AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic

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.

Are you stupid?
- I think Alk is referencing, the concept of perverse incentives. Without explicitly saying it. It's a concept, or a way of refering to an incentive structure that gives un-desirable results, in economics.
  Example: When clicks give you ad revenue. And hurt kittens nurtured back to health gives the most clicks. People start hurting kittens, so they have more to nurture back to health for clicks.
  Edit: my example is unfortunately a very real thing. Multiple channels on YT have been found to do it. Someone else will have to find the articles about it. I don't want to ruin my day reading about it again.
- Yes, but that's besides the point.
- Are you Google's official bootlicker?
- Another unnecessarily aggressive asshole on the web, what's new.

Given how wrong/ridiculously oversimplified those AI summaries usually are, it scares me that so many people would stop there like, "Ehh, good enough".

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.
- 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.

Hadn't thought of this before.

The AI summary stops people from going to the website, which means the website the AI used isn't getting any page views.

On a long enough timeline, it would kill webpages, then the AI has no new info to steal.

- You had one job.
We do not need to worry. The amount of scraping and traffic those ais are doing are already killing every website. At least they all have full backups of the whole internet by now... Right? Righttt?
I'm surprised nobody thought at this before. It was the fairly obvious outcome, inevitably this will lead to the collapse of the information environment we rely on, if nobody puts a stop to this. Ai doesn't seem to care, neither improvements seem to target this. Small websites were already struggling, now they're dying.
- People have been talking about it since Google debuted their instant answers years ago.
  Nobody listened or cared.
- Literally everyone has been saying this the entire time.

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.

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.

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.

Google will probably just start playing video ads as soon as you hit. Enter on the search bar.
- 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.

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.

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.