> ask Google for something and it responds with links to the best content
This hasn't been the case for more than a decade.
It's been seo crap from a long time.
No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
41–50 of 190 posts
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just made me imagine if Wikipedia had titles like "Is the Heliocentric model wrong?" or "The third planet of the Solar System has a generic name! Learn everything about it", and half of it behind a paywall. Or worse, if its content were distributed in short videos: "What to know what's that giant fire ball on the sky? Watch until the end!", with a like-and-subscribe animation covering the bottom 20% of the video…
10 shocking secrets about the solar system!
“the last one will turn your brain upside down”
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#43The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…
AI will kill the volunteers run websites and blogs faster then it will kill corporate ones. It will kill free information first. It will basically finish the process google search engine started when it started to require seo to find stuff. People will have less or no motivation to create them, because well, why would they? It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. And more importantly, people won't be findi…
I doubt search engines are primarily what helped most blogs and sites grow. It's forums/word of mouth/social media
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#44"Businesses produced and maintained quality content, Google rewarded the businesses with visitors while diverting some to their ads" that's idealistic, I am happy to see Google algorithm losing its monopoly, even if AI seach ends up being a bubble. When search engines will stop reducing website sorting to some stupid algorithm picked because of scalability while neglecting quality, I will start pity them. By the way this is, again, a low quality short opinion article about AI going to HN front page while not deserving it, it's really an annoying trend.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#45The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…
Often, that off-topic content was garbage anyway. Not really deep or helpful or expert in any way. Not always, but often.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#46I'm curious what the overlap is between people who use AI tools and people who use ad blockers. Personally, I've been a leech on the ad-funded web my entire adult life; I always block ads. I haven't adopted AI tools. They only seem to work well for content that's readily discoverable anyway, otherwise the risk of hallucination has been far too high in my testing. If I care about the answer, why risk it?
I believe there's strong overlap between technically minded people and ad blockers. Maybe the challenge is that AI search appeals to less technically-minded people, who would have otherwise been exposed to ads?
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#47I can't bring myself to "Google" anything anymore. Every single time I open up google and try searching for the information... I get frustrated being forced so do the agentic work and sift through the crap... and I fall back on ChatGPT or Gemini.
Interesting. When I Google I always get the AI summary which does it for me.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#48If AI kills the ad-funded business model of the internet, it will be one of the few good outcomes from AI. Good riddance.
Is this is a joke? Of course it's not going to kill ad-funded anything, ads will still be there 100% in some form, except now all the ad money will go to 1-2 companies instead of the whole world of web publishers. Very smart cheering that on!
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#49The previous model isn’t sustainable either. It leads to enshittification. Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.
> Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality. There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.
What I notice here in Brazil is that most local news channels get the bulk of their money from TV ads. They all have a badly done website-blog with news that are very superficial (like 2 paragraphs) just to fill them with ads up and down and try to get something from it.
The big channels nowadays usually have 2 websites: one that is free and full of ads and pop-ups with very superficial news (seemingly written by interns) and one with actual quality analysis, journalism etc. that allow you access of 3 articles a month before you need to pay or something of that sorts.
I think the “serving ads” business hasn’t worked for a while.
Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search
#50The content is now created in private chats with AI, probably a trillion tokens per day flow between humans and LLMs. When new AI models are made they will incorporate some experience from past usage. This dataset might be the most valuable source for training AI and solving our tasks. So in case humans decide to abandon publishing, there is a new experience flywheel spinning up.
I assume that AI chat is a lot of questions being asked by people unfamiliar with the subject matter. Would that training dataset have any information from experts?