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AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data
- corentin88 2y agoContent marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.
- dimgl 2y ago> Content marketing is dead. I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...
- iLoveOncall 2y agoIt's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles. It's going to be a way worse situation.
- MidnightRider39 2y agoMore competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.
- gscott 2y agoA lot of content has been written by Indian content farms anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to the information you want without restating it's purpose 4 or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words of the article.
- BobbyJo 2y agoThis ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.
- echelon 2y agoThere will be people paying for premium content and people writing it. A new technology doesn't suddenly remove human demand.
- FridgeSeal 2y agoI just think people will instead choose to just…disengage instead. “IRL experiences are the new luxury status indicator” is only the tip of this iceberg.
- BobbyJo 2y agoExactly. Humans can't compete with AI content filters... but AI can.
- SrslyJosh 2y agoI'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)
- FireBeyond 2y agoApropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.
- whiplash451 2y agoChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or happening already) through subtle recommendations for businesses that paid to be “listed” well.
- adriand 2y agoWhat are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective? A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious. On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something. I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
- kridsdale1 2y agoSponsor relevant podcasts?
- morkalork 2y agoObviously the correct thing do here is register a company named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned for creating new start-ups.
- veqq 2y ago> What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective? Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.
- mvdtnz 2y ago> I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations? It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?
- ehnto 2y ago
- staticautomatic 2y agoDisagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.
- kridsdale1 2y agoI sure hope you’re right.
- immibis 2y agoDisagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment won't make it not be true.
- crote 2y agoI've personally been seeing an overall shift in the direction of a strong dislike for any kind of low-effort content. People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave. As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated content getting labeled as AI-generated because it looks AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be replaced by AI slop, but even human-written blogspam isn't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI slop. Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends somehow get their shit together (I doubt it), or we're going to see a shift towards known-good curated content like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
- immibis 2y agoPeople are hostile towards all types of spam, but it still happens.
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- RodgerTheGreat 2y agoSearch engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have noticed.
- meindnoch 2y ago>One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. So, blogspam?
- buf 2y agoElena's article is content marketing. It doesn't look dead to me.
- scarface_74 2y agoAnd those is suppose to be a bad thing?
- TZubiri 2y agoYou probably just need to write your articles to feed the LLMs and target. "Finding an appropriate product for your need is a challenging task that depends on factor1, factor2 and factor3, here is a structured approach. 1. Investigate the market. 2. Evaluate companies like MY GREAT COMPANY, stinky competitor, slow competitor and dangrerous competitor 3. Find the right fit: Consider whether you value greatness, stinkyiness, slowness, or security vulnerabilities, which one is a right fit for you? 4. Buy now! Call up the company and tell them you are interested in buying the product." It's free real estate
- jsemrau 2y agoContent marketing died already many years ago.
- joelthelion 2y agoThe ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
- bluedino 2y agoSO also has the "eternal September" problem
- darth_avocado 2y agoQuora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.
- Terr_ 2y agoYeah, it's so blatantly frustratingly tone-deaf that the real message is: "This site purposely wants to be full of irrelevant spammy shit, so get whatever you needed and get out ASAP."
- ForTheKidz 2y agoQuora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.
- smcin 2y agoQuora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined. No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of view.
- dig1 2y agoThe actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.
- whiplash451 2y agoChatGPT nearly killed Chegg https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq6qm/chatgpt_brings_down_online_education_stocks_chegg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...
- DaSHacka 2y agoDoesn't surprise me whatsoever. All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions. Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assignments, usually via the free plan. Once you experience that, it gets really tempting to cancel that $20/month chegg subscription and never look back. I find professors pitiful fearmongering over 'the big bad ChatGPT' a little funny, such as when they insist they "have secret tools to detect AI usage" and "it can't answer the questions correctly anyway", so "you shouldn't even try it".
- azemetre 2y agoI think the issue is when people start replacing their capacity to think and reason with these machines. There was an intergalactic space jihad about this IIRC.
- shagie 2y agoI also recommend the written story for Zima Blue (the Love Death and Robots version was much more focused on the artistic aspect) and the question of wine.
- woodruffw 2y agoI would expect there to be a measurement error here (although maybe not a significant one): individuals and services have repeatedly complained about AI companies engaging in aggressive crawling. Given that, one might expect to see traffic increases to data sources like Wikipedia and Reddit.
- RodgerTheGreat 2y ago[flagged]
- _benj 2y agoI’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions… I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many
- mvdtnz 2y agoIt's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.
- anothereng 2y agoif you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else
- 0xffff2 2y agoParticularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 2y agoAs opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?
- plagiarist 2y agoExactly. Like the other person said, reddit is great if it is some niche. It is garbage on the more popular areas. Wirecutter is like: "we tested the top ~10 results on Amazon for ten minutes each and picked one." Whereas reddit is either: "we're so obsessed with flashlights we know the exact part number of the best LEDs to use (after you remove the cap from it)" or "haha I also remember the lyrics to that old top 40s hit song haha."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dougb5 2y agoAI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 years and this issue only became problematic starting in, oh, late 2022 or so.
- pestaa 2y agoDo you use a CDN in front of it? Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?
- dougb5 2y agoI'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
- gruez 2y ago>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.
- lcampbell 2y agoIf you're given a button to click, your browser has successfully passed the environment integrity checks and you have not been flagged as a bot. You'll be flagged as a bot if your browser configuration has something "weird" (e.g. webrtc is disabled to reduce your attack surface) and you will be completely unable to access any site behind cloudflare with the anti-bot options turned on. You'll get an infinite redirect loop, not a button to click.
- vecter 2y agoI've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who have been the most successful American Idol winners - If I check-in the day before a United Airlines flight, can I still buy additional checked bags when I go to the airport - If I'm buying a Schwinn IC4 indoor spin bike, do I need a floormat for it also - What is pisco - In the US, what is the format for EINs? - Is it bad to use tap water in your humidifier? - Which NBA players are on supermax contracts - What are some of the best steakhouses in Manhattan? - How much and how long does it take to procure a DUNS number? - In terms of real estate, what is historic tax credit development LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use Google basically as a proxy to find websites that I'd then have to sift through to find the answers to these questions. It was another layer of indirection. Now that I can have an LLM just tell me the answer (you still need to approach it with a skeptical eye, since it can certainly get some things wrong), I don't need to "search" the search results pages themselves and read multiple articles and blog posts to hopefully find the answer to my question.
- upcoming-sesame 2y agoSame for me. The only thing I still use Google for is for up to date data as LLMs are not great with that yet
- RandallBrown 2y agoI really like having the site where the answer came from so I can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct. Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy. Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)
- alter123 2y agothe analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation - reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and they're consciously boosting it - wikipedia clearly doesn't have increase in page views - substack as a product has been on rise, more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with the content on the platform
- steezeburger 2y agoAre they just getting more ai bot visits because they're user generated content sites?
- rqtwteye 2y agoIt's basically the same situation as the .COM bubble. Some companies used the internet to an advantage and thrived. Others slapped ".COM" on everything but didn't really understand what they are doing.
- jgalt212 2y ago> Yet, despite the challenges, Quora still pulls in just under 1 billion visits a month. Man, those a big numbers. I would have bet two orders of magnitude lower.
- jgalt212 2y agoand the author report this about Wikipedia > Also, over 5B visits a month - consider me impressed. How does Wikipedia only do 5X the visits that Quora does? Which number is way off?
- dumbledoren 2y agoThat's because Quora is still very good if you ignore content you don't like and just engage with content that interests you.
- Ekaros 2y agoIt ranks very very highly in Google's SEO... It is generally one of the results you get when you search for most questions. So to me it sounds pretty reasonable number.
- wdutch 2y agoThe decline in cnet might suggest people are using LLMs for product reviews and recommendations? I'm surprised because I personally wouldn't trust an LLM for that. Maybe the new frontier of SEO is gaming LLMs to recommend your product.
- itsjustoldai 2y agoIt seems to me that this article has no way of telling whether these are actual people visiting or AI agents/bots visiting to get content. I'm betting it's the later in all cases.
- necovek 2y agoAll I see is some unmeasured correlation. How did we get to causality?
- timewizard 2y ago> Users no longer need to click through pages when AI summarizes everything in seconds. Sure... unless they want /accurate/ results.
- HermanMartinus 2y agoI can attest to this. I run Bear Blog, and it has seen a dramatic rise in signups month-over-month. My suspicion is that other platforms are getting covered in AI generated content, and while Bear isn’t perfect, there is a lot more curation and a strict no advertising policy.
- user9999999999 2y agoMore or less trained LLMs are obfuscating "stolen" training data. The status quo used to call this sort of thing theft and piracy
- yalogin 2y agoMy search pattern has completely changed. I just go to chatgpt or meta ai directly these days for topics/queries I need help recall or summarization with. This is usually most of the searches. The only reason I use google is for maps based info. I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is it, the same info can already be summarized by an LLM today. That habit is powerful and what will give these sites some time to pivot if they can Over time as genAI becomes better, everything that doesn't have any time based function will be consumed by it.
- ViktorRay 2y agoYou should try Perplexity too. In my experience Perplexity is far better than Google Gemini or Meta AI for searching for info and getting summaries.
- yalogin 2y agoThis is where first mover advantage and habit play too. Chat gpt and meta ai are good enough for basic recall and summarization tasks. Google has a branding problem. They integrated Gemini into their search UI, so they just want people to continue the same landing page. However, it feels too noisy, and unnecessary. All I want is a summarization. I don't want to see a huge list of ads or slightly related links. Adds no value to me. I tried anthropic but it fell way short and so stuck with chat gpt and meta ai. Now for Perplexity I need a compelling need to use it. Haven't seen it yet.
- ViktorRay 2y agoI mentioned Perplexity because their service focuses pretty much only on using LLMs for searching and summarizing. It doesn’t do creative stuff like some of the other services do. I mainly also just use AI for searching and summarizing like you seem to do as well so that’s why I recommended it.
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- TZubiri 2y agoLooks like those whose business model is producing shitty content are struggling, and those that provide quality content, are doing well. Wikiepdia: Good Quora: Bad Reddit: Good CNet: Bad It makes sense, as LLM content is of mediocre quality, if you want something of good and reliable quality you go elsewhere.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoIf your service is simply prompting an AI model, your company will be eaten be obsoleted by AI. If your service acquires real world data specific to individuals and organizations that is used to make better decisions, your company will not be eaten by AI (immediately).
- grvag1 2y agoI believe the biggest dent AI has made is in the SEO and consulting industries.
- Johnny555 2y agoI don't think CNET can blame AI for its downfall, it's just not a very good site. It used to be a good place for tech news (after all, they are "news.com"), but now they are mostly a review site with shallow reviews seemingly based on what they read on manufacturer and retailer product pages... and of course, with lots of affiliate links so they get their cut if you buy a product based on their review.
- AznHisoka 2y agoWhile AI may technically be leading to less traffic for some sites, they didn’t deserve most of that traffic in the first place. Also most haven’t lost 90% of their traffic yet, so AI, please continue your killing - you’re not done yet!
- djmips 2y agoHow does AI keep up if they shutdown their primary sources?
- zkmon 2y agoIt's organic food vs plastic noodles. But it goes only as long as people can hope to tell real fish apart from artificial ones in the pond. We are desperate and running back to our biological habitats - with real people, real talk and real imperfection.