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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

#611

Post by kylebenzle »

brokencode wrote: post #589
Nicook wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its encrapification is real. It has been slow though, mostly affecting niche interests and smaller creators. And the ad experience has definitely gotten worse, but adblockers help. Try using youtube without and adblocker.

I pay for the subscription and don’t see any ads. It comes with YouTube Music. It’s great.

In the old days people would pay to host video content and now people pay Google to watch other people's hosted video content. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing. I'm still waiting for the first company to start selling bottled air next!

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#612

Post by jaydenmilne »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #454
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to “create content” or “gain followers” or show ads. Why would you do that if you thought it was going to be hoovered up by some giant corporation and spat out again for $20 a month with no attribution.

"Writing is its own reward"

― Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing

"… and now its Sam Altman’s reward too!"

― Jayden Milne (2025). https://jayd.ml/about/

I think both are true.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#613

Post by [deleted] »

DanielKehoe wrote: post #532

I'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…

[deleted]

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#615

Post by wmeredith »

mvieira38 wrote: post #541

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...

This is not the future. It's already a thing. The content_marketing subreddit has been talking about this for months: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/

There isn't a clever new acronym for it yet, but I'm sure it's coming. Right now people are just calling it LLM SEO. I assume the discipline will someday be shortened to AIO or similar.

Here's a relevant post from 22 days ago with some good methodology and results: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1lq04yd/...

Here's one from 2 months ago with methodology of findings and action items for executing LLM SEO: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1kzafm9/...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#616

Post by streptomycin »

pembrook wrote: post #512
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…

Yes, this is the experience on virtually every content website that used to be tolerable or even good. But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create. Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take…

Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results.

Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#617

Post by Karawebnetwork »

guluarte wrote: post #614

I think this will be the end of Google as a search engine. I don't see how website owners don't start charging bots for scraping their content.

See: "Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access"

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#618

Post by troyvit »

pcdoodle wrote: post #570
nicbou wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is built by the same companies that built the last generation of hostile technology, and they're currently offering it at a loss. Once they have encrusted themselves in our everyday lives and killed the independent web for good, you can bet they will recoup on their investment.

Is there another edge to this sword? Can we fight back with LLMs that ignore sources with all the tracking / SEO and other garbage? I'd love to tell my local LLM that "I hate pintrest" for instance and it just goes "okay, pintrest shields are up".

Seconding the Kagi thing. You don't even need an LLM. If you search something like the term 'camping gear' search results pop up right away, no LLM response. However by each site's link is a little shield warning you about how many trackers and ads there will be on the page. Next to that is a lil kebob menu that lets you either boost the site or remove it from your search. That's also where their AI functionality is hidden. You can get a page summary or ask questions about that page.

If you'd rather the quick AI-summaries a la google you can put a question mark at the end of your search term. 'lawsuits regarding ferrets?'

And yeah as the sibling commenter pointed out, you can go into Kagi's preferences and explicitly rule out pinterest (or whatever site you want) from any of your searches for ever.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#619

Post by thoroughburro »

fhd2 wrote: post #434
hereonout2 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And then the part where you have to create an account to read past the SEO filler :( It's so sad, cause it drags down good pages. I recently did a lot of research for camping and outdoor gear, and of course I started the journey from Google. But a few sites kept popping up, I really liked their reviews and the quality of the items I got based on that, so I started just going directly to them for comparisons and revie…

Outdoor Gear Lab is great, it’s true.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#620

Post by tim333 »

kylebenzle wrote: post #611
brokencode wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for the subscription and don’t see any ads. It comes with YouTube Music. It’s great.

In the old days people would pay to host video content and now people pay Google to watch other people's hosted video content. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing. I'm still waiting for the first company to start selling bottled air next!

I get a lot of value from youtube - hours of entertainment. Also I don't pay and use an ad blocker which is maybe a bit unfair but thanks to the people who do pay.
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