AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks • Hacker News Board

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#261

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

sgentle wrote: post #150

Nursie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find it amazing that the world's largest search engine, which so many use as an oracle, is so happy to put wrong information at the top of its page. My examples recently - - Looking up a hint for the casino room in the game "Blue Prince", the AI summary gave me details of the card games on offer at the "Blue Prince Casino" in the next suburb over. There is no casino there. - Looking up workers rights during a…

It's kinda old news now but I still love searching for made-up idioms. > "You can't get boiled rice from a clown" is a phrase that plays on expectations and the absurdity of a situation. > The phrase "never stack rocks with Elvis" is a playful way of expressing skepticism about the act of stacking rocks in natural environments. > The saying "two dogs can't build an ocean" is a colloquial and humorous way of expressin…

People get to make up idioms and AI's don't?

They're just playing games. Of course that violates the 'never play games with an AI' rule, which is a playful way of expressing that AIs will drag you down to their level and then beat you over the head with incompetence.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#262

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:03 AM UTC

andrei_says_ wrote: post #90

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.

I don't think that was true for Google in the first year. But after that it rapidly became their goal.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#263

Post by ssss11 » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:03 AM UTC

littlecranky67 wrote: post #233

Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking * There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. U…

And don’t try to exit or you’ll get another pop up “why are you leaving? Please don’t go”

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#264

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:06 AM UTC

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.

All you need is good information and AI tools are giving you information without you knowing whether or not it is any good. You may think it is good, but unless you know more about the answer to your query than what you needed to create it you won't be able to tell the difference. If you did then you would not have been asking in the first place. Effectively you are now believing in an oracle.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#265

Post by maerch » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:06 AM UTC

badc0ffee wrote: post #241

maerch wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, in Germany, you can get raw pork with raw onions on a bread roll at just about every other bakery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett When I searched for the safe temperature for pork (in German), I found this as the first link (Kagi search engine) > Ideally, pork should taste pink, with a core temperature between 58 and 59 degrees Celsius. You can determine the exact temperature using a meat thermometer…

Should "Taste pink", you say

It’s just the ChatGPT translation, and it’s a literal one. That said, I’ve never heard that phrase in German either.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#266

Post by simianwords » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:06 AM UTC

toenail wrote: post #212

ripped_britches wrote: post #203

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

Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't understand that their life depends on progress that was made in the past.

This is because they have entrenched themselves in a comfortable position that they don’t want to give up. Most won’t admit this to be the actual reason.

Think about it: you are a normal hands on self thought software developer. You grew up tinkering with Linux and a bit of hardware. You realise there’s good money to be made in a software career. You do it for 20-30 years; mostly the same stuff over and over again. Some Linux, c#, networking. Your life and hobby revolves around these technologies. And most importantly you have a comfortable and stable income that entrenches your class and status. Anything that can disrupt this state is obviously not desireable. Never mind that disrupting others careers is why you have a career in the first place.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#267

Post by teddyh » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:11 AM UTC

croes wrote: post #199

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.

Only if those “good sites” were dependent on advertisements for survival.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#268

Post by kimi » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:13 AM UTC

throwaway81523 wrote: post #133

Of course slow, shitty web sites also cause a massive drop in clicks, as soon as an alternative to clicking emerges. It's just like on HN, if I see an interesting title and want to know what the article is about, I can wince and click the article link, but it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer the info I want from the comments. That difference is almost entirely from the crappy overdesig…

I do the same thing - Instead of going first to an unknown site that might (will?) be ad-infested and possibly AI generated, so that a phrase becomes a 1000-word article, I read the comments on HN, decide if it's interesting enough to take the risk, and then click. If it's Medium or similar, I won't click.

Hey, coming out feels good - I thought I was the only one.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#269

Post by stereolambda » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:17 AM UTC

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)"

Honestly the SEO talk sounds like reflexive coping in this discourse. I get that WWW has cheapened quality, but we now have the tech that could defeat most of the SEO and other trash tactics on the search engine side. Text analysis as a task is cracked open. Google and such could detect dark patterns with LLMs, or even just deep learning. This would probably be more reliable than answering factual queries.

The problem is there is no money and fame in using it that way, or at least so people think in the current moment. But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.

Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#270

Post by verzali » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:18 AM UTC

My site never got much traffic from Google and I never wasted time on SEO. So I find it hard to care about losing clicks I didn't have.

But I do find it concerning that Google is effectively stealing the time I spend on research and not offering proper credit. I'm always careful to credit people and provide extensive links to the work of others on my site. But here Google and others are simply stealing that work, getting it wrong, and then claiming they did all the effort.