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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

#731

Post by locofocos »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #345
arkh wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even bother linking to an article or blogpost: use a shock title, maybe associate it with some specific news source. No article to read, just a title and a comment section. Harvest said comments and create a 1h, 1d, 1 week, all time digest.

That reminds me of this webpage some years ago (idk if I can link it, it was very cynical) that summarized the week on HN with a lot of cynicysm and snark, it was a great, "grounding" read, a cynical break from the HN techbro overhyping of e.g. Rust. (I don't know if Rust is overhyped, it's calmed down again but at one point a recurring post on HN was "solved problem X... but written in Rust!", where the latter was t…

Oh yeah, n-gate.com, "we can't both be right"

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#732

Post by FredPret »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #458
sothatsit wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that SEO has made it hard to find trustworthy sites in the first place. The places I trust the most now for getting random information is Reddit and Wikipedia, which is absolutely ridiculous as they are terrible options. But SEO slop machines have made it so hard to find the good websites without putting in more legwork than makes sense a lot of the time. Funnily enough, this makes AI look like a good…

>The problem is that SEO has made it hard to find trustworthy sites in the first place. We should remember that's partly Google's fault as well. They decided SEO sites were OK.

Well, they decided which sites were OK, and then people SEO'd a bunch of crap into Google's idea of a good website.

I'm no fan of Google but it's not so simple to figure out what's relevant, good content on the scale of the internet, while confronted by an army of adversarial actors who can make money by working out what you value in a site.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#733

Post by pembrook »

fortyseven wrote: post #635
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…

> YouTube is still young I almost spit out my drink.

The open web that Google killed is 20 years older than YouTube.

Give it time.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#734

Post by otherayden »

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…

I’ve actually been working on a tool that uses jina.ai’s “reader” api to let you see a rendered markdown view of a pages contents. Check it out at https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb or try it out with https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb#example.com

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#736

Post by bgro »

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…

also gotta have every click on the page to highlight text navigate to a shopping cart subscription page and then break the back button.

Clicking on a video to mute it also needs to navigate to a sponsor’s page and break the back button. And then the page reloads which doubles the page view count. Genius web dev decision. I bet they said “there’s literally no downsides to doing this!”

Also, the ads need to autoplay on full volume, often bypassing my system volume somehow so they can play even though the rest of the audio is on mute and none of the mute functionality works. Surely the user simply forgot they had mute on so we should just go ahead and fix that.

They also need to play on 4K ultra HD to use my entire monthly cell plan if I don’t stop it in the first 3 seconds, which I can’t do because the video has to fully load before I’m able to interact with it to click stop. Or clicking stop pauses it and then automatically restarts playing the video.

These webdev chrome devs need to stop adding new random features and start fixing the basic functionality. I don’t want fading rotating banners that save 3 lines of CSS. I want the “DO NOT AUTOPLAY. EVER.” Button to actually work.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#737

Post by arrowleaf »

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

For the past ten years I've run a side project that estimates the word count of books and how long it takes to read them. Maintaining and improving this requires tens of hours a month, and a few hundred dollars in RDS, ECS, etc. costs. Two years ago I was at least breaking even on affiliate income, so the cost put into it was purely my own time and effort which I enjoy. These days my total traffic numbers are about 10x, but human traffic is down 50-70%.

I'm basically paying to host content for AI crawlers to scrape and I don't know how much longer I can do this. I'm adding Goodreads-esque features currently, but if it doesn't get the sign ups I'll be forced to archive the code and take the site down.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#738

Post by mrinterweb »

Knowing that your content is unlikely to be seen by many humans, and is mainly just feeding an AI is pretty discouraging. AI is great at detecting patterns, if content creations is discouraged, and more AI content is generated, AI content is likely to become so homogeneous that the internet becomes more of an echo chamber (than it already is).

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#739

Post by JoshTriplett »

drewr wrote: post #702
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…

I spend noticeably less time on youtube than I used to because they keep shoving shorts in my face. I'm a premium subscriber, I click "fewer shorts," nothing changes. Maybe I should be thankful?

Turn off all the history options, and bookmark https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions , which shows you only what you're subscribed to, in reverse-chronological order. (It'll still show you shorts, but only those for channels you're subscribed to.)
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