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AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

arstechnica.com

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Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#81

Post by owenversteeg »

wat10000 wrote: post #57
ImaCake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, it includes a link to the USDA reference so you can verify it yourself. I have switched back to google because of how useful I find the RAG overviews.

The link is the only useful part, since you can’t trust the summary. Maybe they could just show the links that match your query and skip the overview. Sounds like a billion-dollar startup idea, wonder why nobody’s done it.

It’s a pretty good billion dollar idea, I think you’ll do well. In fact I bet you’ll make money hand over fist, for years. You could hire all the best engineers and crush the competition. At that point you control the algorithm that everyone bases their websites on, so if you were to accidentally deploy a series of changes that incentivized low quality contentless websites… it wouldn’t matter at all; not your problem. Now that the quality of results is poor, but people still need their queries answered, why don’t you provide them the answers yourself? You could keep all the precious ad revenue that you previously lost when people clicked on those pesky search results.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#82

Post by sothatsit »

ncallaway wrote: post #65
mtkd wrote: post #50

Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"

Dear lord please don’t use an AI overview answer for food safety. If you made a bet with your friend and are using the AI overview to settle it, fine. But please please click on an actual result from a trusted source if you’re deciding what temperature to cook meat to

The problem is that SEO has made it hard to find trustworthy sites in the first place. The places I trust the most now for getting random information is Reddit and Wikipedia, which is absolutely ridiculous as they are terrible options.

But SEO slop machines have made it so hard to find the good websites without putting in more legwork than makes sense a lot of the time. Funnily enough, this makes AI look like a good option to cut through all the noise despite its hallucinations. That's obviously not acceptable when it comes to food safety concerns though.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#83

Post by landl0rd »

msgodel wrote: post #49
kozikow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads inside LLMs (e.g. pay $ to boost your product in LLM recommendation) is going to be a big thing. My guess is that Google/OpenAI are eyeing each other - whoever does this first. Why would that work? It's a proven business model. Example: I use LLMs for product research (e.g. which washing machine to buy). Retailer pays if link to their website is included in the results. Don't want to pay? Then redirect the user t…

People are already wary of hosted LLMs having poisoned training data. That might kill them altogether and push everyone to using eg Qwen3-coder.

No, a small group of highly tech-literate people are wary of this. Your personal bubble is wary of this. So is some of mine. "People" don't care and will use the packaged, corporate, convenient version with the well-known name.

People who are aware of that and care enough to change consumption habits are an inconsequential part of the market.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#85

Post by squigz »

mtkd wrote: post #50

Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"

I wonder how people have such awful experiences with (traditional) Google when I don't and really never have.

First result: https://www.porkcdn.com/sites/porkbeinspired/library/2014/06...

Second result: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#86

Post by mvdtnz »

deadbabe wrote: post #79
washadjeffmad wrote: post #30

The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed. Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need correct information from a truth source like o…

> The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed. Let’s not pretend that some websites aren’t straight up bullshit. There’s blogs spreading bullshit, wrong info, biased info, content marketing for some product etc. And lord knows comments are frequently wrong, just look around Hackernews. I’d bet that LLMs are actually wrong less often than typical search results, because they pull from far greater training…

When asking a question do you not see a difference between

1. Here's the answer (but it's misinformation) 2. Here are some websites that look like they might have the answer

?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#87

Post by landl0rd »

krupan wrote: post #70

I feel like the discussion here is missing the point. It doesn't matter if the AI overview is correct or not, it doesn't matter if you can turn it off or not. People are using it instead of visiting actual websites. Google has copied the entire World Wide Web into their LLM and now people not using the web anymore! We have bemoaned the fact that Facebook and Twitter replaced most of the web for most people, but now i…

Is there an appreciable difference between a company that controls what information is surfaced via pagerank and one that does so via LLM?

Remember the past scandals with google up/downranking various things? This isn't a new problem. Wrt how the average person gets information google doesn't really have more control because people aren't clicking through as much.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#88

Post by landl0rd »

achierius wrote: post #25
JKCalhoun wrote: post #24

Liberating me from "search clicks" is not a bad thing at all. I suspect many of us though don't even go to anyway but ask an LLM directly.

It's fundamentally self-destructive though. In time, the sites which rely on search clicks for revenue will essentially cease to be paid for their work, and in many cases will therefore stop publishing the high-quality material that you're looking for.

Most of the time when I find a good answer from search it's one of a few things:

- Hobbyist site

- Forum or UGC

- Academic/gov

- Quality news which is often paywalled

Most of that stuff doesn't depend on ad clicks. The things that do depend on ad clicks are usually infuriating slop. I refuse to scroll through three pages of BS to get to the information I want and I really don't care if the slop farmers die off.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#89

Post by landl0rd »

bugsMarathon88 wrote: post #37
thewebguyd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here? Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only continue to harm them in the long run, no? ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on re…

Total behavioral control through the augmentation of senses, emotions and all other sensibilities. Such political power is significantly more valuable than mere revenue.

Okay I think the question is still how they plan to convert this into cash, because political power can't buy food or pay your employees or be stored and quantified simply, which is why we invented money. Assuming this dystopian scenario is correct.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#90

Post by andrei_says_ »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #30

The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed. Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need correct information from a truth source like o…

Their goal has always been to be the gatekeeper.
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