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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

#431

Post by toenail »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #231
toenail wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That does not imply that future progress is a good thing, nor does it imply that future progress will even be useful to the majority. It boggles my mind how some people make the logical inference that "all progress is good" based on "some past progress was useful".

Do you think that having fast, distraction-free access to relevant information is not useful?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#433

Post by fl0id »

lelanthran wrote: post #399
ileonichwiesz wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up the numbers. OpenAI actually loses money on every paid subscription, and they’re burning through billions of dollars every year. Even if you convince a fraction of the users to pay for it, it’s still not a sustainable model.

I actually wondered about this myself, so I asked Gemini with a long back and forth conversation. The takeaway from Gemini is that subscriptions do lose money on some subscribers, but it is expected that not all subscribers use up their full quota each month. This is true even for non-AI subscriptions since the beginning of the subscription model (i.e. magazines, gamepass, etc). The other surprising (to me, anyway) t…

That’s just a general explainer of subscription models. As of right now VC money is necessary for just existing. And they can never stop training or researching. They also constantly have to buy new gpus unless there’s at some point a plateau of ‘good enough’

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#434

Post by fhd2 »

hereonout2 wrote: post #347
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…

You forgot the part about when you actually get to the content, there's usually about 5 paragraphs of SEO filler text before it actually gets onto answering the topic of the post.

And then the part where you have to create an account to read past the SEO filler :(

It's so sad, cause it drags down good pages. I recently did a lot of research for camping and outdoor gear, and of course I started the journey from Google. But a few sites kept popping up, I really liked their reviews and the quality of the items I got based on that, so I started just going directly to them for comparisons and reviews. This is how it's supposed to work, IMHO.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#435

Post by 3036e4 »

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…

NoScript removes almost all of that, at the insignificant cost of sometimes having to add some (usually temporary) exceptions to run scripts from a few domains.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#436

Post by hualapais »

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…

I have been leaning more and more on Marginalia Search to avoid the type of webpages you are describing. The filters centered on page technologies seem to weed out much that is wrong with the modern style-over-substance web, IMHO.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#437

Post by mschuster91 »

3036e4 wrote: post #435
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…

NoScript removes almost all of that, at the insignificant cost of sometimes having to add some (usually temporary) exceptions to run scripts from a few domains.

You don't have NoScript or AdBlock on any default browser on any relevant mobile platform.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#438

Post by IgorPartola »

3036e4 wrote: post #435
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…

NoScript removes almost all of that, at the insignificant cost of sometimes having to add some (usually temporary) exceptions to run scripts from a few domains.

Clay tablets and library books have no ads either. NoScript is not the solution to the web being full of AI-generated SEO crap. It’s a bandaid over the real problem.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#439

Post by graemep »

ethbr1 wrote: post #334
weinzierl wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is subtly different from what is in the article. The article is about Google (and other traditional search engines) snatching away clicks from web site owners. What you describe is AI tools (for lack of a better word[1]) snatching away traffic from the ruling gatekeepers of the web. I think the latter is a much bigger shift and might well be the end of Google. By extension it will be the end of SEO…

> everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world In this model, only monetizable content will be generated though. As much as we abhor what advertising has done to the web, at least it’s independent of content: pair quality content with ads, make money. In the brave new AI search world, only content which itself is directly monetiz…

> In the brave new AI search world, only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created

Or content that is not meant to make money (e.g. opinion pieces arguing for a cause), or is very specific to products that make money (e.g. documentation, manuals), or is funded by governments or non-profits for the public good.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#440

Post by ports543u »

mschuster91 wrote: post #437
3036e4 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NoScript removes almost all of that, at the insignificant cost of sometimes having to add some (usually temporary) exceptions to run scripts from a few domains.

You don't have NoScript or AdBlock on any default browser on any relevant mobile platform.

You have adblock on firefox mobile or in browsers like Cromite (fork of Bromite, based on Chromium).
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