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As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue
- softwaredoug 1y agoAI kills search traffic. Yes. OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.
- ceejayoz 1y agoUntil they kill off the content providers who a) rely on that traffic and b) provide the raw material for the models, of course.
- GardenLetter27 1y agoAnd put ads and sponsored results in the LLMs.
- heisenbit 1y agoAnd until now had to pay part of their revenue to Google for search results being ranked accordingly. Diversity of ingress vectors may not be such a bad thing.
- candiddevmike 1y agoUsing AI to do research almost seems worse than citing wikipedia as a reference.
- amirmi78 1y agoThe same people who cited Wikipedia instead of its sources are probably the same people who cite AI instead of its sources. New scope for people with a stick.
- etchalon 1y agoHopefully everyone's learned not to build their business on top of any Google product. Who knows when they'll cancel it.
- blackoil 1y agoGiven the monopolies, what are the alternatives? For video content, Youtube is near monopoly with alternatives no better than Google. Same goes for mobile app, website (traffic via Google SE), offline store (search/reviews on maps)
- etchalon 1y agoMaybe I should have qualified that with new Google Product.
- timewizard 1y agoLLMs haven't "killed" search traffic. Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models. As they've now realized this kills off any incentive to feed their LLMs with new content they're stuck actually having to pay lip service to publishers by offering them, yep, a new way to prevent users from seeing their content! What a bummer of a decade this has become.
- SirFatty 1y ago"LLMs haven't "killed" search traffic." "Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models." Both things can be true.
- dpacmittal 1y agoIs it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.
- pier25 1y agoIt's not unfair it's content theft at an industrial scale. Edit: Those how are downvoting me probably haver never spent a week writing an article or blog post.
- mattmanser 1y agoAnd then governments are mysteriously rolling over and saying of course it's not infringement and even if it is we'll legislate against it. Just all stinks of corruption.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoPublishers ≠ authors.
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- blibble 1y ago> It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again. isn't this the entire AI playbook? artists, software developers, writers, musicians, everyone total parasitism always kills the host
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoI think the problem is that government/companies don't see that we are eating the seed corn and completely hollowing out society.
- AstroBen 1y agoYeah and then what happens in 2026 onwards? No one's going to put in the work to create high quality original content when they can't monetize it..
- WD-42 1y agoScare off whatever human visitors you have left with more paywalls, sounds like a great plan.
- mrtksn 1y agoReaders can unlock more content(which is often just some AI slop or SEO optimized word salad) by watching an ad or can get their content on some AI chatbot on the VC's dime. Good luck with that, quality publishing died years ago when Google was optimizing for their end.
- jeffbee 1y agoThe "killing" started way before AI summary was launched, and the killing was done by the sites themselves, by turning themselves into garbage factories churning out slop (human slop!) that nobody wants to read. Look at this graph and tell me when Google AI Summary launched: https://x.com/YujieChen/status/1932566121846354228/photo/1 https://x.com/YujieChen/status/1932566121846354228/photo/1
- snowwrestler 1y agoWhile many sites did shovel slop out the door in the name of SEO, the decline in Google search traffic is happening to all sites. It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic. Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most obvious culprit. But regardless, the change in pattern is real and not correlated with site content quality.
- johnnyjeans 1y agoI know that I've stopped using Google's search primarily because it's been intentionally[1] made a worse tool. The AI overviews sound obnoxious and I'm not surprised if they're driving more people off of the platform. I don't know what the hell is going on over there, but the systemic issues and awful decisions I see coming out of Alphabet companies in recent years paints a picture of suicidal levels of hubris at the c-suite level. The boards need to pull their heads out of their asses, otherwise incompetence is going to sink that ship before 2040. [1] - https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-design-internal-memo/ https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-d...
- jeffbee 1y agoThe AI overviews are not obnoxious to me. I quite like them. It is the sites that are obnoxious!
- citizenpaul 1y agoGoogle really is braindrained if the best thing they can come up with is to rebrand pop ups.
- grugagag 1y agoLet’s not forget Google was sleeping on AI and it still is. They were ahead at some point but didnt know what to do with it.
- xnx 1y ago> sleeping on AI and it still is How is Google still sleeping on AI? Don't they have the best available models at every size?
- joe_the_user 1y agoYeah, At this point, Google has become a shitty ChatGPT. In the last few weeks, using both Google and ChatGPT for search, I get a far broader range of links from ChatGPT. Basically, Google-today is the product of a long history of having and using its search the monopoly for profits and political agendas (include lots of other entities legally and otherwise forcing this use btw). All it's search results were as "opinionated" as an AI even before the appearance of ChatGPT. It's logical that any "green fields" search engine would be better. Of course, the problem will be that OpenAI and company will face the Example: The original Phil Specter version of Let It Be (the album) exists on Youtube but it's not possible to easily find it with either Google or Youtube searches (I've a number of times). But easily ChatGPT found a link to the song and album for me (Ole 'Chat gave strings use for google but these didn't work either btw).
- everforward 1y agoThis doesn't feel like it will work to me, for a few reasons: 1. A video or survey will take longer than just finding the content elsewhere. The survey is also probably more effort. 2. This breaks the "flow". The odds that I get distracted or just lose interest before the ad/survey is done is pretty high. 3. A lot of the stuff I want to read is more "passing curiosity" than "thing I have a dedicated interest in". The effort and time I'm willing to put into access is low. The real question for me is whether Offerwall is going to make it harder to get around the paywall than previously. There are a few sites that actually send the full article, they just cover it up with an HTML element. You can still see the full text if you open the request for the content in DevTools.
- deadbabe 1y agoThe exciting thing about search engines becoming useless as a traffic source, is that small publishers and blogs will eventually learn to adopt old technologies to gain traffic: web rings and links sections. This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.
- righthand 1y agoWhy would I publish if no one is ever looking for my content? To feed the LLMs? A lot of blogging is done to make money. If no one is searching anymore what is the revenue model? What you’re describing to me seems like passion blogging which already exists and I don’t think the financially interested are going that way if there’s no revenue model.
- deadbabe 1y agoThe revenue is clout
- hackerbeat 1y agoClout doesn‘t pay the bills.
- deadbabe 1y agoBut it pays
- candiddevmike 1y agoNo one knows what a web ring is, and there's no incentive for folks to leave their preferred "attention theme parks" that have been meticulously curated by big tech. There will not be a second decentralized web renaissance. We are all too busy, lazy, and enthralled by low effort content, like posting on HN.
- bargainbin 1y agoI can already see how this plays out, it falls flat, the increasing decline in search coincides with industry wide realisation LLMs still can’t achieve AGI, this sets alarm bells ringing, they offer a new system for advertisers to promote content via the AI responses since now “it’s just glorified search”
- seydor 1y agoThey re going to have to do more than this. They can surely make an AI that determines which % of the LLM answer is owed to which website / source. Then either pay them ad revenue or demand the user to pay to see the rest of the answer. I don't often click on AI answers, and i assume most people don't. I find myself clicking beyond it only when the answer is bad. If google doesn't do that, publishers will respond in a vicious way, like purposely poisoning content to mislead their LLMs.
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- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated recently: Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44373222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44373222
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y agoI don't really know how publishers fight back in this situation. Big tech took all of their content and art, trained AI, and are now trying to sell it back to them. It's incredibly fucked.
- renegat0x0 1y agoOften it is hard for me to discover new places on internet using search. How monetization could take place if I cannot easily find for example Warhammer related blogs, resources. I created my own Internet index. That is how I control my discoveries. https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
- Mars008 1y agoThe question, did all traffic really go to AI companies? May be just there are so many jumping and blinking adds that users simply don't like it. Like youtube is unwatchable without add blockers or other add skipping tricks.
- notsydonia 1y agoAlso, leaving aside my previous two points on this and speaking as a person who consumes the internet, I don't want the apparently outmoded 'list of blue links' to be replaced by one A.I. overview. As is well documented, the overviews can 'hallucinate' and less well-documented, they're bland. I'd rather have my search query met with an array of links, offering a variety of takes that I can then sift through. This is especially vital for research which is why I now use Kagi and also Perplexity, as in the latter provides quality links. I may be wrong but I believe it was started by former Google execs and uses some of the natural language processing mechanisms that made legacy Google so good.