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

711–720 of 872 posts

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#711

Post by AlecSchueler »

languid-photic wrote: post #559
AlecSchueler wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In theory, an AI should be able to fetch the llms.txt for every library and have an actual authoritative source of documentation for the given library. But isn't the entire selling point of the LLM than you can communicate with it in natural language and it can learn your API by reading the human docs?

Yes, but I think part of the reason for llms.txt is optimize context. eg beyond content, the human docs often have styling markup which wastes tokens.

Hmm, sounds like LLMs.txt might be nicer for humans to read all well.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#712

Post by zahlman »

pasc1878 wrote: post #290
refactor_master wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't take long to find SEO slop trying to sell you something: When our grandmothers and grandfathers were growing up, there was a real threat to their health that we don’t face anymore. No, I’m not talking about the lack of antibiotics, nor the scarcity of nutritious food. It was trichinosis, a parasitic disease that used to be caught from undercooked pork. The legitimate worry of trichinosis led their mothers…

The link quoted does not have that text so what are you on about? However that site gives the temperature for Pork as 71C which is not what USDA says but is correct. So using the USDA recommendation does have a risk according to at least Canada and UK

> but is correct

That's the thing, though — there isn't an objective standard here; it's mediated both by the local context (how good are the local trich inspections, etc.) and risk tolerance vs. cultural expectations for how the meat should taste. The Canadian and US governments currently disagree; so it goes.

Everything "has a risk". Taste and smell are not reliable indicators of bacterial contamination, and properly cooking meat won't eliminate dangerous toxins left behind by prior contamination if the meat was improperly stored before cooking.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#713

Post by zahlman »

stereolambda wrote: post #269
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)"

Honestly the SEO talk sounds like reflexive coping in this discourse. I get that WWW has cheapened quality, but we now have the tech that could defeat most of the SEO and other trash tactics on the search engine side. Text analysis as a task is cracked open. Google and such could detect dark patterns with LLMs, or even just deep learning. This would probably be more reliable than answering factual queries. The proble…

> But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.

We could.

But it will absolutely not happen unless and until it can be more profitable than Google's current model.

What's your plan?

> Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.

Well, yes. That's the problem. Why rely on the same random liars as taste-makers?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#714

Post by wat10000 »

pasc1878 wrote: post #295
wat10000 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only useful if you can trust it, and you very much cannot. I know you can’t necessarily trust anything online, but when the first hit is from the National Pork Board, I’m confident the answer is good.

But for the OP it is not as it does not give a temperature in their preferred units and probably USDA gives the wrong temperature in their locality.

The only advantage is the automatic unit conversion, and that introduces a second point where the summary can get it wrong. If the source gives an incorrect answer then the AI summary is just going to repeat it, if you’re lucky.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#715

Post by claudiulodro »

streptomycin wrote: post #616
pembrook wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Before header bidding, publishers sold ad space through a “waterfall” method, offering the space to one ad exchange at a time, typically prioritizing whichever had previously offered the highest prices. But Google made it so that its AdX got “first look” access through DFP by calling it to submit a real-time bid before other exchanges got the chance to take part in an auction. That meant AdX could buy up any inventory it wanted as long as it met the publisher’s floor price, then pass the less desirable space to other exchanges, according to the DOJ.

[...]

> But Google moved quickly to reestablish AdX’s power. It created a competitor to header bidding called “Open Bidding,” which let Google take an extra cut of revenue. And under the adoption of header bidding, Google’s AdX ultimately got a “last look” advantage when publishers chose to feed the winning header bid into their publisher ad server — which most often was Google’s DFP. That’s because AdX’s advertiser buyers would then have the option to bid as little as a penny more than the winning header bid to secure the most attractive ad space.[0]

Google's header bidding-related shenanigans were a big part of the antitrust case against them, and they were found to be "monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets"[1], so I wouldn't say that it is mostly not controlled by Google.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/24/24253293/google-ad-tech-a... [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-l...

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#716

Post by zahlman »

ripped_britches wrote: post #203

Why is this being framed as a problem? People are obviously happier with the new feature, duh Of course they need to make the AI overviews suck less, but saying it’s unfair to sites is crazy talk because your site now just generates less value than an AI response if that’s what stopped you from going If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site

> If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site

No, you won't. Because how will you know that my site exists?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#717

Post by LearnYouALisp »

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…

On a smaller phone I often can't even see the button and it won't let me zoom out/scroll to get to it

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#718

Post by radley »

ceejayoz wrote: post #657
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.

None of your videos have in-video ads? "This segment is sponsored by NordVPN!" style stuff?

There's another plug-in called SponsorBlock that will skip over most of those.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#720

Post by radley »

tartoran wrote: post #643
marcellus23 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an adblocker certainly won't help smaller creators and niche interests. If you don't want ads but want to support creators, pay for Premium.

I have a question. How much do small creators get for views from Premium users? Say they get a few thousand views per video, would they get anything from Premium users?

Probably not much for a few thousand. My understanding is that it requires continually producing videos that attract 100k+ viewers. It doesn't pay a lot, but it attracts direct sponsors who pay better. The biggest money comes from selling your own products and services, like "How to make millions on YouTube" seminars.
Post reply on HN