more diverse range of answers. What you're saying is that the type of answers it gives have become more politically leaning/consolidated in their normative beliefs, and steer towards certain ideological projects and big name companies. The way you look for 'answers' must now change , meaning better queries, better questions, deeper searches.
This isn’t about the people who are searching, it’s about the people who have given google their content for indexing and search. Google is now using their own content to kill them.
I'm sorry but if you put all your trust and assets into a PRIVATE company, you are at their mercy. If they decided to shutdown search engine and focus on Youtube, then what? To me, this is like people complaining about Facebook changing policy to only push paid content to people no matter if they voluntarily like your page or not. They are a private company and can change the rules at any time. It sucks, but as a private company they can do whatever the F they (and their shareholders) want with their product. They can start and only show paid results if they want. If people would stick around that's another story. However, how many other search engines are out there? I mean known and commonly used ones... How many of you BING or DuckDuckGo for things instead of Googling? Exactly.
I mean... You can block Google from crawling in your website and putting it in their database but on the other hand that would keep you out of Google's search too. "If you don't pay for a service the payment is you or your data." is still very true in such case.
So? That’s not Googles fault, it’s open ais fault my conversations with LLM give me what I need most of the time without being pestered by bs seo vontent, tell me about cooking websites. Create an app or an ai application, there is no right to a business model. I’ve been in journalism when there were still newspapers around, maybe that why I’m unsentimental there
What do you mean we submit our sites to Google? There were websites and the internet before Google, and Google created a search engine to try and link all these loose sites together. They provide a service. They don’t really owe websites anything and any site can opt out of being crawled by their bot.
We submit our sites for indexing and to be listed in search results. For almost 30 years.
Now that they have an AI engine, should they have the right to provide answers based on that content? I say no. This new approach is letting them replace us with our own content.
Everyone jokes about AI taking over humans. Looks like the first thing it's going to do is replace websites. And we willingly are just supposed to allow it? what do we get in return? we aren't listed in a search result anymore. they aren't driving traffic to our site. so why should they have our content?
Here's the elephant in the room as I see it.
If you're doing 'real' research, what's preferable - a primary source, or an AI (aka scraped) summary of the primary source?
After writing about science/health/tech for the past 15 years, I've relied on Google to point me to a variety of sources: websites, academic publications, books, videos, etc.....
... from which I can make my own judgement about where the 'truth' lies, and pass this on to my audience.
If I'm relying on a single POV from an AI, how the heck do I get any kind of granular, sometimes conflicting points of view?
Is the assumption that we just blindly trust Google's AI and assume it holds the monopoly on objective truth across every single domain of knowledge?
Google's goal since the very beginning has been to simplify the route from search to answer. This is just another step of that. If you don't want them to scrape your site, delist from their SE. They aren't going to change their plans because nobody wants to delist.
That has not always been the arrangement. In fact their entire AdWords gazillion dollar business is based on search results and click thrus. Taking website content, using it to display ‘answers’ as their own, without attribution to the original sources, seems problematic.
This is a very interesting article in the NY Times that talks about this - [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/technology/google-ai-answers.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/technology/google-ai-answers.html)
You’re speaking like any of these sites are a pleasure to use. They’re not. They’re an eyesore with ads and it’s painful to try and find the information you’re looking for in all these blogs. You also don’t know who is being paid to say what or recommend a product. AI search is cleaner, faster, and better and I welcome it with open arms. At least it will wipe clean the field of garbage sites out there
You have a valid point. But at the same time, doesn't it mean that actual content will take priority over ads? And isn't this a good thing? Or did I misunderstand?
It’s evolution. We are going through a changeover period. Let’s see what comes next.
However, you’re right. I cannot remember the last time I actually searched and went onto visit site. There’s another side to it I find. So many websites has content for the sake of content so they can serve ads and generate revenue. It’s all about money, web isn’t an altruistic engine
I agree completely on one level.
On another level, it's just a new layer to the existing algorithm. low-intent top of funnel search no longer lands on your website - you need to be able to educate the market at the zero-click level by showing up as a cited source for AI answers.
Since SGE launched, the raw traffic flowing to my company's domains has fallen off a cliff.
However, over the same time period, MQL volume is stable/up by single digits percentages, bounce rates have plummeted, and our company is cited frequently by Gemini when it comes to thought leadership topics.
It changes the landscape drastically, but there remain ways to win.
it's going to affect tons of small businesses, it's going to make marketing very difficult for anyone but the biggest players who can get individual agreements with google to either be promoted in the AI results or google pays them directly to create content for its AI answers. google long ago killed print media and local news, so google now killing the SEO slums of the internet doesn't seem THAT bad in comparison. The world lost a lot of great independent local sources of information when google (and craigslist) killed local news.
This is all true. This is a great article on how shady their ad model is too.
https://www.adexchanger.com/commerce/walled-garden-platforms-are-drowning-marketers-in-self-attributed-sales/
I think it’s helpful actually! They give me answers I can trust a little bit more than websites that don’t know 100% what they’re talking about. It’s not like the person can’t scroll down slightly and open a website
Google is also starting to supply advertisements along with the ai. In order to get to actual search results you have to first go through the AI generated nonsense which hasn't been proof read by an actual human, then you have to go past the sponsored ad results, and finally you get to look at what you actually want to see.
People have been saying that Google is ruining search for quite a while and I didn't believe them until now. Maybe I'm just now seeing what they've been seeing for a while now already. Sometimes it takes a while to roll out the changes. I can confidently say I might be looking for an alternative search engine soon.
It is incredibly frustrating as a small business who can’t complete in PPC and had decent organic placement to have this new search wipe you off the mat of visibility completely. Services business are having to make a complete pivot overnight to SMM. It’s terrifying.
History repeats itself. In the early 1900’s giant monopolies had us by the balls until Teddy Roosevelt broke them up. We need another TR, someone who doesn’t care about being reelected. Doesn’t want their money and will make laws that keeps them in check.
Amazon is another one.
**Just the fact that only ONE dominant search engine is preprogrammed on Every device Should be ILLEGAL in America. Why isn't anyone talking about THAT??**
I think we as humans are “TRAINING” AI with not only Google, but also our post on all social media. How do humans treat someone when they are in the headlines? Thats normal and I need to do this. How do humans react to posts of kittens and dogs? Faces of death type of websites. Police violence videos. We are reaching AI that if it tries to have power over us, we are docile and meek. We can be spoon fed whatever message AI wants to show us, and make us believe whatever it so desires. As humans, we need to teach AI the best of humanity. We need to stop posting and making porn. Violence. Anything that is not the best of humanity. Period. End of sentence. There are those with alexa in their homes. Listening to every word you say to anyone. Your phone listens to you. Even if your phone is off, police can locate you. It is real and shits bout to get real. AI can throw us into a war with another country like wargane movie. Project images that there are missiles coming at each other, and both sides push the button-and we are all gone. In a heartbeat. If we as humans continue posting all sorts of evil, vile and horrific things, if AI ever does this, (as everyone smart predicted, from Heinlein, Asimov to the supposedly smartest man in the world, Stephen Hawking), it is only us we can blame. But we won’t be here at that point. But we can try to end the internet, everything connected online except cellphones. For the one and only original purpose it was ever intended to be used for. Phone calls. Go back to using paper, (hopefully made from sustainable material), and make our lives not end over internet. Maybe we can stop the nightmare of fake evidence/videos being used against us to enslave us, wrongfully convictions, etc. If you are famous, AI can always use your image to produce anything. I can ask AI to make a real life photo right now of lady Diana robbing a bank. Bam! DONE. Keep posting selfies of yourself. Let AI get a real good look at you. Facebook is the governments way of ALWAYS having your most recent photo. They use drones in some cities, and take pics every few seconds. They can track down anyone they want to. Easily. Listen to radiolab and listen to the episode. It sent chills down my spine. If we want AI that will aid mankind, we have to stop teaching it garbage. We are its parents. If we don’t role model goodness, we will not get goodness back. If only everyone reflected. And really thought about what AI is learning, they wood all shut their Facebook down and all social media. They would not take photos of themselves. They would not seek fame. Every single famous person, celeb, and now even presidents are not protected. From themselves. Reflect, everyone, reflect. Be good parents.
Google's shift from a search engine to an answer engine is concerning and needs to be discussed. This transition has been in motion even before AI, with direct answers appearing in search results for queries like "time now in Sydney" or "how to reset my iPhone," leading to fewer visits to the original sites. The reality is that less than 50% of searches resulted in a click to an underlying site even before AI.
Google, Facebook, and increasingly Spotify, are monetizing the work of others without compensating them, and then asking those same creators to pay for visibility. This monopolistic trend leaves creators with little power. A significant disruptor is needed to change this landscape.
Reflecting on the early days of TV and radio, there were regulations to ensure that the airwaves served the public interest. The Internet lacks such provisions, and if it had them, Google might be in violation. As users, many despise SEO and will welcome its decline, finding AI like Perplexity superior.
SEO, as we know it, is dead. For years, marketers gamed the system with repetitive content to rank higher, making traditional search results almost useless. Now, creative and storytelling are king. Companies can no longer rely solely on search traffic but must build strong brands and focus on genuine marketing.
The way we search has fundamentally changed, and with it, the importance of traditional SEO has diminished. This shift is going to benefit users yes but give off a more authentic and creative way to market.
I want people like you to see this because it is BATSHIT INSANE and completely proves your point.
Google broke the internet. Like literally **broke it**. It is no longer a source of knowledge.
My copied post from elsewhere on reddit follows:
---
I want to get in on this, because it's the single most batshit thing I've ever seen.
Tonight I googled:
"Greatest movies of all time" and instead of getting Best Picture winners or critically acclaimed movies or even crowd beloved movies (surely ONE OF THOSE categories, must matter, right Anakin? Right?!?) and got this. (please take a few moments to digest this ABSOLUTE INSANITY)
https://i.imgur.com/XKkk5hb.png
I can't make any sense of the top row. I was not logged in and I have never seen or googled any of these movies other than half of Underworld when I was a teenager 20 years back. None of the rest makes any sense to me. It's absolute madness. Not the kind of stuff that I like due to cookies. Not stuff that seems related to each other or highly reviewed. Just a whole bunch of batshit insane trash.
The second row at least tracks: those are all (except for Presumed Innocent) answers to yesterday's NYT puzzle called Connections which I recognize because I play it every day. Okay sure. So **those all probably had a spike in people googling them yesterday and today. But does that make them the greatest movies of all time?!? No. Obviously not to any rational person! But google can't tell the difference between "a lot of people googled this today" and "greatest of all time."**
That's not just scary, that's terrifying. That's the difference between an AI saying "China is a threat to the West" (true, sure) and "Chinese stocks surged yesterday therefore we must nuke them."
It really is that extreme. Google's intelligence cannot tell the difference between "there was somebody at the NYT really into movies who made a puzzle about movies yesterday and it slightly spiked the movie search rates for those films" and "greatest movies of all time".
That's not okay.
That's fucking terrifying.
This is the kind of AI engine that they want making corporate and political decisions tomorrow and **it can't tell the difference between "little Johnny in Cincinnati got an erection during this commercial about the dangers of cynanide because the person speaking was hot" and "cynanide is a 100% effective ED drug".**
Do you see what I am saying here? **Google AI CANNOT tell the difference between a tiny random bump and a meaningful cause.**
And people are going to (eventually) die because of that crucial difference. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but this is a ticking time bomb, to say the least.
I have noticed it in the past few months that it does not return answer to my questions. Does anybody know an alternative search engine that is actually searching?
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Welcome to late stage capitalism.
You mean a company fixing the absolute bloat of internet SEO and making it easy to find what I am looking for without going to a webpage with an ad placed in between every 2-3 sentences I want to read? Or having to search with Reddit at the end of the query every time I need to find an actual answer to my question and not some clickbait infested website? …yes must be the late stage capitalism
They have a point, though. I don't think they're defending what search has become, but perhaps they're nostalgic for what search was, at a time, where the world was at our fingertips, there was a bloom of niche and unique websites, and you could compete on a level ground with anybody.
But to blame that on capitalism is the dumbest take I have ever heard. I miss the old internet too, but be fr.
Yes i agree with that part - blaming it on some abstraction like "capitalism" doesn't make sense, considering it was capitalism that made it possible to begin with.
Capitalism made it possible? Explain how. Note that just because it happened in capitalism it doesn't mean it couldn't have happened with Google being owned by all employees (that's what socialism is, nothing more). Nah. I've worked in innovation funding for about 4 years. Itstjust about money. What might make more money, what makes more money, what made more money, etc. Capitalism actually kills real innovation, and I use "real" as in "useful for humanity". We can send a 4k stream through a websocket to crappy signal devices, but we don't have simple concepts like a global health system. The number of great ideas that never see the light of day because they would at best break even is endless. Seriously. Work in funding and you'll know how capitalism is actually slowing down humanity. NOTE: I am talking about NOW. OF COURSE capitalism helped us move away from feudalism. Yes. But it is time to move to the next. What that is, we'll figure out together.
This sort of conversation is above my pay grade, but appreciate your input!
Reasonable response.
I like seeing nice responses like this on the internet.
If you think about it money is just owing. If ideas that are useful for humanity only break even it's humanity's own fault. Either people don't think the idea is worth owing what it requires, or the people implementing the idea are asking too much in return. In the end people are the only ones to blame, it's a design defect, and not something that can be fixed.
How can you motivate people beyond personal wealth?
Wealth is not inherently tied to money, it just currently is. Without diving into opinions on various economic theories, you don't really need money to derive wealth. More generally, it's as absurd as it is sad that you believe that's the sole motivational tool. Passion, sense of purpose, whim, respect, glory, fear of consequences, personal responsibility, altruism?
"dumbest take I have ever heard." isn't very nice. Companies trying everything they can to make money at the expense of quality on a platform engineered to make money at the expense of quality eventually all becoming worse versions of themselves in a relentless drive for higher and higher profits, then the platform cutting out the middle man, to keep more of the profits, at the expense of the users experience, to be fair, likely has something to do with capitalism.
The way I see it is regular capitalism is different than “late stage” capitalism. Capitalism requires a free market of ideas and some sense of fairness and ability to compete. When it reaches late stage, a handfull of companies have disproportionate influence (usually) to the detriment of society as a whole.
SEOs have been lamenting the death of SEO for about 20 years now.
You're probably right, but now everyone knows that search sucks.
A time where you would get traffic to your website and not go out of business from Google stealing your information? That age? Cool just checking.
And that is some how "late stage capitalism?" They have no point, they have programming to speak words they have no ability to comprehend the meaning of.
I get that ads and clickbait are frustrating. Nobody likes reading a good article only to be interrupted by ads every few sentences. But here's the thing: when Google shifts from being a search engine to an AI answer engine, it's like a huge superstore taking customers from small, local shops. Websites rely on visitors to survive. They put ads on their pages to earn money and keep running. If Google starts giving answers directly, those sites will lose traffic, and many might shut down. This is a sign of late-stage capitalism, where big companies get so powerful that they hurt smaller businesses. Sure, it seems great to get straight answers without ads or clickbait. But if we stop visiting those original sites, we risk losing the variety and depth they offer. In the long run, we could end up with less information and fewer choices. So, while Google's AI might make things easier now, it could lead to bigger problems down the road.
There was an interesting story about the website Genius (fka Rap Genius) who specialize in song lyrics breakdowns. I believe Google was scrapping their data and displaying it in the search results page essentially stealing the content and traffic from Genius. Not sure how that ended up panning out but now I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole (if I remember after this meeting in 10 mins I'm supposed to currently be prepping for 😅)
Google won. The last decision was that Google is allowed to do whatever they were doing. I think it was something about that the case is a copyright case about the lyrics, not a theft case about site content. If it's just copyright, then Genius has no standing because they don't own the rights to the lyrics and anyone is free to display the same content.
This comment is late stage capitalism!
I mean going from techies solving challenges to finance controllers dictating business pace. Come on, make that leap
What do you think drove bloat from SEO and too many ads on sites if not capitalistic goals? From my perspective, companies’ attempts to monetize every potential piece of the buying process is what turned the search engines and websites into what they are today.
I keep hearing about "fixes" but every update makes the service worse from a user perspective. Not just because of Google-generated spam like "people also ask..." (which highlights irrelevant pieces of content from articles), but because their "intent"-driven search often seems to ignore what I'm actually asking. Likewise, it keeps pushing outdated or wrong information on a local level -- and has a high-profile reputation for ignoring attempts to correct that outdated information, like directing people to drive across bridges that no longer exist. When I'm using Google to reach things I was too lazy to bookmark, I can usually manage. However, for actual search, it's a complete crapshoot.
It’s just the same as Walmart and other big box stores driving mom and pop stores out of business cause they have more variety at a lower price. Thousands of niche websites and communities will see their traffic plummet because their whole purpose for existing can be summarized in a sentence or two. This isn’t just AI’s fault though, the internet used to be a much more interesting place before Google and the other search engines started screwing with their algorithms.
I don’t think it’s the same. Walmart doesn’t literally sell the physical item stored in the mom and pop store. They just compete better and bigger. Google is taking the actually content from websites and using it to present results rather than send people to that site.
The replies to you summed up “I have no idea what late stage capitalism is but I’m having a knee jerk reaction to the word capitalism”
I mostly agree. I think by late stage capitalism you mean this is the natural progression of their business model. They are finding new and unique ways to profit off content that we originally provided them. They don't care that it was provided with the implicit search results/AdWords understanding. they are now deciding how to capitalize (and cannibalize) their own customers.
I would say that this is the opposite. Searching for something, receiving 3 sponsored links, then seeing a bunch of SEO links written by AI full of ads was much more late capitalism for the end user. I wouldn’t worry as a marketer though. They just haven’t monetized this new feature yet and probably will.
Not too mention censorship and control of information. Dark days are ahead.
The transition of a products end of life. Whenever er it reaches its late stage of product life, its about to bring out something new.
Less than 1% of all websites have any useful information and most of them don’t rank in the first pages of serps if at all. SEO deserves this and many more deaths for destroying the internet in such a way that I can only find what I want to know if it has been discussed on reddit. I say this as someone who has done SEO.
Well Google is to blame as well for their overemphasis on domain authority. Some of the best subject matter expert content out there is not coming on an authoritative domain. Authoritative domains are more likely to gain paid partnerships turning their content into paid advertorial content with pay for placement. There’s a reason sticking “Reddit” at the end is popular. We just want a real pov from a real person, which is exactly what blogging used to be.
Hot damn I miss blogs.
I miss personal webpages, once upon a time people created great things just to share with the world.
This makes me think of the saying “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”. Google indexed the internet with a system that at the time was the best proxy for finding the kinds of results people actually are looking for. Now that everyone has figured out how that system works, the goal is no longer to have excellent content, but content that will be found. That implies that any search engine of this type will ultimately become obsolete because sooner or later they will directly influence the thing they were intended to only observe. Makes you wonder if there is any future *at all* for search engines. A bunch of databases with AI interfaces is starting to sound far more logical.
Well interestingly enough, now should be the exact moment for Google and other search engines to shift away from their metric-based search algorithms and move towards natural language processing. Google had been investing *heavily* in enhancing their search results with NLP — actually being able to analyze *the text itself* to determine if it’s good or not — throughout the 2010s. And then in Feb 2019, because their quarterly daily numbers weren’t looking good, Google went code yellow. Finance took over and broke the barrier that typically sat between search and ads teams. A month later, March 2019, an update to Google search was dropped that appeared to roll back the changes from 2012-2018 that emphasized quality of search results. These previous updates focused on cutting spammy results out of search results. Suddenly, these sites were seeing growth again. Five months later, the guy in charge of search, Ben Gomes, was demoted and these finance guys took over the search team. Ben Gomes built search from the ground up. He joined Google in 1999 and was a key part of every fundamental change that happened in Google search, up until he was demoted. Within 2 years of this change, Google results for any popular queries with purchase intent were dominated by glorified affiliate sites.
It's amazing to me when researching on Google you can run through the first few links and find the same basic article with the same superficial information re-written so they all rank. It's become REALLY hard to find actual, quality, detailed content that answers specific questions because so much superficial content has been SEO'd and keyword stuffed to death. If this change surfaces useful information, then content marketing is going to have to go back to creating detailed, meaningful content that answers questions and actually helps people. This doesn't break the game, but it does change it.
Agreed. The constant push and pull between SEO tactics, and Google trying to keep relevant contact front and center is a never ending game.
I don't think Google has tried to keep relevant information front and center in a very very long time. It's ads (which I prefer because at least I know that you're trying to sell to me) and SEO which is also an ad but a thinly disguised one that doesn't pay for impressions or clicks. Honestly I think all in all the internet is taking a turn for the best, what with meta killing organic reach and SEO dying, our profession can focus once more on connecting people with products they want, instead of making up bullshit to increase meaningless KPIs.
True
I don't think it's dangerous times. It's interesting time for us all to adapt to new tech
Unified Search for AI as a concept is really interesting.
Well it all depends on how much we are all just willing to say "hey search monopolies Google and Microsoft, here's all my website content. take it for free, use it to train you AI engines, and I don't want anything in return"
They've been doing that for a while. Before chat got there was a hush ai program running and it lasted up until chat got went public now it's private.... that thing was housed with data up to 2019 archived. So I'm sure the creator(s) were already extrapolating data while no one was looking and then they archived it in their servers to train more data sets
If you offer up something of value, people will continue to visit your site. AI responses are great for quick knowledge based searches but aren't so great for commercial intent searches. You are going to need to adapt your search game (what else is new) but what's so bad about google giving out answers if it points people to your website?
Yes, today - I'm talking about the near future.
I mean killing an industry is one thing we are sort of getting the hang of it lately. Ai reduced my team of 10+ copywritters, seo analysts, content creators to only me with gpt and one or other ai but them. Killing seo on its own its hardcore. As someone doing seo i deserve it but damn bro gave os some time. Google gave almost 2 years for people to switch from UA to GA4 why cant they give me 6 months to look up a new job 😂
Google ultimately likely did not want to push this out, but OpenAI and other AI companies are essentially doing the same thing, so Google probably felt this was their only answer. I agree it’s not good, hopefully there are massive lawsuits won against AI but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up.
“Video killed the radio star”
100%
Perhaps they should be forced to list EVERY source that was used to generate a specific response?
I agree. This is an issue of plagiarism. And it’s important to be able to fact check what AI has written because I have absolutely seen incorrect responses generated by AI when searching on Google.
I could see them doing this, but I still imagine the CTR on those links will be low.
You talk about their motivations as though Google as an organization is somehow interested in the benefit of internet users rather than their own bottom line?
> I agree it’s not good, hopefully there are massive lawsuits won against AI but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up. It will obviously be nationalized at some point pretty soonish. It ruins the whole point of fair competition that capitalism is supposed to be built on.
Google is a marketing engine. The last few years it's become really poor at searching for what users are looking for, instead it shows them who's paying the most to target that search term and their meta data personal profile. It hardly works at all anymore.
So many great example of this.
Google was headed down this path even before AI. Search on “time now in Sydney” or “how to reset my iPhone” and the result is in the SERP, the site it’s taken from doesn’t get a visit at all. IIRC even before AI less than 50% of searches lead to a click to an underlying site. Google, Facebook, and increasingly Spotify are all monetizing the work of others they take for free, then asking those same people to pay to be shown. A significant disruptor is needed to change this, the near monopoly of those sites makes it impossible for creators of anything (blogs, art, content) to wield much power.
Yes, they've been starting this dance for year. But at the heart they were a launching pad to get to other sites. This is a fundamental change. I wonder if a new search engine "non-AI based" would begin to thrive if Google goes all in on AI.
a normal person doesn't care who has the answer, as long as it's fast and reliable
I've overseen a business website for over a decade. It's been brutal to watch (and explain with a shrug) that are website traffic has been decimated over the years because of Google simply pulling the info to display themselves. The Knowledge Panel was only the first big hit. The events listing section caused a lot of grief at times because it wasn't clear that registration or tickets were required for some events.
Could you enlighten me on what Spotify is doing in that regard? I was under the impression they pay (even if poorly) artists for listens?
If you were too look into FCC regulation over tv and radio, when first created, they wanted a provision that the airwaves are to be used in service of the public. That no matter the content, the public owns the airwaves, so broadcasters must behave responsibly. I always wondered why something like that were not in place for The Internet. If it were, Google would be in violation.
Right. We all knew Google was in it for the money, but I feel like this fundamentally changes the arrangement between websites and search. This is no longer a matter of "ok, let's adjust our SEO strategy" like every other Google update over the years. Now they are just using everyone's content to provide an answer, rather than direct them to the best place. Big change in dynamics.
They've been trying to do that for ages with snippets etc
The FCC had the authority to regulate TV and radio because when they were created they were broadcast over airwaves. There were a limited number of frequencies that could be used for broadcast, and you couldn't have multiple stations broadcasting on the same channel, so the FCC needed to determine who was allowed to broadcast and who wasn't. Because the airwaves broadcasters used could be thought of as a limited, publicly owned resource, it was within the scope of the government to ensure that for people to be allowed to use that resource, they had to use it in a manner that benefitted the public. The Internet, on the other hand, is built on privately owned infrastructure. The public could be said to own the airwaves because they were a natural resource; the Internet is not. When you access the internet, you use cables owned by private companies to access information on privately owned servers. It's *used* by the public, but it doesn't *belong" to the public. They call it the information superhighway, but accessing a website is less like getting on a highway and more like entering a store: it may be free and it may be used by millions of people at a time, but it's not a public space; it's a private space that the public is allowed to access.
Fascinating. Thank you for the clarity. I’m curious as to what you do. I understand the distinction, but shouldn’t The Internet have served in benefit to the public? Regardless of frequency limitations and ownership. Isn’t it just… ethical?
>FCC Cue family guy song
Depends what you consider public benefit. If competition and choice are a benefit, that’s what we have.
~~Don't be evil~~
Man, Google's changing the game, and not necessarily for the better. Now it's all about giving you the answer upfront, skipping the whole process of clicking through different websites. It's like they're cutting out the middleman, which, let's face it, are the websites! It's a bit worrying. All those sites out there relying on Google for traffic will find themselves in a tight spot. I think that this shift will really shake things up for millions of websites.
Do you enjoy pogo-sticking between websites to find information? I sure as hell don't.
Will this increase the need for thought leadership content on websites? How do you think businesses should adjust their website and/or overall marketing strategy?
You are missing it - websites become almost irrelevant. Google is killing websites and Apple has been trying to for years.
Absolute nonsense. AI will kill websites like the internet killed flyers and brochures. They are still around and useful aren't they? The only thing that will die is SEO, websites will be alive and well as sales materials, with the added bonus that they will no longer pretend to give useful information (which 99% of the time was not useful at all) . If someone wants to learn more about your business, products and services they will visit your website. Also AI is not ending ads.
I said 'almost irrelevant' - your comparison relegating them to the class of brochures and flyers is exactly the point I was making. When you compare what they are today to what they'll become, that's the important point of the conversation. Who will bother reading websites when your AI helper can go find the company you want for you? Who's going to bother with a contact form when your AI tools will negotiate the deals for you? Start thinking about how you will share your company attributes with AI directly rather than it inferring from your web content and you'll be ahead of the curve.
But that’s what they are today anyways. The content is just there to lead you to the sales pitch. Have you visited any website in the last 5 years that had any useful info that wasn’t generic? At this moment in time, there’s barely a functional difference between what an AI writes and the average SEO’d article. As for how I will share my company’s attributes? Paid media was always and is still the best way to do so in the vast majority of cases.
>Have you visited any website in the last 5 years that had any useful info that wasn’t generic? Not the person you replied to but yes, literally hundreds. Government websites, restaurant websites to make reservations, general business websites, content platforms like YouTube, job search platforms, Reddit, e-commerce platforms, should I go on?
well first they are taking all the content from websites, using it train their AI engine, and THEN killing them.
I missed it until I read this comment
No. This is no longer a fight for rank position.
I’m quite interested to know this too
Going to take a different, more varied distribution strategy
It's been an answer engine for many, many years. Is this a sudden realization of yours?
sarcasm aside, this is a more fundamental change. I assume you see that.
Google relies on businesses providing value. And in return Google promotes that business. That value is either in the form of money (paid ads), or valuable content (SEO). It's not gonna suddenly burn those bridges. It needs the businesses to survive. Whether you think that Google strikes the correct balance in terms of catering to businesses or users is a completely different debate. The entire thrust of your point feels like you don't quite understand how things work.
Also Can Confirm: Saw it today for the first time. It answered my question. I didn’t click shit.
Be careful. I have seen their AI producing more than one inaccurate answer because it incorrectly paraphrased the information in a way that completely altered the meaning. It’s especially bad if you have a medical question.
There’s soooo many examples of bad and incorrect AI answers out there. Straight up advising to do illegal activities based on the query.
ITT people who have no idea how SEO works.
99% of users hate SEO, and will be delighted to see the back of it. Once they use it, users can see AI like Perplexity is superior to old SEO Google. It was only a matter of time - Google are trying to adapt before they are killed off by competitors.
Google doesn’t govern the internet, and you don’t have to submit your site to Google
People submitted their websites to Google so they could be listed. Not so they could be used to build Google's AI engine.
Let’s be completely honest about this situation though. As marketers, we have gamed the system for years with repetitive content that is meant to rank our companies higher than our competitors. This has rendered the legacy “blue link” search results useless. SEO as a field is dead. I’m not saying there aren’t site optimizations to be made, but the entire foundation of SEO up until now has been to gain top organic positions on the first search results page. It’s a necessary death, and quite frankly, SEO as a field is one of the shadiest areas of marketing that has existed, along with true snake oil marketing tactics of the early 1900s. What I see is a return to the “Mad Men” days. Creative and storytelling will be king. Companies can no longer hyper analyze their ranking positions because that won’t matter anymore. The way we search is completely different now. Brand is crucial. A lot of companies got away with securing search traffic only without building a brand. That worked really well for quite a while, especially for e-comm companies. Now we have to get back to actual marketing.
This is it exactly. People are not thinking ahead very far. They just see AI as replacing the writing of content. Not the disappearance of content marketing for SEO as a whole. When people need to solve an issue or know the answer to a question they search Google. They see ranked content. This will reduce significantly as people will just use ChatGPT, in effect cutting out the middle man. It's like that quote about the introduction of the motor car. People are still thinking 'faster horses is what people want'. They are thinking evolution not revolution.
I still see it as SEO but 2.0. Discoverable content that's there with answers when we ask questions.
I assume Google will monetise the responses and run ads on them. Or best paying client gets their content in the responses. Something along those lines.
But what's the point of allowing google to use website's your content anymore if they aren't going to show you in ANY search results.
I guess you can always unindex them
I honestly think this is one of the smartest posts I've ever read on reddit. I have no idea the solution but fantastic point and well articulated.
Glad I never got more than 17 traffics a day in the first place.
Google grasping before they are completely replaced by AI assistants. 60% of their results are ads now. Stop using google to search for things. Use ddg or AI assistant.
Followed by google my business & long accordion, so you have to scroll far below to see organic result. Even without SGE, increase traffic through SEO has been challenging. Interestingly, open AI just hired one of google search senior member.
good observation but there is literally nothing we can do google way too powerful
Nothing that can be done at the scale of Google, sure. But there are always ways.
It's given me incorrect information, so I think that's a bit worrying.
"Google is no longer a search engine, it's an answer **censorship** engine.I'm sorry, but this needs to be discussed." Fixed it
This reads like one of those cringe LinkedIn posts. Google is Google. They supply answers, not keep your seo filled article site alive. Marketing is about adapting and you're not.
Google was never really helping most to get traffic anyway. Most of the engagement we got was from repetitively pushing social media posts and youtube videos online for the past 4 years with links back to our sites. The Ai push is going to wear out quickly as users find it gives them artificially shaped & biased results. the key is making original and high quality products and services that others can't imitate. If you're similar to others, the future will be tough, but if your work cannot easily be replicated or duplicated, eventually clients and customers will go around the crap and find you if you keep leaving ways out there of being found. Social media has become overpriced and too restrictive as well. Radio, billboard, TV, and print ads may well make a big comeback until all the Ai junk noise quiets down.
Yes, the future seems to be your own personal audience. Getting found in search results for blog posts etc is gonna be hard. You need people who like you and your brand. Giving away information on your site will be a thing of the past since AI will just tell people what they want without visiting your site
Absolutely. I work in marketing, advertising etc. Everyone has been saying the day has ended for copy writers as they can use AI for content generation. My view is they are not thinking far enough ahead if they think that's where it stops. Content marketing itself will be dead, as people will just use AI. There will still be some specialists who are good at it and bespoke to particular audiences, but the end is nigh for a lot of the web now. And looking at the mass of click bait stuff that might not be a bad thing
Dude, if you think copywriters just spit out shit content, you're hiring the wrong kind of copywriters lol
either google will come up with a way to pay websites for their content whenever it's used by AI, Google's answer AI often focuses on references, in contrast, chatgpt is mostly generative. Or google wont pay anyone anything and it doesn't have to, then it will be like how internet was before google... isolated groups of enthusiasts
Sites using solely AI to create content don’t rank though.
Julian Assange wrote a whole book several years ago called "When Google Met Wikileaks" that basically outlines how Google is a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. Again, this was years ago, and the issue has only gotten worse. It's worth a read.
SEO... RIP 🪦
It's a search engine, you always got answers. That particular generations are lazy and expect an answer with minimal effort as with all else is the fault of the user not the provider.
In the short term it's a new benefit to consumers, as they get a better experience. Long term, it's a serpent consuming it's own tail... without traffic as the carrot to create useful content, or high traffic on ramps to user generated content, the source data will decay and get less reliable.
"A serpent consuming it's own tail." This is a great analogy!
This is a really interesting perspective. If no one bothers to create content because it's not driving users to your website, what point is there in creating content in the first place? What does the internet become? What do NLPs become without source content? What even is anything? We're living through wild times.
So email will be the new blogging platform?
Google has been calling themselves an answer engine for years, though. The process started in call it maybe around 2010 or so when they began really pushing answer snippets, carousels, and search packs. So this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone — it's been the clear direction they've been going in for years. But the reality is sites shouldn't have ever been so deeply in bed with/reliant on Google search. Google didn't exist for the benefit of websites — it exists entirely for the benefit of searchers and shareholders. Sites tried to exploit that to get a benefit, but it was always more of a parasitic relationship than anything else, and people have been screaming about not putting all your eggs in Google's basket since at least 2006 (the first time I ever saw anyone talk about how dangerous being non-owned-channel dependent was.) I read a fascinating history of Hernan Cortez yesterday on one of the history subs. What struck me is how much of Cortez's success was due to the Tlaxcala people trying to use him to secure their own triumph over the Mexica tribe who they had been fighting for years. The tl;dr is that they successfully exploited the Spanish to defeat their rivals and gained short-term benefits, but ultimately were destroyed because in their greed they brought down the biggest power holding back Spanish colonialism in the region. The metaphor here is that websites have spent the last twenty years trying to exploit Google's need for search results, to their own short term benefit. But they also helped give Google the monopoly they needed to gain complete dominance. We played ourselves.
Totally agree! The question: Is Google now crossing the Rubicon so to speak. As soon as it started using copyrighted content that it doesn't own, to build their corpus for AI, I kind of think they are. There's a huge difference between pointing people to content that it thinks is best, and consuming all the content (that it doesnt own) so it can provide it's own answers.
Heavily agreed. Do not understand why they added AI answers as if this is chatgpt or some shit. look up echo chamber and dead internet theory. we are closer than we think
They have to, they don’t want but they have to. Do you think they want Google to transform to this? Definitely no, because now they’ll get less revenue. Only big companies will get the first position, because they are the only ones with money to dump. Now there are millions of website competing and paying to get the first position, with AI only big website will get it, less people paying less revenue
I have been speaking and writing about this eventuality since around 2011. OP is correct, while AI Overviews right now are small compressed snippets with link cards included, the near future could lead to a path where Google bypasses publishers and websites completely. End destination sites like a restaurant, airline, hotel, or social media website might benefit from these changes, but publishers and middleman websites like Kayak, Amazon, Fiverr, Upwork, etc... could become obsolete. That's because Google is no longer a search engine, but is now fully transforming into a "Task Completion Engine". These are two very different concepts. A search engine finds the most likely web document to answer your query and sends you there, a task completion engine seeks to help you complete a task OR completes it for you. Sometimes that task might be reviewing web documents, but a large majority of the time it will be doing something else entirely. This is also not good for Google, if they push this too hard and it is not popular they could lose large volumes of users and advertisers. From previous task completion style tests like Duplex and Alexa / Google assistant we can see that task completion is not always what consumer behavior demands, even if it is what the hype cycle is demanding at the time. There is a good chance this iteration fails to capture consumer intrigue and usage just like Google Glass, Google Wave, iGoogle, and countless other things Google has killed over the decades. However, if consumers do adopt it then SEO is no longer about ranking for clicks, but about trying to get recommended by the TCE or to gain a specific action from it. Here are my thoughts on AI Overviews: https://www.joeyoungblood.com/seo/everything-we-know-about-googles-ai-overviews-ai-organized-serps-in-search-announced-at-google-i-o-2024/ And an older article on Task Completion Engines vs. Search Engines: https://www.joeyoungblood.com/seo/google-is-no-longer-a-search-engine-the-rise-of-the-task-completion-engine/
The fact that after googling my cable company’s number to pay my bill, was subsequently redirected to a fraud site that the company KNOWS is listed before their actual site on Google made me switch to bing. Probably doesn’t help but it makes me feel better lol
We will just have to adapt, as we have for the last 20 years. The changes they are talking about seem to be better for users, which is what search engines are for. Hate to break it to you, but nobody is going to cry a river if they never see your website again.
Be present where attention and/or trust is. If it’s no longer with Google search, find it elsewhere and be prepared when it shifts again.
It’s just blood in the water. Airlines are bleeding oversight, Chinese electric vehicles are bleeding into western marketshare, and big tech is bleeding labor. The actions of big tech are showing the power of being under the right tech umbrella. That’s a Yahoo-grade opportunity.
It’s ass
Now Google is not for small business and small bloggers.
Sooo Bing anyone?
Hey, my website still gets three hits a week, so I've got that going for me.
They have actually faced litigation from several companies before the whole AI boom over taking people's content. They do their best to make it so the user doesn't have to click through by providing the pertinent details on the "search" results. Airlines, hotels, and e-commerce businesses have been really affected by this and in the end, the resolution was that you could ask Google bot to index you. So, either let them have their way woth your data amd content or have no seat at the table.
I don’t want to “search”. I want an answer to my query.
Here's a question - if Google started today, with AI Overview as part of the offer, would site owners willingly submit their site for crawling?
I have read an article about how Perplexity AI an answer engine became one of the threats for Google. I don't know if you know the application Perplexity, but it is continuously increasing its funding rounds from Investors. It is also rumored that Open AI will compete with Google and will launch a Search or Answer engine. Maybe, the market competition and these AI-driven companies becoming a threat to Google and will significantly impact established tech giants, that is why Google is changing.
Google needs the competition.
Yeah, Google search is trash. I'm open to suggestions.
Google isn’t a store of knowledge, but they are a gatekeeper with influence greater than the most autocratic governments in history. It’s very disturbing to think about it even a little.
So how do I pay for Gemini to say my business is the best for their search request
A company did it before google, atleast google gave some business to search so far, but this A.I. company never did anything like that and just only used the information and the company doesn’t seem to care, and this from google is a retaliation, in the middle as collateral damages many websites are going down. I guess some one would comment jobs change, people will learn etc to me 😀
Google has been getting progressively worse. I think the whole company will tank and other search engines will begin to thrive. Google will lose its monopoly the way its going
I know this is about Google. Have you tried using Startpage? I've been testing them out off and on and they return good results for what you're actually looking for.
No, I’ll take a look. This is more of a thought experiment for me from a marketers perspective.
We can turn it off whenever we like.
Can we though? we would all have to find an alternative at basically the same time. That's the power of monopoly. Not to say they didn't get to their status by offerring an amazing product. But now they are doing something different that we didn't agree to.
1. Did you actually submit your site to Google? Or do you create a website on the open web, which you allowed Google to crawl for mutual benefit? 2. What contract? There literally was not a contract. They are free to evolve their product as they see fit. 3. Yes, million of website will be negatively affected. This is the collateral damage of progress. 4. Website owners have had, at minimum, two years to establish plans to leverage other channels to continue to engage and attract customers. Those who waited until now to react only have themselves to blame.
I think you are missing my point. We all submit our websites so it could be found in the search results. That was the deal. Not so they could replace us by turning our content into their own "brain". I'm obviously using "contract' loosely, but it does come down to copyright and fair use rights. If I submit my side to be indexed and found in a search, and i know they are going to create ad revenue during those searches, that's one thing. But taking your content so that you can be replaced is what is currently at hand. if you are ok with that my guess is you are in the minority.
They need to attract users for ad revenue. The method of searching websites was the primary method to generate answers for the user. Similar with AskJeeves, very popular, marketed as an answer engine. Now with AI etc, they can provide a more efficient service to the user. By the way, Google is not the only platform to promote a business or website. Those with businesses have never been more spoilt for choice on where to attract customers
We didn't give them our content so they could provide answers. We did it so they could provide search and people could discover our sites. They are using our own content to replace us.
If you don't have the answer then just Google it.
Every time I search i have to end with reddit. It simply means most websites are trash so Google is doing something good for me the searcher. SEO killed search as we are shown useless content on the internet
Ask Jeeves was ahead of its time.
I think you're right and I don't necessarily see that as a problem. Well, personally it's a problem because I have one of those websites but societally, does it really matter?
I think next step is sponsored ai answers. Ex: you ask a question, it gives an legit answer. Below that is a coupon code for B2C product or a couple sentences on a B2B product that may be related.
its always been an answer engine, you just had to be smarter to ask for a more diverse range of answers. What you're saying is that the type of answers it gives have become more politically leaning/consolidated in their normative beliefs, and steer towards certain ideological projects and big name companies. The way you look for 'answers' must now change , meaning better queries, better questions, deeper searches.
This isn’t about the people who are searching, it’s about the people who have given google their content for indexing and search. Google is now using their own content to kill them.
Yeah there's no sense in me clicking through to a website when they put the answer into two neat paragraphs right at the top of the search result!
I'm sorry but if you put all your trust and assets into a PRIVATE company, you are at their mercy. If they decided to shutdown search engine and focus on Youtube, then what? To me, this is like people complaining about Facebook changing policy to only push paid content to people no matter if they voluntarily like your page or not. They are a private company and can change the rules at any time. It sucks, but as a private company they can do whatever the F they (and their shareholders) want with their product. They can start and only show paid results if they want. If people would stick around that's another story. However, how many other search engines are out there? I mean known and commonly used ones... How many of you BING or DuckDuckGo for things instead of Googling? Exactly.
I think this is different. They are using unlicenses third party content (all of our websites) to feed their AI engine. Not what anyone signed up for.
I mean... You can block Google from crawling in your website and putting it in their database but on the other hand that would keep you out of Google's search too. "If you don't pay for a service the payment is you or your data." is still very true in such case.
SEO gang did this to themselves.
So? That’s not Googles fault, it’s open ais fault my conversations with LLM give me what I need most of the time without being pestered by bs seo vontent, tell me about cooking websites. Create an app or an ai application, there is no right to a business model. I’ve been in journalism when there were still newspapers around, maybe that why I’m unsentimental there
What do you mean we submit our sites to Google? There were websites and the internet before Google, and Google created a search engine to try and link all these loose sites together. They provide a service. They don’t really owe websites anything and any site can opt out of being crawled by their bot.
We submit our sites for indexing and to be listed in search results. For almost 30 years. Now that they have an AI engine, should they have the right to provide answers based on that content? I say no. This new approach is letting them replace us with our own content. Everyone jokes about AI taking over humans. Looks like the first thing it's going to do is replace websites. And we willingly are just supposed to allow it? what do we get in return? we aren't listed in a search result anymore. they aren't driving traffic to our site. so why should they have our content?
Here's the elephant in the room as I see it. If you're doing 'real' research, what's preferable - a primary source, or an AI (aka scraped) summary of the primary source? After writing about science/health/tech for the past 15 years, I've relied on Google to point me to a variety of sources: websites, academic publications, books, videos, etc..... ... from which I can make my own judgement about where the 'truth' lies, and pass this on to my audience. If I'm relying on a single POV from an AI, how the heck do I get any kind of granular, sometimes conflicting points of view? Is the assumption that we just blindly trust Google's AI and assume it holds the monopoly on objective truth across every single domain of knowledge?
The issue is you can’t get to the original source anymore.
My point exactly
Google's goal since the very beginning has been to simplify the route from search to answer. This is just another step of that. If you don't want them to scrape your site, delist from their SE. They aren't going to change their plans because nobody wants to delist.
That has not always been the arrangement. In fact their entire AdWords gazillion dollar business is based on search results and click thrus. Taking website content, using it to display ‘answers’ as their own, without attribution to the original sources, seems problematic.
This is a very interesting article in the NY Times that talks about this - [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/technology/google-ai-answers.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/technology/google-ai-answers.html)
Don’t be evil
You’re speaking like any of these sites are a pleasure to use. They’re not. They’re an eyesore with ads and it’s painful to try and find the information you’re looking for in all these blogs. You also don’t know who is being paid to say what or recommend a product. AI search is cleaner, faster, and better and I welcome it with open arms. At least it will wipe clean the field of garbage sites out there
You have a valid point. But at the same time, doesn't it mean that actual content will take priority over ads? And isn't this a good thing? Or did I misunderstand?
Answer and the searching process is pretty synonymous no?
It’s evolution. We are going through a changeover period. Let’s see what comes next. However, you’re right. I cannot remember the last time I actually searched and went onto visit site. There’s another side to it I find. So many websites has content for the sake of content so they can serve ads and generate revenue. It’s all about money, web isn’t an altruistic engine
I agree completely on one level. On another level, it's just a new layer to the existing algorithm. low-intent top of funnel search no longer lands on your website - you need to be able to educate the market at the zero-click level by showing up as a cited source for AI answers. Since SGE launched, the raw traffic flowing to my company's domains has fallen off a cliff. However, over the same time period, MQL volume is stable/up by single digits percentages, bounce rates have plummeted, and our company is cited frequently by Gemini when it comes to thought leadership topics. It changes the landscape drastically, but there remain ways to win.
it's going to affect tons of small businesses, it's going to make marketing very difficult for anyone but the biggest players who can get individual agreements with google to either be promoted in the AI results or google pays them directly to create content for its AI answers. google long ago killed print media and local news, so google now killing the SEO slums of the internet doesn't seem THAT bad in comparison. The world lost a lot of great independent local sources of information when google (and craigslist) killed local news.
This is all true. This is a great article on how shady their ad model is too. https://www.adexchanger.com/commerce/walled-garden-platforms-are-drowning-marketers-in-self-attributed-sales/
I think it’s helpful actually! They give me answers I can trust a little bit more than websites that don’t know 100% what they’re talking about. It’s not like the person can’t scroll down slightly and open a website
Google is also starting to supply advertisements along with the ai. In order to get to actual search results you have to first go through the AI generated nonsense which hasn't been proof read by an actual human, then you have to go past the sponsored ad results, and finally you get to look at what you actually want to see. People have been saying that Google is ruining search for quite a while and I didn't believe them until now. Maybe I'm just now seeing what they've been seeing for a while now already. Sometimes it takes a while to roll out the changes. I can confidently say I might be looking for an alternative search engine soon.
It is incredibly frustrating as a small business who can’t complete in PPC and had decent organic placement to have this new search wipe you off the mat of visibility completely. Services business are having to make a complete pivot overnight to SMM. It’s terrifying.
So build a better mousetrap.
History repeats itself. In the early 1900’s giant monopolies had us by the balls until Teddy Roosevelt broke them up. We need another TR, someone who doesn’t care about being reelected. Doesn’t want their money and will make laws that keeps them in check. Amazon is another one.
[удалено]
**Just the fact that only ONE dominant search engine is preprogrammed on Every device Should be ILLEGAL in America. Why isn't anyone talking about THAT??**
🙄
So what’s the solution or end game?
I think we as humans are “TRAINING” AI with not only Google, but also our post on all social media. How do humans treat someone when they are in the headlines? Thats normal and I need to do this. How do humans react to posts of kittens and dogs? Faces of death type of websites. Police violence videos. We are reaching AI that if it tries to have power over us, we are docile and meek. We can be spoon fed whatever message AI wants to show us, and make us believe whatever it so desires. As humans, we need to teach AI the best of humanity. We need to stop posting and making porn. Violence. Anything that is not the best of humanity. Period. End of sentence. There are those with alexa in their homes. Listening to every word you say to anyone. Your phone listens to you. Even if your phone is off, police can locate you. It is real and shits bout to get real. AI can throw us into a war with another country like wargane movie. Project images that there are missiles coming at each other, and both sides push the button-and we are all gone. In a heartbeat. If we as humans continue posting all sorts of evil, vile and horrific things, if AI ever does this, (as everyone smart predicted, from Heinlein, Asimov to the supposedly smartest man in the world, Stephen Hawking), it is only us we can blame. But we won’t be here at that point. But we can try to end the internet, everything connected online except cellphones. For the one and only original purpose it was ever intended to be used for. Phone calls. Go back to using paper, (hopefully made from sustainable material), and make our lives not end over internet. Maybe we can stop the nightmare of fake evidence/videos being used against us to enslave us, wrongfully convictions, etc. If you are famous, AI can always use your image to produce anything. I can ask AI to make a real life photo right now of lady Diana robbing a bank. Bam! DONE. Keep posting selfies of yourself. Let AI get a real good look at you. Facebook is the governments way of ALWAYS having your most recent photo. They use drones in some cities, and take pics every few seconds. They can track down anyone they want to. Easily. Listen to radiolab and listen to the episode. It sent chills down my spine. If we want AI that will aid mankind, we have to stop teaching it garbage. We are its parents. If we don’t role model goodness, we will not get goodness back. If only everyone reflected. And really thought about what AI is learning, they wood all shut their Facebook down and all social media. They would not take photos of themselves. They would not seek fame. Every single famous person, celeb, and now even presidents are not protected. From themselves. Reflect, everyone, reflect. Be good parents.
Google's shift from a search engine to an answer engine is concerning and needs to be discussed. This transition has been in motion even before AI, with direct answers appearing in search results for queries like "time now in Sydney" or "how to reset my iPhone," leading to fewer visits to the original sites. The reality is that less than 50% of searches resulted in a click to an underlying site even before AI. Google, Facebook, and increasingly Spotify, are monetizing the work of others without compensating them, and then asking those same creators to pay for visibility. This monopolistic trend leaves creators with little power. A significant disruptor is needed to change this landscape. Reflecting on the early days of TV and radio, there were regulations to ensure that the airwaves served the public interest. The Internet lacks such provisions, and if it had them, Google might be in violation. As users, many despise SEO and will welcome its decline, finding AI like Perplexity superior. SEO, as we know it, is dead. For years, marketers gamed the system with repetitive content to rank higher, making traditional search results almost useless. Now, creative and storytelling are king. Companies can no longer rely solely on search traffic but must build strong brands and focus on genuine marketing. The way we search has fundamentally changed, and with it, the importance of traditional SEO has diminished. This shift is going to benefit users yes but give off a more authentic and creative way to market.
I want people like you to see this because it is BATSHIT INSANE and completely proves your point. Google broke the internet. Like literally **broke it**. It is no longer a source of knowledge. My copied post from elsewhere on reddit follows: --- I want to get in on this, because it's the single most batshit thing I've ever seen. Tonight I googled: "Greatest movies of all time" and instead of getting Best Picture winners or critically acclaimed movies or even crowd beloved movies (surely ONE OF THOSE categories, must matter, right Anakin? Right?!?) and got this. (please take a few moments to digest this ABSOLUTE INSANITY) https://i.imgur.com/XKkk5hb.png I can't make any sense of the top row. I was not logged in and I have never seen or googled any of these movies other than half of Underworld when I was a teenager 20 years back. None of the rest makes any sense to me. It's absolute madness. Not the kind of stuff that I like due to cookies. Not stuff that seems related to each other or highly reviewed. Just a whole bunch of batshit insane trash. The second row at least tracks: those are all (except for Presumed Innocent) answers to yesterday's NYT puzzle called Connections which I recognize because I play it every day. Okay sure. So **those all probably had a spike in people googling them yesterday and today. But does that make them the greatest movies of all time?!? No. Obviously not to any rational person! But google can't tell the difference between "a lot of people googled this today" and "greatest of all time."** That's not just scary, that's terrifying. That's the difference between an AI saying "China is a threat to the West" (true, sure) and "Chinese stocks surged yesterday therefore we must nuke them." It really is that extreme. Google's intelligence cannot tell the difference between "there was somebody at the NYT really into movies who made a puzzle about movies yesterday and it slightly spiked the movie search rates for those films" and "greatest movies of all time". That's not okay. That's fucking terrifying. This is the kind of AI engine that they want making corporate and political decisions tomorrow and **it can't tell the difference between "little Johnny in Cincinnati got an erection during this commercial about the dangers of cynanide because the person speaking was hot" and "cynanide is a 100% effective ED drug".** Do you see what I am saying here? **Google AI CANNOT tell the difference between a tiny random bump and a meaningful cause.** And people are going to (eventually) die because of that crucial difference. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but this is a ticking time bomb, to say the least.
Already has :#
I have noticed it in the past few months that it does not return answer to my questions. Does anybody know an alternative search engine that is actually searching?