> Why are they in a panic over ChatGpt? The NYTimes and the rest of the media misread between the lines on this story. Google aren't worried about competition

> Why are they in a panic over ChatGpt? The NYTimes and the rest of the media misread between the lines on this story. Google aren't worried about competition. They are worried about losing the war with SEO. ChatGPT showed them a glimpse of the SEO endgame. It upsets the balance between search ranking/boosting and SEO. Whatever adaptations they put into their boosting algo, GPT-style AI can eventually learn. Once learned, it can be subverted. Fundamentally search boosting is at a disadvantage, because SEO has (blackbox) access to the boosting algo by feeding content to the crawlers and running searches. However the booster doesn't have access to the SEO algo; in fact it doesn't even know (beyond a guess) how many discrete SEO algos it is fighting, or which sites are optimized by which algos. So there is great asymmetry there. That is why the fire alarm was pulled.