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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

#191

Post by greazy »

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 googled (Australia) "what temp is pork safe at?", top three hits:

1. https://www.foodsafety.asn.au/australians-clueless-about-saf... 2. https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/safe-minimum-i... 3. https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/

All three were highly informative, well cited sources from reputable websites.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#192

Post by henry2023 »

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.

By high quality material do you mean the 15 ads per page, ultra SEO optimized, content length extended posts that will give you a mediocre carbonara recipe?

Ad web has never incentivized quality and never will.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#193

Post by pacifika »

kozikow wrote: post #19
oezi wrote: post #6

The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their cash cow ad business.

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…

Who doesn’t want to associate their product with unreliability and incorrect information? Think about that reputational damage.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#194

Post by omnicognate »

sothatsit wrote: post #82
ncallaway wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I do that search on Google right now, the top result is the National Pork Board (pork.org): ad-free, pop-up free, waffle-free and with the correct answer in large font at the top of the page. It's in F, but I always stick " C" at the end of temperature queries. In this case that makes the top result foodsafety.gov which is equally if not more authoritative, also ad-, waffle-, and popup- free and with with the answer immediately visible.

Meanwhile the AI overview routinely gives me completely wrong information. There's zero chance I'm going to trust it when a wrong answer can mean I give my family food poisoning.

I agree that there is a gigaton of crap out there, but the quality information sources are still there too. Google's job is to list those at the top and it actually has done so this time, although I'll acknowledge it doesn't always and I've taken to using Kagi in preference for this reason. A crappy AI preview that can't be relied on for anything isn't an acceptable substitute.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#195

Post by watwut »

throwaway992673 wrote: post #182
cornholio wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty apt analogy: why settle for the original article when you can read the outrage infused summary of an opinionated troll in a hurry? It has little to do with overdesign or load times.

The troll gives me the main idea without having to find five tiny x's on the screen like some sadistic minigame then paywall me. I'll take the troll.

They dont. Most commenters react to the title and preexistent opinions. Rhey frequently misinterpret the article too - misconstructing arguments they dont like and such.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#197

Post by wiseowise »

greazy wrote: post #191
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 googled (Australia) "what temp is pork safe at?", top three hits: 1. https://www.foodsafety.asn.au/australians-clueless-about-saf... 2. https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/safe-minimum-i... 3. https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/ All three were highly informative, well cited sources from reputable websites.

Only your second link provides good information in a convenient format (both F and C), first and third are useless.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#198

Post by josteink »

I'm going to call good old "supply & demand" at this.

There was a demand for information, and people made websites to make that information easily accessible. The market was working.

Then cheap/free hosting combined with Google Ads came along incentivized the market to SPAM the internet with SEO-optimized websites which makes that information just as inaccessible as the market could possibly tolerate. Basically the market converged on enshittification, rather than excellence.

The result of that was that users were forced to search, the first SEO spam, then the second, then the third and maybe somewhere along the line they found what they were really looking for, from a real website. The market just barely supplied what there was a demand for.

But thanks to AI and LLMs, the power has now shifted back to the users, and we can sidestep all the Google Ads SEO SPAM enshittification nonsense. If this is done via ChatGpt, DDG Chat or Google AI overviews, I don't really care.

Once again we have gained easy access to information without any ill-incentivized middle men making the process cumbersome. This is absolutely a good thing. If this means the death of Google Ads funded content farms, I'm all for it.

The niche sites which contains real information was never funded or driven by Google Ads in the first place, so hopefully they won't buckle under during this minor AI apocalypse.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#199

Post by croes »

wiseowise wrote: post #196

And thank God! It does. I’m done dealing with bazillion shitty websites with bad, slow, performance, bad ui and dark patterns. All I need is an information in a convenient format and that is what AI tools provide to me.

But that also kills the good sites.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#200

Post by croes »

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)"

Don’t forget to add glue and rocks
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