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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

#371

Post by jajko »

poemxo wrote: post #179
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, but it's not because of format. To me, blogs and other articles feel like sales pitches, whereas comments are full of raw emotion and seem more honest. I end up seeking out discussions over buttoned up long-form articles. This is not strictly logical but I have a feeling I'm not alone.

No its pretty logical, I often get more info in comments than in article, plus many angles on topic. I only actually read the most interesting articles, often heading right into comments.

Often the title sort of explains the whole topic (ie lack of parking in NY, or astronomers found the biggest quasar yet), then folks chirp in with their experiences and insight which are sometimes pretty wild.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#372

Post by nightfly »

tyfon wrote: post #324
nightfly wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent It was with the best of intentions but cookie banners have done more to hurt web browsing than anything else in the last decade

The banner is not the problem, the predatory tracking by webpages are. You can make a webpage without it no problem, my home page does not have it.

The banners themselves are ugly and can fill almost half the screen

Even website makers who don't use predatory tracking end up including them as a CYA tactic

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#373

Post by benrutter »

A 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 monetise it however I wanted. This has mostly led to what we have today, some high quality content, lots of low quality content, mostly monetised through user hostile ads.

Previously, if I wanted to take a recipe from "strawberry-recipes.cool" and published it on my own website with a better user experience, that wouldn't have been allowed because of copyright rules. I still can't do that, but Google can if it's done through the mechanism of AI summaries.

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. The best one is that we find some alternative, third way, for creators to monotise content while maintaining discoverability.

I'm not sure what will happen, and I'm not denying the usefulness of AI summaries, but it feels easy to miss that, at their core, they're a fundamental reworking of the current economics of the internet.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#374

Post by ricardobeat »

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…

> pair quality content with ads, make money

Huh, the exact opposite happened. Create as much filler content as possible, optimized for SEO, generate thousands of variants to capture search traffic, cover as much of the screen as possible with ads, use tricks to increase page view count, and then make money.

Publishers of quality content have moved to subscriptions, which is a different kind of trouble.

> only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created

We have already been here for a while and it can hardly get any worse.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#375

Post by ileonichwiesz »

moontear wrote: post #365
generic92034 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition or not, dark patterns or not - sooner or later LLMs will need to earn money for their corporations.

But they do? Paid subscriptions for Gemini, ChatGPT and Copilot are a thing. If Google throws in a free AI summary in their search it only helps promoting Gemini in the long run.

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.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#376

Post by federiconafria »

seszett wrote: post #302
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK we've got amazing National Health Service informational websites[1], and regional variations of those [2]. For some issues, you might get different advice in the Scottish one than the UK-wide one. So, if you've gone into labour somewhere in the remote Highlands and Islands, you'll get different advice than if you lived in Central London, where there's a delivery room within a 30 minute drive. Google's AI ov…

> ignores the high-quality NHS care delivery websites, and presents you with stuff from US sites Weird because although I dislike what Google Search has become as much as any other HNer, one thing that mostly does work well is localised content. Since I live in a small country next to a big country that speaks the same language, it's quite noticeable to me that Google goes to great lengths to find the actually releva…

The problem is when your IP is temporarily wrong or you are just traveling and suddenly you can't find anything...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#377

Post by azangru »

jdietrich wrote: post #315
tmountain wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is following the drug dealer model. “The first dose is free!” Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be coming for sure.

It's a market where nobody has a particularly deep moat and most players are charging money for a service. Open weight models aren't too far behind proprietary models, particularly for mundane queries. The cost of inference is plummeting and it's already possible to run very good models at pennies per megatoken. I think it's unreasonably pessimistic to assume that dark patterns are an inevitability.

> and most players are charging money for a service

The aricle talks about AI overviews. As exemplified by the AI summary at the top of Google search results page. That thing is free.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#378

Post by Havoc »

dirkc wrote: post #329

At 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…

> Google will need to be accountable

Hell will freeze over first

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#379

Post by eitland »

cudder wrote: post #356
dspillett wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only".* I never use those. I suspect that in many cases if there are "legitimate interest" options¹ those will remain opted-in. ---- [1] which I read as "we see your preference not to be stalked online, but fuck you and your silly little preferences we want to anyway"

That is such a silly stupid thing in the GDPR consent. - "Please don't track me." - "But what if we realllly want to?" A normal response to that would be an even more resounding FCK NO, but somehow the EU came to the completely opposite conclusion.

Please show me where GDPR says this.

I think you'll find that GDPR says the opposite and the only reason this continues to happen is because authorities don't have enough resources to go after every at the same time and also because European authorities have a hard time against US companies.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#380

Post by jr000 »

toofy wrote: post #152
esafak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write documentation and don't block crawlers.

> … don't block crawlers. this rhymes a lot with gangsterism. if you don’t pay our protection fee it would be a shame if your building caught on fire.

How else do you expect them to get the information from your site if you block them from accessing it?
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