If you’re a website owner, you can forget about the importance of being for a subset of users on Google’s first search page. Even if your link is in the coveted first spot on the user’s first page, people are far less likely to click on it.
Google, for now, is still laughing its way to the bank. The search giant is putting advertisers’ ads within or directly above and below AI Overviews themselves. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview last year, “If you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.” Organic links are pushed down.
Even in 2024, market research company SparkToro’s study of searchers found “almost 30 percent of all clicks go to platforms Google owns.” For every 1,000 Google searches in the United States, 360 clicks go to a non-Google-owned, non-Google-ad-paying property. With the rise of AI Overview, Google’s share can only have grown, while everyone else’s has shrunk.
Of course, Google reports that ad revenue per search has remained the same for AI Overviews as for traditional search result pages. In other words, website owners are losing money, but Google’s doing just fine.
So…Google places ads within its own AI summaries, entirely over the traditional search engine optimization model? I’m terrified that high quality search results won’t even exist in the future.
Unfortunately, I realize I’m kind of part of the problem. Or well, at least I pay for Kagi, but I still find myself just asking the AI first most of the time, since all you have to do is add a ‘?’ at the end of the question.
But I feel bad for the small businesses in the ad-supported search ecosystem… Because most people don’t pay for the service directly, only through ads.
It’s sad because people should want to visit websites organically. There is so much beauty in stumbling across a new link in a search. While AI summaries are so convenient, I feel like we may be loosing much of what made the Internet so wonderful.
Perhaps I’m just fearmongering of a Perplexity or ChatGPT based browser being the norm. But hey, I hope I get proved wrong.
I’m constantly ravenous for finding new information and learning new things to keep my brain from stagnating, and in the past couple years it’s gotten nearly impossible to find websites with informational articles written by actual humans. Even using only kagi and brave, the sheer volume of ai generated seo listicles and copycat articles is out of control. And the quality control over the ai articles is nonexistent too, like a few days ago I was reading an obviously ai generated article speculating about the colors of the iphone 17 series and in the article it mentioned that the iphone 16 pro came in a color called teal pro. The base 16 series, not the pro, came in the teal color but it was just called teal. Like hello where are the editors?
I’ve been considering paying for annual subscriptions to various stem magazines and journal publications because ai slop has made learning/researching on the internet impossible now. Dead internet theory is absolutely here.
What kind of websites (or articles) were you looking for? I may have a website I can message you. It’s a website that lets you browse a large selection of actual websites from real humans. Depending on what you’re looking for, it could be refreshing at least for a month or so. There’s blogs, poetry, art, articles, actual personal (non-AI generated…) opinions etc., and this is all from actual people just doing their own thing.