AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too.

I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads.

The key part here will be monetization for content creators. People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get revenue?

I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.

If I'm searching "how to get an intuitive understanding of dot product and cross product", any open source model right now will do a perfectly fine job. By the time that the ad-pocalypse reaches AI answers, the models I mention will be at the point of being able to be run locally using consumer hardware. Probably every phone will run one.

I suspect in the next decade we will see the business model of "make money via advertising while trying/pretending to provide knowledge" become well and truly dead.

Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.

The current subscription situation for LLM stuff actually makes me hopeful.

If you did, that doesnt mean you should. If you can, that doesnt mean you should.

I almost spit out my drink.

  src: "https://js.monitor.azure.com/scripts/b/ai.2.min.js", // The SDK URL Source
  crossOrigin: "anonymous", // When supplied this will add the provided value as the cross origin attribute on the script tag

Anyway, is it really not even possible to set up things like NoScript and uBlock Origin on mobile?

I needs to have 15+ to really capture that modern web experience.

    document.querySelectorAll("[type='checkbox']").forEach(c => c.checked = undefined)

Probably useless for mobile though, unless you can punch it in the omnibar with `javascript:` prefix

Most of those are like:

    $movie release date
    
    <five paragraphs of garbage>
    
    While we don't know the actual $movie release date yet, ...

What is the price of the Switch 2?

The Switch 2 can be purchased with money. <Insert the Wikipedia article about currencies since the bronze age>

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.

It's so sad, cause it drags down good pages. I recently did a lot of research for camping and outdoor gear, and of course I started the journey from Google. But a few sites kept popping up, I really liked their reviews and the quality of the items I got based on that, so I started just going directly to them for comparisons and reviews. This is how it's supposed to work, IMHO.

jesus wept.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

- "Please don't track me."

- "But what if we realllly want to?"

A normal response to that would be an even more resounding FCK NO, but somehow the EU came to the completely opposite conclusion.

I always use the inspect tool to just remove the popup. Interacting with it could be considered consent.

In this model, only monetizable content will be generated though.

As much as we abhor what advertising has done to the web, at least it’s independent of content: pair quality content with ads, make money.

In the brave new AI search world, only content which itself is directly monetizable will be created. E.g. astroturf ads

The term you're looking for is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), though your "AIO" is also used. It's the new frontier.

And you've nailed the 180° turn: the game is no longer about blocking crawlers but about a race to become their primary source. The goal is to be the one to "gaslight the agent" into adopting your view of the world. This is achieved not through old SEO tricks, but by creating highly structured, authoritative content that is easy for an LLM to cite.

Your point about shifting to "assets the AI tools can only link to" is the other key piece. As AI summarization becomes the norm, the value is in creating things that can't be summarized away: proprietary data, interactive tools, and unique video content. The goal is to become the necessary destination that the AI must point to.

The end of SEO as we know it is here. The fight for visibility has just moved up a layer of abstraction.

i can definitely see LLMs companies offering content creators a bump in training priority for a fee. It will be like ad-sales but you're paying for the LLM to consider your content at a higher priority than your competition.

Sometimes it breaks the site so that you can't scroll or something, but that's quite rare. And most of the time it's solved by a refresh. Very infrequently you need to whitelist the site and then deal with the nag screen manually. A bit annoying, but way better than rawdogging it.

Works on desktop & mobile.

https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.fontstruct.com?view=t...

https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=special%3Apopover...

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.

Weird because although I dislike what Google Search has become as much as any other HNer, one thing that mostly does work well is localised content. Since I live in a small country next to a big country that speaks the same language, it's quite noticeable to me that Google goes to great lengths to find the actually relevant content for my searches when applicable... of course it's not always what I'm actually looking for, because I'm actually a citizen of the other country that I'm not living in, and it makes it difficult to find answers that are relevant to that country. You can add "cr=countryXX" as a query parameter but I always forget about it.

Anyway I wasn't sure if the LLM results were localised because I never pay attention to them so checked and it works fine, they are localised for me. Searching for "where do I declare my taxes" for example gives the correct question depending on the country my IP is from.

its not a UK wide one. The home page says "NHS Website for England".

I seem to remember the Scottish one had privacy issues with Google tracking embedded, BTW.

> So, if you've gone into labour somewhere in the remote Highlands and Islands, you'll get different advice than if you lived in Central London, where there's a delivery room within a 30 minute drive

But someone in a remote part of England will get the same advice as someone in central London, and someone in central Edinburgh will get the same advice as someone on a remote island, so it does not really work that way.

> if you live in the USA, but US medical advice is wildly different to the UK.

Human biology is the same, diseases are the same, and the difference in available treatments is not usually all that different. This suggests to me someone's advice is wrong. Of course there are legitimate differences of opinion (the same applies to differences between

A third-party LLM hallucinating something like that though? Hell no. It should be possible to sue for libel.

I have come across the same lack of commonsense from ChatGPT in other contexts. It can be very literal with things such as branded terms vs their common more generic meaning (e.g. with IGCSE and International GCSE - UK exams) which again a knowledgeable human would understand.

You need to wait until they offer it as a paid feature. And they (and other LLM providers) will offer it.

> "You can't get boiled rice from a clown" is a phrase that plays on expectations and the absurdity of a situation.

> The phrase "never stack rocks with Elvis" is a playful way of expressing skepticism about the act of stacking rocks in natural environments.

> The saying "two dogs can't build an ocean" is a colloquial and humorous way of expressing the futility or impossibility of a grand, unachievable goal or task.

Now it's the worlds biggest advertisement company, waging war on Adblockers and pushing dark pattern to users.

They've built a browser monopoly with Chrome and can throw their weight around to literally dictate the open web standards.

The only competition is Mozilla Firefox, which ironically is _also_ controlled by Google, they receive millions annually from them.

But, they hired the best and brightest of my generation. How’d they screw it up so bad?

At some point, an article about how Google was showing this crap made it to the top of the rankings and they started taking the overview from it rather than the original Quora answer it used before. Somehow it still got it wrong, and just lifted the absurd answer from the article rather than the part where the article says it’s very wrong.

Amusingly, they now refuse to show an AI answer for that particular search.

Is that relevant when we already have official truth sources: our websites? That information is ours and subject to change at our sole discretion. Google doesn't get to decide who our extensions are assigned to, what our hours of operation are, or what our business services do.

Our initial impression of AI Overview was positive, as well, until this happened to us.

And bear in mind the timeline. We didn't know that this was happening, and even after we realized there was a trend, we didn't know why. We're in the middle of a softphone transition, so we initially blamed ourselves (and panicked a little when what we saw didn't reflect what we assumed was happening - why would people just suddenly start calling wrong numbers?).

After we began collecting responses from misdirected callers and got a nearly unanimous answer of "Google" (don't be proud of that), I called a meeting with our communications and marketing departments and web team to figure out how we'd log and investigate incidents so we could fix the sources. What they turned up was that the numbers had never been publicly published or associated with any of what Google AI was telling them. This wasn't our fault.

So now we're concerned that bad info is being amplified elsewhere on the web. We even considered pulling back the Google-advertised phone extensions so they forward either to a message that tells them Google AI was wrong and to visit our website, or admit defeat and just forward it where Google says it should go (subject to change at Google's pleasure, obviously). We can't do this for established public facing numbers, though, and disrupt business services.

What a stupid saga, but that's how it works when Google treats the world like its personal QA team. (OT, but bince we're all working for them by generating training data for their models and fixing their global scale products, anyone for Google-sponsored UBI?)

If Google shows bullshit about me on the top of its search, I'm helpless.

(for me read any company, person, etc)

1. Here's the answer (but it's misinformation) 2. Here are some websites that look like they might have the answer

?

Often the title sort of explains the whole topic (ie lack of parking in NY, or astronomers found the biggest quasar yet), then folks chirp in with their experiences and insight which are sometimes pretty wild.

Me too. That is why sometimes I take the raw comment thread and paste it into a LLM, the result is a grounded article. It contains a diversity of positions and debunking, but the slop is removed. Social threads + LLMs are an amazing combo, getting the LLM polish + the human grounded perspective.

If I was in the place of reddit or HN I would try to generate lots of socially grounded articles. They would be better than any other publication because they don't have the same conflict of interests.

But I never expected that this would also link back to my tendency to skip an article and just stick to what the top comments of a section have, HN or Reddit.

I often click on the HN comments before reading the article because the article I very often nothing more than the headline and I'm more interested in the discussion.

At the same time, I have no issue disagreeing with whatever is the popular stance, there’s almost some catharsis in just speaking the truth along the lines of “What you say might be true in your circumstances and culture, but software isn’t built like that here.”

Regardless, I’d say that there’s nothing wrong with finding likeminded peers either, for example if everyone around you views something like SOLID and DRY as dogma and you think there must be a better, more nuanced way.

Either that, or everyone likes a good tl;dr summary.

This is where it breaks down; why would they shove in MORE ads when their readers are going down? I'm not saying it's a rational decision, of course.

I suspect a big part is metrics-driven development; add an aggressive newsletter popup and newsletter subscriptions increase, therefore it's effective and can stay. Add bigger / flashier ads and ad revenue increases, therefore the big and flashy ads can stay.

User enjoyment is a lot harder to measure. You can look at metrics like page visits and session length, but that's still just metrics. Asking the users themselves has two problems, one is lack of engagement (unless you are a big community already, HN doing a survey would get plenty of feedback), two is that the people don't actually know how they feel about a website or what they want (they want faster horses). Like, I don't think anybody asked Google for an AI summary of what they think you're searching for, but they did, and it made people stay on Google instead of go to the site.

Whether that's good for Google in the long run remains to be seen of course, back when Google first rolled out their ad problem it... really didn't matter to them, because their ads were on a lot of webpages. Google's targets ended up becoming "keep the users on the internet, make them browse more and faster", and for a while that pushed innovation too; V8, Chrome, Google DNS, Gears, SPDY/HTTP/2/3, Lighthouse, mod_pagespeed, Google Closure Compiler, etc etc etc - all invented to make the web faster, because faster web = more pageviews = more ad impressions = more revenue.

Of course, part of that benefited others; Facebook for example created their own ecosystem, the internet within the internet. But anyway.

Doesn't scale, but maybe that's the only way to survive.

What do HN comments and AI Overviews have in common?

- All information went through a bunch of neurons at least once

- We don't know which information was even considered

- Might be completely false but presented with utmost confidence

- ...?

More generally speaking though, I do agree that comments probably tend to give people more of a dopamine hit than the content itself, especially if it’s long-form. However comments on HN often are quite substantial and of high quality, at least relatively speaking, and the earlier point about reading the articles often being a poor experience has a lot of merit as well. Why can’t it be a combination of all of the above (to various degrees depending on the individual, etc)?

From reading one or a few short comments I at least know what the linked article is about, which the original headline often does not reveal (no fault of those authors, their blogs are often specialized and anyone finding the article there has much more context compared to finding the same headline here on a general aggregation site).

Even when you have them dead to rights (like with the Whisper hallucinations) the legal argument is hard to make. Besides, the defendants have unfathomable resources.

As sad as it is, I think we're looking at the end of the open internet as we've known it. This is massive tragedy of the commons situation and there seems to be roughly zero political will to enact needed regulations to keep things fair and sustainable. The costs of this trend are massive, but they are spread out across many millions of disparate producers and consumers, while the gains are extremely concentrated in the hands of the few; and those few have good lobbyists.

The beginning of the end was including Wikipedia entries directly in the search results, although arguably even some of the image results are high quality enough to warrant skipping visiting the actual website (if you were lucky enough to get the image at the target site in the first place) So maybe it goes back sooner than that.

It happens for all VC based products since the drive on returns of invested capital is so high.

Put another way -- early stage products that every uses and love (in most not all cases) should not be assumed to be the end product.

Why would you do that if you thought it was going to be hoovered up by some giant corporation and spat out again for $20 a month with no attribution.

I agree the current model sucks, but I think it being replaced is only good if it's replaced with something better.

> More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter

I'd love the idea of people doing things because they're passionate, but I feel a little unsure about people doing things because they're passionate, generating money from those things, but all that money going to AI summariser companies. I think there's some pretty serious limits too, journalists risk their safety a lot of the time, and I can't see a world where that happens purely out of "passion" without any renumeration. Aside from anything else, some acts of journalism like overseas reporting etc, isn't compatible with working a seperate "for-pay" job.

Someone who publishes content because they love the subject matter would only reach enough of an audience to have an impact if they work on it, a lot, and most people wouldn't do that without some expectation of return on investment, so they'd follow the influencer / commercial publication playbook and end up in the same place as the established players in the space are already.

If you're satisfied of being on the 50th page on the Google results, then that's fine. Nobody will find you though.

The web is on a trajectory where a local dyi zine will reach as many readers as an open website. It might even be cheaper than paying for a domain+hosting once that industry contracts and hosting plans aren't robust enough to keep up with requests from vibe-coded scrapers.

I disagree with that. There are still people out there doing that out of passion, that hasn't changed (it's just harder to find). Bad actors who are only out there for the money will continue trying to get the money. Blogs might not be relevant anymore, but social media influencing is still going to be a thing. SEO will continue to exist, but now it's targeted to influence AIs instead of the position in Google search results. AIs will need to become (more) profitable, which means they will include advertising at some point. Instead of companies paying Google to place their products in the search or influencers through affiliate links, they will just pay AI companies to place their products in AI results or influencers to create fake reviews trying to influence the AI bots. A SEO slop article is at least easy to detect, recommendations from AIs are much harder to verify.

Also it's going to hit journalism. Not everyone can just blog because they are passionate about something. Any content produced by professionals is either going to be paywalled even more or they need to find different sources of income threatening journalistic integrity. And that gives even more ways to bad actors with money to publish news in their interest for free and gaining more influence on the public debate.

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 option to cut through all the noise despite its hallucinations. That's obviously not acceptable when it comes to food safety concerns though.

So, I'd agree -- safety info from an LLM is bad. But generally, the /flavor/ (heh) of information that such data comprises is REALLY good to get from LLMs (as opposed to nuanced opinions or subjective feedback).

After all, AI can theoretically ask follow-up questions that are relevant, can explain subtleties peculiar to a specific situation or request, can rephrase things in ways that are clearer for the end user.

Btw, "What temperature should a food be cooked to" is a classic example of something where lots of people and lots of sources repeat incorrect information, which is often ignored by people who actually cook. Famously, the temp that is often "recommended" is only the temp at which bacteria/whatever is killed instantly - but is often too hot to make the food taste good. What is normally recommended is to cook to a lower temperature but keep the food at that temperature for a bit longer, which has the same effect safety-wise but is much better.

Why are people downvoting this? I’ve literally never seen anyone use a thermometer to cook a burger or steak or pork chop. A whole roasted turkey, sure.

Why would you purchase meat that you suspect is diseased? Even if you cook it well-done, all the (now dead) bacteria and their byproducts are still inside. I don't understand why people do this to themselves? If I have any suspicion about some meat, I'll throw it away. I'm not going to cook it.

First result under the overview is the National Pork Board, shows the answer above the fold, and includes visual references: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/

Most of the time if there isn't a straightforward primary source in the top results, Google's AI overview won't get it right either.

Given the enormous scale and latency constraints they're dealing with, they're not using SOTA models, and they're probably not feeding the model 5000 words worth of context from every result on the page.

Maybe they could just show the links that match your query and skip the overview. Sounds like a billion-dollar startup idea, wonder why nobody’s done it.

We could.

But it will absolutely not happen unless and until it can be more profitable than Google's current model.

What's your plan?

> Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.

Well, yes. That's the problem. Why rely on the same random liars as taste-makers?

When our grandmothers and grandfathers were growing up, there was a real threat to their health that we don’t face anymore. No, I’m not talking about the lack of antibiotics, nor the scarcity of nutritious food. It was trichinosis, a parasitic disease that used to be caught from undercooked pork.

The legitimate worry of trichinosis led their mothers to cook their pork until it was very well done. They learned to cook it that way and passed that cooking knowledge down to their offspring, and so on down to us. The result? We’ve all eaten a lot of too-dry, overcooked pork.

But hark! The danger is, for the most part, past, and we can all enjoy our pork as the succulent meat it was always intended to be. With proper temperature control, we can have better pork than our ancestors ever dreamed of. Here, we’ll look at a more nuanced way of thinking about pork temperatures than you’ve likely encountered before."

Sorry, what temperature was it again?

Luckily there's the National Pork Board which has bought its way to the top, just below the AI overview. So this time around I won't die from undercooked pork at least.

In your case, I think that it is just the interrogation point in itself at the end that somehow has an impact on the results you see.

I’ve also tried various engines over the years. Kagi was the first one that didn’t have me needing to go back to Google. I regularly find things that people using Google seem to not find. The Assistant has solved enough of my AI needs that I don’t bother subscribing to any dedicated AI company. I don’t miss Google search at all.

I do still using Google Maps, as its business data still seems like the best out there, and second place isn’t even close. Kagi is working on their own maps, but that will be long road. I’m still waiting for Apple to really go all-in, instead of leaning on Yelp.

Apple really needs to update Safari to let people choose their search engine, instead of just having the list of blessed search engines to choose from.

Think about it: you are a normal hands on self thought software developer. You grew up tinkering with Linux and a bit of hardware. You realise there’s good money to be made in a software career. You do it for 20-30 years; mostly the same stuff over and over again. Some Linux, c#, networking. Your life and hobby revolves around these technologies. And most importantly you have a comfortable and stable income that entrenches your class and status. Anything that can disrupt this state is obviously not desireable. Never mind that disrupting others careers is why you have a career in the first place.

Not all change is progress. You can't point at some random change and declare "Progress!".

This is a change. It likely is progress, but at this point there's still a chance that it is not progress.

You might think that's the correct way to do it, but there is likely much more to it than it seems.

If it wasn't tricky at all you'd bet they would've done it already to maximize revenue.

It never will. By disincentivizing publishers they're stripping away most of the motivation for the legitimate source content to exist.

AI search results are a sort of self-cannibalism. Eventually AI search engines will only have what they cached before the web became walled gardens (old data), and public gardens that have been heavily vandalized with AI slop (bad data).

Google search, as others have mentioned in this thread, increasingly fails to give me high-quality material anyway. Mostly it's just pages of SEO spam. I prefer that the LLM eat that instead of me (just spit back up the relevant stuff, thankyouverymuch).

Honestly though, increasingly the internet for me is 1) a distraction from doing real work 2) YouTube (see 1) and 3) a wonderful library called archive.org (which, if I could grab a local snapshot would make leaving the internet altogether much, much easier).

Ad web has never incentivized quality and never will.

- Hobbyist site

- Forum or UGC

- Academic/gov

- Quality news which is often paywalled

Most of that stuff doesn't depend on ad clicks. The things that do depend on ad clicks are usually infuriating slop. I refuse to scroll through three pages of BS to get to the information I want and I really don't care if the slop farmers die off.

And if ad supported content ceases to exist, nothing of value will have been lost. I’m not morally opposed to advertising, I find ad supported content not worth reading especially on mobile.

I'm never asking LLMs anything super critical like, "Do my taxes for me." This morning (as an example) I asked: "Is there talk of banning DJI drones in the U.S.?"

Later: "Difference between the RSE20 and RSS20 models of Yamaha electric guitars?"

And "Is there an Eco-Tank ink-jet suitable for Dye-Sub inks that can print Tabloid?"

1) None of the above are "critical".

2) All would have been a slight pain using Google and generated a lot of ... noise. LLMs eat the noise, do a decent job of giving me the salient points that answer my question.

3) All are easily verifiable if, for example, I decided to make a purchase based on what the LLM told me.

Or put another way, my disappointment in LLMs pales in comparison to my disappointment in search.

Or maybe I am just sick of search engines and want to "stick it to them".

If you do a Google (or other engine) search, you have to invest time pawing through the utter pile of shit that Google ads created on the web. Info that's hidden under reams of unnecessary text, potentially out of date, potentially not true; you'll need to evaluate a list of links and, probably, open multiple of them.

If you do an AI "search", you ask one question and get one answer. But the answer might a hallucination or based on incorrect info.

However, a lot of the time, you might be searching for something you already have an idea of, whether it's how to structure a script or what temperature pork is safe at; you can use your existing knowledge to assess the AI's answer. In that case the AI search is fast.

The rest of the time, you can at least tell the AI to include links to its references, and check those. Or its answer may help you construct a better Google search.

Ultimately search is a trash heap of Google's making, and I have absolute confidence in them also turning AI into a trash heap, but for now it is indeed faster for many purposes.

First, in the pre training stage humans curate and filter the data thats actually used for training.

Then in the fine tuning stage people write ideal examples to teach task performance

Then there is reinforcement learning from human feedback RLHF where people rank multiple variations of the answer an AI gives, and thats part of the reinforcement loop

So there is really quite a bit of human effort and direction that goes into preventing the garbage-in garbage-out type situation you're referring to

0.5 User 1,563,018 puts their credit card details in to make the world’s first online transaction!

0.50001 The web is filled with spam and unsearchable for real information

0.9 Some smart nerds figure out an algorithm to find the signal in the noise

1.9 Google throws out “don’t be evil” because search is cost, ad’s are money

4.1 Google and the rest of the AI/s subvert human decision making in ways that marketers could only ever dream

∞.∞ Humans toil in slavery to the whims of our corporate overlords

I wanted a different dystopia.

Since the AI is trained on the data on the websites below the AI summary, the summary quality is basically lock step with the quality of the websites.

But they're not often confidently wrong like AI summaries are.