Maybe the future is "LLMO" instead of SEO, where pages are optimized to be more easily readable and navigable by LLMs and agents. Ironically this would make them better IMO, less Javascript bloat, faster load times, no cookies or tracking...
AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
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Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#542Here 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.
Big Mama's Best Brownie Recipe.
Let's start at the beginning. I was born in 1956 in Chicago. My mother was a cruel drunk and the only thing my father hated more than his work was his family.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#543My Google feed (the one that shows up on some Android phones) is 90% articles that could be answered in the headline: "This one ingredient improves the taste of your potato salad." Of course you have to click through and read, read, read till you find it.
It's why things like /r/savedyouaclick exist.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#544I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon), and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing…
The pattern repeats itself. Come, use our services, it's free, it will be good for you. Users elevate the service to a monopoly. And then the behemoth thinks that the users - who gave their blood so the behemoth could grow - are now more like a nuisance and kills those that are the most vulnerable.
Every year they put the threshold higher and it results in more and more people getting burned. Of course the big, established brands are protected.
So they don't want the average joe's opinion. And they don't want to funnel money to you, now that you have fulfilled your purpose.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#545Earlier 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…
Why do you think Gemini is the authority on the internal costs of AI providers and their profit margins?
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#546Of 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…
YC idea pitch: HN Commenters as AI Summarizer Simulator as a Service
I will need $100M in seed funding.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#547A lot of the comments here are along the lines of "websites are often hostile, and AI summaries are a better user experience" which I agree with for most cases. I think the main thing to be worried about is that this model is undermining the fundamental economic model the internet's currently based on. If I create content like recipes, journalism etc, previously I had exclusive rights to my created content and could…
> I think the main thing to be worried about is that this model is undermining the fundamental economic model the internet's currently based on. This would be lovely. > I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing content on the web altogether. The most likely one is that search/summary engines eat up money that previously came from content creators. More than likely, people return to publishing con…
Being passionate about hats is one thing, but being passionate about sharing something you care about with others is the real driver for publishing. As LLMs degrade web discoverability through search (summaries+slop results), there's no incentive for the latter people to continue publishing on the open web or even the bot-infested closed gardens.
The web is on a trajectory where a local dyi zine will reach as many readers as an open website. It might even be cheaper than paying for a domain+hosting once that industry contracts and hosting plans aren't robust enough to keep up with requests from vibe-coded scrapers.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a library I use with extensive documentation- every method, parameter, event, configuration option conceivable is documented. Every so often I get lost in the docs trying to do something that actually isn't supported (the library has some glaring oversights) and I'll search on Google to see if anyone else came up with a similar problem and solution on a forum or something. Instead of telling me "that isn't su…
I mean... Yeah I've had ChatGPT tell me you can't do things with Make that you totally can. They aren't perfect. What do you expect Google to do about it?
Don't ship fundamentally broken products would be step one for me. Sadly, there's a lot of people who are really excited about things that only occasionally work.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#549At some stage Google will need to be accountable for answers they are hosting on their own site. The argument of "we're only indexing info on other sites" changes when you are building a tool to generate content and hosting that content on your own domain. I'm guilty of not clicking when I'm satisfied with the AI answer. I know it can be wrong. I've seen it be wrong multiple times. But it's right at the top and tells…
>But it's right at the top and tells me what I suspected when I did the search. The way they position the AI overview is right in your face.
Which also introduces the insidious possibility that AI summaries will be designed to confirm biases. People already use AI chat logs to prove stuff, which is insane, but it works on some folks.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#550Why 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.
You think every new technology is inherently a good thing and good for society?