I find I read the AI summary then realise I prefer and trust ChatGPT’s answer more so copy my query into that and go from there. Having below average “chat” suggestions in a non-chat interface with loads of SERP cruft feels pointless.
AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
791–800 of 872 posts
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#792Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big Mama's Best Brownie Recipe. Let's start at the beginning. I was born in 1956 in Chicago. My mother was a cruel drunk and the only thing my father hated more than his work was his family.
This might be a hot take but I'm usually fine with this... If its authentic which most of the time it isn't. But I don't know, I feel like personal stories are what really makes a blog worth reading? I don't like it when it's unnecessary "info dump" type. Like, "we all know the benefits of garlic (proceeds to list the well known benefits of garlic)". It's not personal or relevant. I just want there to be a well forma…
Sure, but there's a time and a place, and when I'm looking for a recipe, especially if I'm landing on a site for the first time and don't even know who the author is yet, it's the time and place to do the shopping or the cooking, not for reading even an interesting origin story.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#793Earlier 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…
Has there ever been an option to pay google $20/month for a better / add-free search? The current subscription situation for LLM stuff actually makes me hopeful.
my kagi subscription is as valuable to me as my youtube premium sub.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#794Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a market where nobody has a particularly deep moat and most players are charging money for a service. Open weight models aren't too far behind proprietary models, particularly for mundane queries. The cost of inference is plummeting and it's already possible to run very good models at pennies per megatoken. I think it's unreasonably pessimistic to assume that dark patterns are an inevitability.
You do realize of course that every service that now employs all these dark patterns we're complaining about was already profitable and making good money, and that simply isn't good enough? Revenue has to increase quarter-to-quarter otherwise your stock will tank. It's not simply enough that a product "makes money" it must "make more money, every quarter, forever" which is why everything, not even limited to tech, bu…
I wish I could put 10 votes on this instead of just one. It just bothers me how success can be defined as something absurdly impossible like that.
We're already at a wild stage of the rot caused by the growth-forever disease: the most successful companies are so enormous that further profit increases would require either absurd monopoly status (Chase, Wells Fargo, B of A all merge!) or to find increasingly insane ways of extracting money (witness network TV: First they only got money from ads, then they started leeching additional money streams from cable providers, now most have added their own subscription service that they also want you to pay for, on top of watching ads.)
ISPs used to just charge a fee, now they also sell personal information about your browsing behavior for extra revenue, cap your bandwidth usage and charge for more, and one of them (comcast) owns a media conglomerate.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#795Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big Mama's Best Brownie Recipe. Let's start at the beginning. I was born in 1956 in Chicago. My mother was a cruel drunk and the only thing my father hated more than his work was his family.
This might be a hot take but I'm usually fine with this... If its authentic which most of the time it isn't. But I don't know, I feel like personal stories are what really makes a blog worth reading? I don't like it when it's unnecessary "info dump" type. Like, "we all know the benefits of garlic (proceeds to list the well known benefits of garlic)". It's not personal or relevant. I just want there to be a well forma…
I discovered justtherecipe.com and never went back. So far it's free and ad-free, though I suspect that will end soon.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#796[deleted]
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#797Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have noticed that a lot. For example: What is the price of the Switch 2? The Switch 2 can be purchased with money.
Recipe for Foo. Foo has always been my favorite dish. I fondly remember all the times my grandma made this for me. My grandma, who was born on August 2, 1946, as the daughter of… (10 more pages of text) To cook Foo the way my grandma did, you first need some Bar. Bar is originally native to the reclusive country of… (20 more pages of text)
I don't even know if the recipes themselves are real and tested any more or just slop.
It seems like it's more often than not that I'm coming across dishes that just do not make sense, or are poorly plagiarized by someone who doesn't understand the cuisine they're trying to replicate with absolute nonsense steps or substitutions or quantities. I used to have a great success rate when googling for recipes but now it's almost all crap, not even a mixed bag.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#798In other news, water makes things wet
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#799Here 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 mean you're not wrong try searching for any recipe or just a search result where you want a simple answer. This problem you're outlining isn't just the search engines/ai/results fault. Simple questions should have answers in paragraphs of dialogue and anymore than 1 ad.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#800The 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…
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 our websites.
Anecdotally, this happened back in analog days, too.
When I worked in local TV, people would call and scream at us if the show they wanted to see was incorrectly listed in the TV Guide.
Screamers: "It's in the TV Guide!"
Me (like a million times): "We decide what goes on the air, not the TV Guide."