Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 872 posts

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#501

Post by vidarh »

fl0id wrote: post #433
lelanthran wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’

The race to continue training and researching, however, is drive by competition that will fall away if competitors also can't raise more money to subsidise it.

At that point the market may consolidate and progress slow, but not all providers will disappear - there are enough good models that can be hosted and served profitably indefinitely.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#502

Post by fireflash38 »

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.

Good news! Now they are often AI drivel too. So you can get an AI summary of more AI crap.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#504

Post by rco8786 »

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 get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.

for now! and we should enjoy it while it lasts. Ad-driven AIs are coming, it is inevitable.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#505

Post by wonderwonder »

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…

Pretty accurate, the web is generally unpleasant at the moment especially using a search engine as your entry point. The first page of results are irrelevant paid ads.

My web experience has been reduced to a handful of bookmarks, X, and chatgpt or grok. Occasionally I’ll go looking for government sites to validate something I read on X. Everything else is noise

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#506

Post by washadjeffmad »

deadbabe wrote: post #79
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…

> The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed. Let’s not pretend that some websites aren’t straight up bullshit. There’s blogs spreading bullshit, wrong info, biased info, content marketing for some product etc. And lord knows comments are frequently wrong, just look around Hackernews. I’d bet that LLMs are actually wrong less often than typical search results, because they pull from far greater training…

>I’d bet that LLMs are actually wrong less often than typical search results, because they pull from far greater training data. “Wisdom of the crowds”.

Is that relevant when we already have official truth sources: our websites? That information is ours and subject to change at our sole discretion. Google doesn't get to decide who our extensions are assigned to, what our hours of operation are, or what our business services do.

Our initial impression of AI Overview was positive, as well, until this happened to us.

And bear in mind the timeline. We didn't know that this was happening, and even after we realized there was a trend, we didn't know why. We're in the middle of a softphone transition, so we initially blamed ourselves (and panicked a little when what we saw didn't reflect what we assumed was happening - why would people just suddenly start calling wrong numbers?).

After we began collecting responses from misdirected callers and got a nearly unanimous answer of "Google" (don't be proud of that), I called a meeting with our communications and marketing departments and web team to figure out how we'd log and investigate incidents so we could fix the sources. What they turned up was that the numbers had never been publicly published or associated with any of what Google AI was telling them. This wasn't our fault.

So now we're concerned that bad info is being amplified elsewhere on the web. We even considered pulling back the Google-advertised phone extensions so they forward either to a message that tells them Google AI was wrong and to visit our website, or admit defeat and just forward it where Google says it should go (subject to change at Google's pleasure, obviously). We can't do this for established public facing numbers, though, and disrupt business services.

What a stupid saga, but that's how it works when Google treats the world like its personal QA team. (OT, but bince we're all working for them by generating training data for their models and fixing their global scale products, anyone for Google-sponsored UBI?)

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#507

Post by gorbachev »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #394
benrutter wrote: post #373

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…

> 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…

It's not going to happen this way, because these days for you to get somewhere near the top of Google results requires you to be an established content publisher, basically anyone with enough followers.

Someone who publishes content because they love the subject matter would only reach enough of an audience to have an impact if they work on it, a lot, and most people wouldn't do that without some expectation of return on investment, so they'd follow the influencer / commercial publication playbook and end up in the same place as the established players in the space are already.

If you're satisfied of being on the 50th page on the Google results, then that's fine. Nobody will find you though.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#508

Post by esnard »

croes wrote: post #202
manmal wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT lists clickable sources in a lot of nontrivial queries. Those sites don’t even need to pay OpenAI for the traffic (yet). If you ask „what’s happening in the world today“, you might get 20 links. How is this worse, exactly?

How many people click the links? What happens to LLMs if people don’t provide training data anymore because nobody visits their sites?

Cloudflare publishes a "crawl-to-refer" ratio, which can be used to estimate the traffic from LLMs:

https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights#crawl-to-refer-rati...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#509

Post by ponys »

I've written a bit about this issue as well, coming from someone working at a company that partially relies on organic search results. It's been interesting (And slightly worrying) to see the shift and layoffs happening here already.

https://sasjakoning.com/blog/how-google-s-new-ai-overview-is...

I have to say that the comments here do offer a great alternative perspective as to how terrible the web has been to navigate before AI Overviews became a thing.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#510

Post by zb3 »

Huxley1 wrote: post #245

This situation makes sense since everyone wants quick answers, and AI summaries are really convenient. A lot of people just read the summary without clicking through to the original content. But this can be a real problem for creators who rely on traffic. Does anyone have ideas on how to balance both user needs and support for creators?

> But this can be a real problem for creators who rely on traffic.

Wait.. why would that creator be paid for the traffic if I'm not buying any shitty overpriced product advertised on these scammy ads, ever? Especially when I don't even see these thanks to ublock.

Post reply on HN