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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

#61

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

mtkd wrote: post #50

Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"

Google's search rankings are also the thing driving those ridiculous articles to the top, which is the only reason so many of them get written...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#62

Post by hansvm »

mtkd wrote: post #50

Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"

As of a couple weeks ago it had a variety of unsafe food recommendations regarding sous vide, e.g. suggesting 129F for 4+ hours for venison backstrap. That works great some of the time but has a very real risk of bacterial infiltration (133F being similar in texture and much safer, or 2hr being a safer cook time if you want to stick to 129F).

Trust it if you want I guess. Be cautious though.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#63

Post by sgentle »

mtkd wrote: post #50

Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"

"full moon time NY"

> The next full moon in New York will be on August 9th, 2025, at 3:55 a.m.

"full moon time LA"

> The next full moon in Los Angeles will be on August 9, 2025, at 3:55 AM PDT.

I mean, it certainly gives an immediate answer...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#64

Post by ljlolel »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #61
mtkd wrote: post #50

Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"

Google's search rankings are also the thing driving those ridiculous articles to the top, which is the only reason so many of them get written...

And also why they incentivized all this human written training data that will no longer be incentivized

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#65

Post by ncallaway »

mtkd wrote: post #50

Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"

Dear lord please don’t use an AI overview answer for food safety.

If you made a bet with your friend and are using the AI overview to settle it, fine. But please please click on an actual result from a trusted source if you’re deciding what temperature to cook meat to

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#66

Post by privatelypublic »

x0x0 wrote: post #13
bgwalter wrote: post #4

You can apparently disable these annoying and useless "AI" overviews by cursing in the query: https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...

appending a -"fuck google #{insert slur of choice here}" to my search results has improved them. Then I wonder why I do this to myself and ponder going back to kagi.

Jesus dude. Just use the udm options instead of practicing slurs.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#67

Post by esafak »

brianwawok wrote: post #35
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…

Fun. I have people asking ChatGPT support question about my SaaS app, getting made up answers, and then cancelling because we can’t do something that we can. Can’t make this crap up. How do I teach Chat GPT every feature of a random SaaS app?

Write documentation and don't block crawlers.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#68

Post by krupan »

wat10000 wrote: post #57
ImaCake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, it includes a link to the USDA reference so you can verify it yourself. I have switched back to google because of how useful I find the RAG overviews.

The link is the only useful part, since you can’t trust the summary. Maybe they could just show the links that match your query and skip the overview. Sounds like a billion-dollar startup idea, wonder why nobody’s done it.

This should be the top comment! Thank you for posting it because I'm starting to worry that I'm the only one who realizes how ridiculous this all is.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#69

Post by abtinf »

slau wrote: post #20
ghushn3 wrote: post #14

I subscribe to Kagi. It's been worth it to have no ads and the ability to uprank/downrank sites. And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.

You can opt-in to get an LLM response by phrasing your queries as a question. Searching for “who is Roger rabbit” gives me Wikipedia, IMDb and film site as results. Searching for “who is Roger rabbit?” gives me a “quick answer” LLM-generated response: “Roger Rabbit is a fictional animated anthropomorphic rabbit who first appeared in Gary K. Wolf's 1981 novel…” followed by a different set of results. It seems the resu…

You don’t have to phrase it as a question; just append a ?, which is an operator telling it you want a generated answer.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#70

Post by krupan »

I feel like the discussion here is missing the point. It doesn't matter if the AI overview is correct or not, it doesn't matter if you can turn it off or not. People are using it instead of visiting actual websites. Google has copied the entire World Wide Web into their LLM and now people not using the web anymore! We have bemoaned the fact that Facebook and Twitter replaced most of the web for most people, but now it's not even those, it's a single LLM owned and controlled by a single corporation.
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