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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

#201

Post by Jean-Papoulos »

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)"

Incredible, you are the problem. Didn't think I'd see such an idiotic answer on HN, please for the love of god do not use AI to know what is safe to eat.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#202

Post by croes »

manmal wrote: post #186
achierius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT lists clickable sources in a lot of nontrivial queries. Those sites don’t even need to pay OpenAI for the traffic (yet). If you ask „what’s happening in the world today“, you might get 20 links. How is this worse, exactly?

How many people click the links? What happens to LLMs if people don’t provide training data anymore because nobody visits their sites?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#203

Post by ripped_britches »

Why is this being framed as a problem? People are obviously happier with the new feature, duh

Of course they need to make the AI overviews suck less, but saying it’s unfair to sites is crazy talk because your site now just generates less value than an AI response if that’s what stopped you from going

If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#204

Post by josteink »

oezi wrote: post #6

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

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

This is not for Google to decide.

The users have spoken clearly that (when given an option) they will not tolerate or succumb to the SPAM of shitty SEO-optimized content-farms which has been plaguing the internet for the last decade.

If Google don't provide meaningful results in their search page, people will use ChatGPT or something else to sidestep the SEO SPAM issue all together.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#205

Post by Scarblac »

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…

But when my site is wrong about me, it's my fault and I can fix it if I care.

If Google shows bullshit about me on the top of its search, I'm helpless.

(for me read any company, person, etc)

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#206

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#207

Post by Scarblac »

what wrote: post #141
mvdtnz wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Isn’t 1 really “here’s a summary of what the websites from 2 say”?

No, enough examples in this thread of the AI advice being contradictory to the correct sites listed below.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#208

Post by croes »

scarface_74 wrote: post #134
achierius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sites rely on ad impressions for revenue. I block ads anyway so either way they aren’t getting money from me. And if ad supported content ceases to exist, nothing of value will have been lost. I’m not morally opposed to advertising, I find ad supported content not worth reading especially on mobile.

So you believe in free lunch.

If the ad sites die, the AI crawlers will rise the hosting costs of all others sites buy putting more traffic on them.

So either they start adding ads too or the sites die also

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#210

Post by Therenas »

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.

Okay, but when those sites go out of business, where does the AI get its information from? This is obviously not sustainable.
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