I have been appending reddit to my queries for 1-2 years now. I agree with everything in the article, but I believe that the whole AI trend had a larger negativ

I have been appending reddit to my queries for 1-2 years now. I agree with everything in the article, but I believe that the whole AI trend had a larger negative effect on Google than more ad optimization. Just like the gmail effect, teams internally have been pushing to integrate AI into search results. Not necessarily because it's the best thing to do, but because someone needs to get promoted. They can't just leave search as it is. Of course, "best thing to do" is meaningless. What are the metrics? Getting reliable metrics and running big A/B tests is really hard if you have to measure fuzzy things like user satisfaction instead of concrete metrics like CTR. But that's really what's going on here. Initially, users may have been clicking and interacting with results more, but after realizing that those results are not actually what they wanted, or are SEO spam (hello Medium), they become disillusioned and append reddit to their query.