AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic
AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic
www.theregister.com
AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic
13 comments
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Given how wrong/ridiculously oversimplified those AI summaries usually are, it scares me that so many people would stop there like, "Ehh, good enough".
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A lot of my queries only call for oversimplified summaries. Either I'm simple like that or I google stupid shoot no one else would bother. A recent example:
Are there butterflies or moths that don't have mouths? (No but some have vestigial mouths connected to non-functioning digestive systems.) Good enough!
That said, I'm very skeptical about answers if it's anything I care about or need to act on.
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The AI answer mostly just parrots whatever the site that has won the referencement war is spewing. If it's easy enough, it can luck out and find an easy ready answer on wikipedia or something. Beyond that, most of those high referenced sites are the shitty aggregators that already pollute the search results.
I often search for the correct way to do do something. For example, there's a lot of baseless bullshit in gardening. If there wasn't an AI answer, I would not trust the first result and stop there, I would look for a few, check what sources they have. I would not even take the wikipedia answer at face value without at least confirming where they got their info.
We know AI doesn't do that. We have examples of it not even recognizing obvious parody, it can't be trusted with recognizing unsourced shit.
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AI literally produces better answers than 99% of ad supported, SEOptimized websites.
That's saying not a lot about AI though. It tells you how utterly awful searching the web is thanks to those sites.
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I'd say AI search summaries are somewhat useful for me 30% of the time. And I click through to the sources to confirm its summaries anyway, because they're often oversimplified.
Often though, they're goddamn useless.
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While the stats vary depending on who's measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.
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All that ad revenue won't be surrendered without a fight. Just wait, there will be ads you have to click through to read all of the AI summary.
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Google will probably just start playing video ads as soon as you hit. Enter on the search bar.
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So I had this joke idea of "they'll just start showing the ads to the AIs", but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I've made myself a bit depressed.
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The top result is always some AI-gen, 2000-word essay response to a simple yes/no question like "Can a dog eat onions?"
I swear they do it to train us to just use the shitty AI summary of the shitty AI essay.
13 comments
On one hand, I don't generate ad revenue for anyone in the first place and would love to see the ad-supported web model collapse. On the other hand, I don't like that AI is destroying things. I'm conflicted.