News sites are getting crushed by Google’s new AI tools. Chatbots are replacing Google’s traditional search, devastating traffic for some publishers.
archive.ph
AI is enshittfying both the web and our entire society (just look at what it’s done to education) and it’s not even fucking profitable lmao. This is just madness. Nobody asked for this.
The SEO sub reddits are on suicide watch lmao
I wonder how many paywalls are going to go up. I also expect the amount of ad code that needs to load first will mean pages take like 15 seconds to load. And after pages load - good luck if you're on mobile. The page will be unreadable do to a large annoying mass of intrusive ads.
this is likely the solution for the time being. it's also what cloudflare's CEO recommended a couple weeks ago.
really interested in seeing how this changes things. i think we're already witnessing the loss of "the internet" as a place, or a refuge of sorts. as people need less and less interaction with computers in order to get the information they're looking for, they will not look back. i'm already starting to see this with friends in my life who have onboarded AI into their lives completely.
i'm already starting to see this with friends in my life who have onboarded AI into their lives completely.
That's bleak. I want to say something positive but I can't think of anything. I think of AI like a drug that can be highly addictive and destructive for some people. And like people with substance abuse problems - they won't admit they even have a problem. What can you do?
A lot of people will crash offline. the rest will silo into forums like this one, using search engines that use old methodologies. It'll be like 1998 again.
But Mr Google, those pages are the ones who pay you
Google already lost two antitrust lawsuits, what's a third at this point?
For a while now the majority of the referrals (and probably the majority of our traffic in general) to the GitHub repos that I manage has been from ChatGPT
The current Google leadership sees this as the goal. They see the replacement of search with LLM summaries as the final solution to SEO.
Is there a non pay walled version of this article?
Critical support
search was shit for a decade before this, gpt-4 is just the final nail
Any media that allows regular people to publish with a reasonably low barrier to entry is just doomed to be completely overwhelmed with spam and shit
Edit: not even exclusive to 'publish' in the one-to-many broadcast sense, even email and phone calls. So many ways to communicate and they're all barely functioning