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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

#721

Post by leptons »

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?

I use Youtube on a Chromecast with the SmartTube-beta app, which skips in-video ads, if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have that. The app just skips right by the in-video ad, as well as a bunch of other non-interesting video content if it is specified in the video timecodes by the creator.

Another great feature of SmartTube-beta - and it's the feature that brought me to that app - is the ability to completely remove all "shorts" from the entire app. No more shorts. I've configured the app to eliminate them completely like they never existed.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#722

Post by ndr »

ekianjo wrote: post #551
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…

> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance. ad-free? For now. That's just a matter of time.

I don't know which models they use but it's likely already happening.

Yesterday's SEO battles are today battles to convince LLMs to produce ad tokens. The corpus is already ridden of such content. And LLM make it even easier to produce more such spam.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#723

Post by sokoloff »

leptons wrote: post #721
ceejayoz wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I use Youtube on a Chromecast with the SmartTube-beta app, which skips in-video ads, if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have that. The app just skips right by the in-video ad, as well as a bunch of other non-interesting video content if it is specified in the video timecodes by the creator. Another great feature of SmartTube-beta - and it's the feature that brought me to that ap…

> if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have that

I'm almost positive that SmartTube is using the SponsorBlock database, which does not depend on creator-submitted demarcation, but rather on user-generated/crowd-sourced segment tagging. https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#724

Post by stronglikedan »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #133

Of course slow, shitty web sites also cause a massive drop in clicks, as soon as an alternative to clicking emerges. It's just like on HN, if I see an interesting title and want to know what the article is about, I can wince and click the article link, but it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer the info I want from the comments. That difference is almost entirely from the crappy overdesig…

You monster!

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#725

Post by floatrock »

lopis wrote: post #534
svachalek wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't be obvious. They'll be highly customized brain worms influencing your votes and purchases to the highest bidder.

Which sounds very illegal in most places, as clearly identifying sponsored content is required. Let's see how that turns out.

> as clearly identifying sponsored content is required

Citation needed?

Once AI content becomes monetized with ads, it's not going to look like the ads/banners we're used to. If you're looking into the past, you don't understand the potential of AI. Noam Chomsky's manufactured consent is going to look quaint by comparison.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#726

Post by stronglikedan »

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.

I guess I'm in the minority of people who click through to the sources to confirm the assertions in the summary. I'm surprised most people trust AI, but maybe only because I'm in some sort of bubble.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#727

Post by a_vanderbilt »

fxtentacle wrote: post #605
pcdoodle wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Kagi allows you to block Pinterest

Kagi got me to sign up as an early adopter because it let me banish pinterest forever.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#728

Post by floatrock »

bdelmas wrote: post #346
tmountain wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is following the drug dealer model. “The first dose is free!” Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be coming for sure.

Well maybe not. Thanks that we have Gemini now to compete with ChatGPT. Competition may avoid dark patterns. But without competition yes definitely

> Competition may avoid dark patterns.

Oh bless your heart.

You don't even need to bring up corporate collusion, countless price gouging schemes, or the entire enshittification movement to understand that competition discovers the dark patterns. Dark patterns aren't something to be avoided, they're the natural evolution of ever-tighter competition.

When the eyeball is the product, you get more checks if you get more eyeballs. Dark patterns are how you chum the water to attract the most product.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#729

Post by boringg »

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…

Sorry to hear that -- thats sounds painful.

It does speak to one of the core problems with AI is the one time productivity boost from using all historical data created by humans is no longer going to be as useful going forward since individual contributors will no longer build and provide that information unless the incentive models change.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#730

Post by leptons »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #353
callc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good time to teach a hard lesson about the trustworthiness of LLM output

This will lead to a major class-action lawsuit soon enough.

I've never seen such a half-assed thing being adopted by so many people so completely and without reservation. The future seems really dysfunctional.
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