22 ms·

AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

• 5350-uiop-1130 1y ago
  if you can get answer in 1 step, why 2? things like "gemini said" and "gpt said" will enter common lingo like "google it" did in the 2010s
• toenail 1y ago
  Why could i perform a web search that leads me to multiple results with cloudflare identity checks and ad spam when i can just use a llm..
• skywhopper 1y ago
  Which is of course Google’s short-sighted goal. See also their push to switch to full “AI mode” search which doesn’t show results at all.
  • thewebguyd 1y ago
    It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here? Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only continue to harm them in the long run, no? ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on replacing that?
    • flashgordon 1y ago
      So youd be surprised and scared - the Ad PMs I know are totally salivating at this. Their angle is "SEO is no more - it is GEO now". GenAI Engine Optimization. Welcome to the Futurama Internet Future!
      • EarlKing 1y ago
        "Futurama does not endorse the COOOOOOL crime of fraudulent misrepresentation!" Seriously, Futurama and Cyberpunk and 1984 were all supposed to be warnings... not how-to manuals.
    • xt00 1y ago
      Yea it is tricky for them -- the old model of "search, see google text / link ad, scroll, click website, scroll, see some ads on that page as well, done" will be replaced with "search, see google text / link ad, read AI result, 'and here are some relevant websites'" -- where all of the incentives there will be to "go into more depth" on the websites that are linked there.
    • bugsMarathon88 1y ago
      Total behavioral control through the augmentation of senses, emotions and all other sensibilities. Such political power is significantly more valuable than mere revenue.
      • landl0rd 1y ago
        Okay I think the question is still how they plan to convert this into cash, because political power can't buy food or pay your employees or be stored and quantified simply, which is why we invented money. Assuming this dystopian scenario is correct.
    • mrheosuper 1y ago
      AI subscription would be my guess. Want better model ? Open your wallet.
    • gundmc 1y ago
      I'm pretty sure their endgame right now is just "don't lose all of your market share to companies that _will_ use LLMs".
• dado3212 1y ago
  Related, but to whichever PM put the "AI Mode" on the far left side of the toolbar, thus breaking the muscle memory from clicking "All" to get back from "Images", I expect some thanks for unintentionally boosting your CTR metrics.
  • fsh 1y ago
    That decision probably paid someone's new car. The KPIs will be excellent. Who cares about what the users might have wanted to do with their clicks.
    • pacifika 1y ago
      Maybe have it forced hover under the mouse cursor next, maybe think of what the long term effect are instead of the KPIs.
• bgwalter 1y ago
  You can apparently disable these annoying and useless "AI" overviews by cursing in the query: https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing-links-cursing-disables-googles-ai-overviews/ https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...
  • x0x0 1y ago
    appending a -"fuck google #{insert slur of choice here}" to my search results has improved them. Then I wonder why I do this to myself and ponder going back to kagi.
    • privatelypublic 1y ago
      Jesus dude. Just use the udm options instead of practicing slurs.
      • nneonneo 1y ago
        I wish there was a good udm option for "what you used to show me before AI took over". For example, I like seeing flight updates when I punch in a flight number, which udm=14 does not show. That said, udm=14 has still been a huge plus for me in terms of search engine usability, so it's my default now.
  • riantogo 1y ago
    Or just append with -ai => "how to pick a running shoe -ai"
    • devnullbrain 1y ago
      Those four characters are enough friction to slowly grind down the number of today's outraged people into a population small enough that, when Google stop supporting '-ai', people will think it's weird that you still care.
  • Polizeiposaune 1y ago
    It's relatively straightforward to create a firefox alternate search engine which defaults to the "web" tab of Google search results which is mostly free of Google-originated LLM swill. Instructions are here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-custom-search-engine-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-custom-search-engin... The "URL with %s in place of search term" to add is: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&client=firefox-b-d&udm=14 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&client=firefox-b-d&udm=14
• oezi 1y ago
  The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their cash cow ad business.
  • pryelluw 1y ago
    Not tricky at all. This is a new line of business that provides them with more ad space to sell. If the overview becomes a trusted source of information, then all they need to do is inject ads in the overviews. They already sort of dye that. Imagine it as a sort of text based product placement.
    • NoPicklez 1y ago
      I'd say putting ads into AI search overviews is absolutely tricky. You might think that's the correct way to do it, but there is likely much more to it than it seems. If it wasn't tricky at all you'd bet they would've done it already to maximize revenue.
      • pryelluw 1y ago
        Product teams in big companies move slow. But soon enough all the shit ads are going to pop up.
    • stevenAthompson 1y ago
      > If the overview becomes a trusted source of information It never will. By disincentivizing publishers they're stripping away most of the motivation for the legitimate source content to exist. AI search results are a sort of self-cannibalism. Eventually AI search engines will only have what they cached before the web became walled gardens (old data), and public gardens that have been heavily vandalized with AI slop (bad data).
  • kozikow 1y ago
    Ads inside LLMs (e.g. pay $ to boost your product in LLM recommendation) is going to be a big thing. My guess is that Google/OpenAI are eyeing each other - whoever does this first. Why would that work? It's a proven business model. Example: I use LLMs for product research (e.g. which washing machine to buy). Retailer pays if link to their website is included in the results. Don't want to pay? Then redirect the user to buy it on Walmart instead of Amazon.
• HPsquared 1y ago
  I've seen blatantly wrong stuff in that overview too many times, I just ignore it now.
  • Jare 1y ago
    To be fair, the actual results are often even worse. I'm pretty sure we're close to the point where our favorite AI prompt replaces classic googling. While it will get a lot of the answer wrong, it will lead to the right result faster than plain searches. If nothing else, because refining our search at the AI prompt will be way easier than in classic google. Google knows and needs to stay on top of this paradigm change, but I guess doesn't know how to monetize AI search yet so it doesn't want to force the change (yet).
    • throaway5454 1y ago
      Ai used in this way is going to replace gui as we know it. Why click when you can just tell ai what you want to to do.
      • thejohnconway 1y ago
        Because I usually don’t want to talk to computers in front of other people? It isn’t that it feels silly, but that it’s incredibly distracting for everyone to hear every interaction you have with a computer. This is true even at home. Maybe we can type the commands, but that is also quite slow compared with tapping/clicking/scrolling etc.
    • Nursie 1y ago
      Sometimes search results don't contain the info you need, sometimes they are SEO-spam, or a major topic adjacent to what you need to know about floods the results. But they're not often confidently wrong like AI summaries are.
  • ahartmetz 1y ago
    I recently typo'd something and the AI box just fabricated a semi-plausible story about how the ancient X did Y.
• wkat4242 1y ago
  To be fair, Google's actual search couldn't be much worse than it was lately. It's like they really try to get all the spam, clickbait and scams right at the top. The AI overview sucks but it can't really be a lot worse than that :)
  • arlcode 1y ago
    I have a lot of confidence that Google will figure out a way to do it. The same economic incentives that led to SEO slop are still there in my opinion. More "content" equals more opportunity to integrate ads even if they are not woven into the AI response directly. It will be tuned to allow and all that changes is cutting out the website provider. Google is incapable/unwilling to do anything beyond flooding the world with ads. They don't have a great track record of actually selling things to people for money.
• yfw 1y ago
  Maybe if the search wasnt full of ads and scams
  • throwawayoldie 1y ago
    ...the same content that the AI was trained on, you mean?
    • landl0rd 1y ago
      At least they're not thrown in my face and appearing as eighteen pop-ups, notification requests, account-walls, SEOslop, and a partridge in a pear tree.
    • awakeasleep 1y ago
      Thats not a real rebuttal. First, in the pre training stage humans curate and filter the data thats actually used for training. Then in the fine tuning stage people write ideal examples to teach task performance Then there is reinforcement learning from human feedback RLHF where people rank multiple variations of the answer an AI gives, and thats part of the reinforcement loop So there is really quite a bit of human effort and direction that goes into preventing the garbage-in garbage-out type situation you're referring to
• j45 1y ago
  This means searches are still happening, just being routed elsewhere? I noticed Google's new AI summary let's me click on a link in the summary and the links are posted to the right. Those clicks are available, might not be discovered yet, curious though if those show up anywhere as data. Google being able to create summaries off actual web search results will be an interesting take compared to other models trying to get the same done without similar search results at their disposal. The new search engine could be google doing the search and compiling the results for us how we do manually.
  • thewebguyd 1y ago
    > Google being able to create summaries off actual web search results will be an interesting take compared to other models trying to get the same done without similar search results at their disposal. And may get them in some anti-trust trouble once publishers start fighting back, similar to AMP, or their thing with Genius and song lyrics. Turns out site owners don't like when Google takes their content and displays it to users without forcing said users to click through to the actual website.
    • j45 1y ago
      Definitely a possibility.
  • AnimeLife 1y ago
    They have decades of data to map queries to pages. They also have access to crawl the pages in advance.
• ghushn3 1y ago
  I subscribe to Kagi. It's been worth it to have no ads and the ability to uprank/downrank sites. And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.
  • slau 1y ago
    You can opt-in to get an LLM response by phrasing your queries as a question. Searching for “who is Roger rabbit” gives me Wikipedia, IMDb and film site as results. Searching for “who is Roger rabbit?” gives me a “quick answer” LLM-generated response: “Roger Rabbit is a fictional animated anthropomorphic rabbit who first appeared in Gary K. Wolf's 1981 novel…” followed by a different set of results. It seems the results are influenced by the sources/references the LLM generated.
    • greatgib 1y ago
      I don't think that you are right. It is the search result that influence the llm generated result and not the opposite. In your case, I think that it is just the interrogation point in itself at the end that somehow has an impact on the results you see.
      • s900mhz 1y ago
        It’s a feature of Kagi. Putting the question mark does invoke AI summaries. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
        • greatgib 1y ago
          I know for the summary. What I say is that the search results part of the page, with or without the summary should be the same in theory. So if the other person saw a difference in the result returned it might be only because of the impact of the question mark character itself on the search index
          • s900mhz 1y ago
• ars 1y ago
  The AI overview doesn't (for me) cause a big drop in clicking on sites. But AI as a product most certainly does! I was trying to figure out why a certain AWS tool stopped working, and Gemini figured it out for me. In the past I would have browsed multiple forums to figure out it.
• JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Liberating me from "search clicks" is not a bad thing at all. I suspect many of us though don't even go to <search engine> anyway but ask an LLM directly.
  • achierius 1y ago
    It's fundamentally self-destructive though. In time, the sites which rely on search clicks for revenue will essentially cease to be paid for their work, and in many cases will therefore stop publishing the high-quality material that you're looking for.
    • JKCalhoun 1y ago
      I assumed that, after having using LLMs myself increasingly, that LLM's killing search was inevitable anyway. Further I assume that Google recognizes it as well and would rather at least remain somewhat relevant? Google search, as others have mentioned in this thread, increasingly fails to give me high-quality material anyway. Mostly it's just pages of SEO spam. I prefer that the LLM eat that instead of me (just spit back up the relevant stuff, thankyouverymuch). Honestly though, increasingly the internet for me is 1) a distraction from doing real work 2) YouTube (see 1) and 3) a wonderful library called archive.org (which, if I could grab a local snapshot would make leaving the internet altogether much, much easier).
    • landl0rd 1y ago
      Most of the time when I find a good answer from search it's one of a few things: - Hobbyist site - Forum or UGC - Academic/gov - Quality news which is often paywalled Most of that stuff doesn't depend on ad clicks. The things that do depend on ad clicks are usually infuriating slop. I refuse to scroll through three pages of BS to get to the information I want and I really don't care if the slop farmers die off.
    • scarface_74 1y ago
      Sites rely on ad impressions for revenue. I block ads anyway so either way they aren’t getting money from me. And if ad supported content ceases to exist, nothing of value will have been lost. I’m not morally opposed to advertising, I find ad supported content not worth reading especially on mobile.
• blibble 1y ago
  no reason not to block Googlebot now...
• maxdo 1y ago
  Pay per click model Should die , it’s really ugly world where you need to fight through loads of ads to get tiny bit of information. People will go to museums to see how complicated pre-ai era was
  • Gigachad 1y ago
    Yep, there’s so much hate for people who don’t read past the headline, but if you actually click on the articles the websites are almost unusable.
• washadjeffmad 1y ago
  The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed. Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need correct information from a truth source like our websites. We have to track each and every one of these problems down, investigate and evaluate whether we can reproduce them, give them a "thumbs down" to then be able to submit "feedback", with no assurance it will be fixed in a timely manner and no obvious way to opt ourselves out of it entirely. For something beyond our consent and control. It's worse than when Google and Yelp would create unofficial business profiles on your behalf and then held them hostage until you registered with their services to change them.
  • owlstuffing 1y ago
    > The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed. No different from Google search results.
  • brianwawok 1y ago
    Fun. I have people asking ChatGPT support question about my SaaS app, getting made up answers, and then cancelling because we can’t do something that we can. Can’t make this crap up. How do I teach Chat GPT every feature of a random SaaS app?
    • esafak 1y ago
      Write documentation and don't block crawlers.
      • ceejayoz 1y ago
        It’ll still make shit up.
        • nomel 1y ago
          It'll need to make less up, so still worth it.
• ValveFan6969 1y ago
  The clicks in question: "Here's a thirty page story of how grandma discovered this recipe... BTW you need to subscribe/make an account/pay to view the rest of the article!"
• mtkd 1y ago
  Conversely, it's useful to get an immediate answer sometimes 6 months ago, "what temp is pork safe at?" was a few clicks, long SEO optimised blog post answers and usually all in F not C ... despite Google knowing location ... I used it as an example at the time of 'how hard can this be?' First sentance of Google AI response right now: "Pork is safe to eat when cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F (63°C)"
  • brookst 1y ago
    Safe Temperatures for Pork People have been eating pork for over 40,000 years. There’s speculation about whether pork or beef was first a part of the human diet. (5000 words later) The USDA recommends cooking pork to at least 145 degrees.
    • BoorishBears 1y ago
      I searched it. First result under the overview is the National Pork Board, shows the answer above the fold, and includes visual references: https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/ https://pork.org/pork-cooking-temperature/ Most of the time if there isn't a straightforward primary source in the top results, Google's AI overview won't get it right either. Given the enormous scale and latency constraints they're dealing with, they're not using SOTA models, and they're probably not feeding the model 5000 words worth of context from every result on the page.
  • ImaCake 1y ago
    Not only that, it includes a link to the USDA reference so you can verify it yourself. I have switched back to google because of how useful I find the RAG overviews.
    • wat10000 1y ago
      The link is the only useful part, since you can’t trust the summary. Maybe they could just show the links that match your query and skip the overview. Sounds like a billion-dollar startup idea, wonder why nobody’s done it.
• krupan 1y ago
  I feel like the discussion here is missing the point. It doesn't matter if the AI overview is correct or not, it doesn't matter if you can turn it off or not. People are using it instead of visiting actual websites. Google has copied the entire World Wide Web into their LLM and now people not using the web anymore! We have bemoaned the fact that Facebook and Twitter replaced most of the web for most people, but now it's not even those, it's a single LLM owned and controlled by a single corporation.
  • landl0rd 1y ago
    Is there an appreciable difference between a company that controls what information is surfaced via pagerank and one that does so via LLM? Remember the past scandals with google up/downranking various things? This isn't a new problem. Wrt how the average person gets information google doesn't really have more control because people aren't clicking through as much.
    • nicbou 1y ago
      The main difference is that pagerank still rewarded content creators with an audience. Now Google extracts all the value of their work.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• yalogin 1y ago
  For the most part there really is no need to use search in the traditional sense for knowledge. For information it’s still the only because llms are not reliable. But ChatGPT must have taken a huge dent in google’s traffic.
• h4kunamata 1y ago
  Not any AI tho. I have replaced SEO with Perplexity AI only. It isn't a chatbot but it actually search for what you are looking for and most importantly, it shows all the sources it used. Depending on the question I can get anywhere from 10 to 40 sources. No other AI service provides that, they use the data from their training model only which in my experience, is full of errors, incomplete, cannot answer or altogether.
  • nneonneo 1y ago
    Google's AI overviews gives you sources. The sources don't always say what Google AI thinks it says. Or, Google will mix up two sources that are talking about totally different things, assume they're the same thing, and then show you nonsense generated from the mix. I don't immediately assume that Perplexity will be any better off. Citing sources is great, but I'd rather just read the sources myself rather than assuming that the AI did anywhere a good job of actually summarizing them properly. At that point, what does the AI actually usefully bring to the table?
  • jjani 1y ago
    Huh? All of the other AI service provide that. Geminii, Claude, GPT.
  • didibus 1y ago
    Almost all other AI do that as well. ChatGPT will show you like 10+ sources, it'll put it next to the part of the answer that the source was used for too.
• kazinator 1y ago
  > Google users are less likely to click on a link when they encounter search pages with AI summaries Well, doh: "Do I just read the AI summary? Or click past five pages of ads and spam to maybe find an organic link to something real?"
  • watwut 1y ago
    I find this claim massivy exaggerated.
• ctas 1y ago
  We (Geostar.ai) work with many brands and companies that have experienced near-death situations caused by Google's AI Overviews. The negative impact this feature has had on people's livelihoods is heartbreaking to witness. Just today, I met with a small business owner who showed me that AIO is warning users that his business is a scam, based on bogus evidence (some unrelated brands). It's a new level of bullshit. There's not much these businesses can do other than playing the new GEO game if they want to get traffic from Google. Who knows if Google will even present any search results other than AIO a few years from now.
• throwaway81523 1y ago
  Of course slow, shitty web sites also cause a massive drop in clicks, as soon as an alternative to clicking emerges. It's just like on HN, if I see an interesting title and want to know what the article is about, I can wince and click the article link, but it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer the info I want from the comments. That difference is almost entirely from the crappy overdesign of almost every web site, vs. HN's speedy text-only format.
  • skydhash 1y ago
    I like good design as much as the next guy, but only when it does not impact information access. I use eww (emacs web wowser) and w3m sometimes and it's fascinating how much speed you get after stripping away the JS bloat.
    • kome 1y ago
      js cult will never ever understand this. designers need the courage to work with html+css only.
      • throwaway81523 1y ago
        Kill css too.
        • whatevaa 1y ago
          No need for html too, just use butterflies and telepathy.
          • chasd00 1y ago
            i just pipe echo to netcat if i want to minimize overhead /s
  • vismit2000 1y ago
    You might want to try out https://hackernews.betacat.io/ https://hackernews.betacat.io/
• AnimeLife 1y ago
  In a sense this is similar to what Amazon has been doing in few countries. Find top selling products, get them cheaper from somewhere, rebrand them, rank them higher and sell them. They don't need to invest in market research like their competetors, they get all data from Amazon.com At big tech scale, this is clearly anti-compete and piracy IMHO.
  • nicbou 1y ago
    Except in this case they still rely on people to create content to train their AI on.
• feverzsj 1y ago
  The AI overview is wrong in most of the time when I check the referenced links. It's even worse than ads.
• southernplaces7 1y ago
  My question here is: why would Google try to actively sabotage, possibly even devastate the very backbone cash cow that is all those spammy, SEO-laden search and ad results right below its own AI overview, that's displacing them for engine users who don't bother with the rest (I thing I personally avoid because fuck you hallucinating AI overview) Anyone have any ideas? EDIT: Also, the irony of Google, which for years harped on and on about working to fight incorrect, erroneous and also even "misinformation-laden" search results, now making a hallucinating AI that often makes up outright bullshit with authority as its primary, first-line result for information. Truly a company that bathes in an ever deeper pool of shit the bigger it grows.
• protocolture 1y ago
  First they came for the stackoverflow comments, and I said nothing, for stackoverflow is notorious for being full of jerks. Then they came for the search engine clicks, and I said nothing, because monetised search contributed heavily to the enshittification of the internet. Great so far. Can AI kill off social media and internet surveillance next?
  • nicbou 1y ago
    Who will provide the training data for AI when Google has stolen everyone's audience and revenue?
• wiseowise 1y ago
  And thank God! It does. I’m done dealing with bazillion shitty websites with bad, slow, performance, bad ui and dark patterns. All I need is an information in a convenient format and that is what AI tools provide to me.
  • croes 1y ago
    But that also kills the good sites.
    • teddyh 1y ago
      Only if those “good sites” were dependent on advertisements for survival.
      • LinXitoW 1y ago
        How many of the "good sites" do you pay for regularly? 99.9% of ALL sites are ad-funded, good or bad. Most people, even people with the disposable income, don't pay for the good sites, esp. because their value is only fractions of a cent from that one google search a month. My irrational hope is that the "good" sites establish a shared Spotify-esque model, where I pay a basic subscription that then gets distributed roughly by usage to all the websites. There is no chance in hell anyone is willing to have the 20 subscriptions to support all the websites they've gotten utility from (directly OR indirectly) this month.
      • croes 1y ago
        Some do
  • Therenas 1y ago
    Okay, but when those sites go out of business, where does the AI get its information from? This is obviously not sustainable.
    • bloak 1y ago
      It's only the advertising-funded sites that go out of business and a lot of those sites were in any case just scraping other sites. What proportion of reliable online information is only available from a web site that is funded by advertising? It's not zero, but it's not a very big number, either, I suspect, so it might be sustainable.
• josteink 1y ago
  I'm going to call good old "supply & demand" at this. There was a demand for information, and people made websites to make that information easily accessible. The market was working. Then cheap/free hosting combined with Google Ads came along incentivized the market to SPAM the internet with SEO-optimized websites which makes that information just as inaccessible as the market could possibly tolerate. Basically the market converged on enshittification, rather than excellence. The result of that was that users were forced to search, the first SEO spam, then the second, then the third and maybe somewhere along the line they found what they were really looking for, from a real website. The market just barely supplied what there was a demand for. But thanks to AI and LLMs, the power has now shifted back to the users, and we can sidestep all the Google Ads SEO SPAM enshittification nonsense. If this is done via ChatGpt, DDG Chat or Google AI overviews, I don't really care. Once again we have gained easy access to information without any ill-incentivized middle men making the process cumbersome. This is absolutely a good thing. If this means the death of Google Ads funded content farms, I'm all for it. The niche sites which contains real information was never funded or driven by Google Ads in the first place, so hopefully they won't buckle under during this minor AI apocalypse.
• ripped_britches 1y ago
  Why is this being framed as a problem? People are obviously happier with the new feature, duh Of course they need to make the AI overviews suck less, but saying it’s unfair to sites is crazy talk because your site now just generates less value than an AI response if that’s what stopped you from going If you have content better than Gemini I will still go to your site
  • toenail 1y ago
    Some people are against all kinds of progress. They don't understand that their life depends on progress that was made in the past.
    • vouaobrasil 1y ago
      That does not imply that future progress is a good thing, nor does it imply that future progress will even be useful to the majority. It boggles my mind how some people make the logical inference that "all progress is good" based on "some past progress was useful".
      • toenail 1y ago
        Do you think that having fast, distraction-free access to relevant information is not useful?
        • djeastm 1y ago
          It is useful, but it assumes the information is trustworthy. At least with websites you could discern some credibility based on the organization publishing the information. With AI summaries, it's just "Google's latest model seems to think this is the answer, good luck!"
          • toenail 1y ago
            You can always follow the source links.. or ask for them..
• prince110 1y ago
  [dead]
• metalrain 1y ago
  People only click from search when they have actual need to visit the site. E-commerce, image/video content, social media, etc. That is pretty much as it should be.
  • Oras 1y ago
    This! Why would I go and read 2000 words optimized article for SEO when I can get the answer in one line? I only go to a website to perform an action as you said.
• littlecranky67 1y ago
  Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking * There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. Upon pressing the tiny X in the corner it takes 1-2 seconds to close or multiple presses as I am either missing the x or because there is a network roundtrip * I scroll down a screen and get a popup overlay asking me to signup for their service or newsleter, again messing with the x to close * video or other flashy adds in the content keep bugging me This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often it is not). If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.
  • AlecSchueler 1y ago
    > This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me And to find that out you have to hit Page Down about twenty times, scanning as you, because the content is padded out to increase ad coverage.
  • jonplackett 1y ago
    I made this game inspired by all the dark patterns from darkpatterns.org - every pop up is based on a real dark pattern https://www.termsandconditions.game/ https://www.termsandconditions.game/
    • jama211 1y ago
      Haha, this is great, nice work
    • bokkies 1y ago
      Application error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail
• Huxley1 1y ago
  This situation makes sense since everyone wants quick answers, and AI summaries are really convenient. A lot of people just read the summary without clicking through to the original content. But this can be a real problem for creators who rely on traffic. Does anyone have ideas on how to balance both user needs and support for creators?
  • zb3 1y ago
    > But this can be a real problem for creators who rely on traffic. Wait.. why would that creator be paid for the traffic if I'm not buying any shitty overpriced product advertised on these scammy ads, ever? Especially when I don't even see these thanks to ublock.
• buyucu 1y ago
  AI overviews are search. It's the next iteration of how web searching works.
• cm2187 1y ago
  What I don't understand is how do you square that with google still reporting growth in ads revenues. Surely google's business should tank by that much (not even taking into account the additional cost of processing a seach with AI).
  • Henchman21 1y ago
    Maybe… it was always a lie?
  • lelanthran 1y ago
    > What I don't understand is how do you square that with google still reporting growth in ads revenues. Advertiser sees fewer hits from ad campaign, assumes it's their competitors, then raises their budget slightly to better compete in the ad auction. Multiply that by about 300m businesses. The signals that Google's customers (the advertisers) get is not "Your ad was ignored after we answer the user's query directly", it's "Your ad was ignored". The advertisers cannot tell why the ad was ignored.
    • cm2187 1y ago
      I don't think advertisers are so naive than to not be aware that google now answers many queries with AI.
• verzali 1y ago
  My site never got much traffic from Google and I never wasted time on SEO. So I find it hard to care about losing clicks I didn't have. But I do find it concerning that Google is effectively stealing the time I spend on research and not offering proper credit. I'm always careful to credit people and provide extensive links to the work of others on my site. But here Google and others are simply stealing that work, getting it wrong, and then claiming they did all the effort.
• jama211 1y ago
  Well, yeah.
• PeterStuer 1y ago
  Main reason: Google seach ranking already became so bad that finding the right query to produce a decent result became a craft in and of itself. HN readers might not realize this, but I used to constantly have to search things for friends and family as they just couldn't find it with Google. The AI result is a godsend fir them. I saw a massive drop in their requests to me.
• SwtCyber 1y ago
  But hey, I'm sure Google's quarterly earnings are doing just fine
  • jeffbee 1y ago
    They were fine, though.
• cess11 1y ago
  I find this rather worrying, because the summaries I look at are frequently wrong or misleading. Over the last years I've moved over a lot of initial search to Wikipedia, which either answers directly or provides useful links.
• Mars008 1y ago
  As I understand it they are saying users waste significantly less time on search if there are AI overviews. Is it really bad? Not from users perspective.
• wulfstan 1y ago
  If you're tired of this BS can I encourage you to make: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ Your default search engine. AI overviews begone.
• anothernewdude 1y ago
  I thought the search clicks was a massive driver of data for the search engine. How is this not a bad thing for the search engine company?
• keiferski 1y ago
  What is the long term plan for data acquisition? 1. Use existing websites for training data 2. Replace search traffic with AI prompts, thereby destroying the economic incentive for websites to publish data 3. ?
  • ethan_smith 1y ago
    Step 3 is "train on synthetic data generated by previous AI models" - creating an inevitable quality death spiral as each generation trains on increasingly derivative content.
• dirkc 1y ago
  At some stage Google will need to be accountable for answers they are hosting on their own site. The argument of "we're only indexing info on other sites" changes when you are building a tool to generate content and hosting that content on your own domain. I'm guilty of not clicking when I'm satisfied with the AI answer. I know it can be wrong. I've seen it be wrong multiple times. But it's right at the top and tells me what I suspected when I did the search. The way they position the AI overview is right in your face. I would prefer the "AI overview" to be replaced with something that helps me better search rather than giving me the answer directly.
  • OldfieldFund 1y ago
    Another problem is that you have to click twice: 1. The anchor icon. 2. Then one of the sites that appear on the right (on desktop).
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    > The argument of "we're only indexing info on other sites" changes when you are building a tool to generate content and hosting that content on your own domain. And yet, "the algorithm" has always been their first defense whenever they got a complaint or lawsuit about search results; I suspect that when (not if) they get sued over this, they will do the same. Treating their algorithms and systems as a mysterious, somewhat magic black box.
  • Havoc 1y ago
    > Google will need to be accountable Hell will freeze over first
  • deltarholamda 1y ago
    >But it's right at the top and tells me what I suspected when I did the search. The way they position the AI overview is right in your face. Which also introduces the insidious possibility that AI summaries will be designed to confirm biases. People already use AI chat logs to prove stuff, which is insane, but it works on some folks.
• WA 1y ago
  Several factors are at play here, which are somewhat contradictive: 1. Publishers feel entitled to traffic, because Google send them traffic in recent years. See [1] for example: > "Google's core search engine service is misusing web content for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss," the document said. > "Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google's AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google's general search results page," the complaint said. I have zero pity for these publishers. 2. Not all traffic is created equal. Does a business really lose customers, just because traffic goes down? Maybe that traffic wouldn't have converted anyways. This is basically the old piracy discussion revamped with businesses arguing that every single copy of a movie or a game would've been a customer. It's idiotic. 3. But: Google is now a content provider and different rules apply for those than being merely on a comparable level like an ISP. This has been discussed for years with social networks in minds. Hence, Google needs to be held accountable for providing harmful information (such as in another story here: the temperature for heating pork and when food safety is affected). [1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/googles-ai-overviews-hit-by-eu-antitrust-complaint-independent-publishers-2025-07-04/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/googles-ai-overview...
• r33b33 1y ago
  Good. About time search dies
• falcor84 1y ago
  > So more people could be walking away from a search with the wrong information. I'd actually be very interested in some real research about this. My impression is that in general, SEO-optimized sites are (intentionally) so bad at transmitting information that the difference between an average person "doing their own research" on these sites vs reading the AI overview would either be negligible, or in favor of the AI summaries.
• eitau_1 1y ago
  I hope the small web will thrive again once the profit incentive for putting content on the web ceases to exist so SEO/dark-pattern heavy players will give up and stop suppressing valuable (altruistic?) stuff.
• 7222aafdcf68cfe 1y ago
  What current incentive is left for people to publish on the internet? Discovery mechanisms are less effective than before, people no longer visit your website, copyright is dead and in the end we're just feeding an insatiable machine with slave labour. Or am I missing something ?
  • gtsop 1y ago
    What was the initial incentive for people to publish on the internet before ad revenue was a thing?
    • righthand 1y ago
      Information sharing with other humans, not corporations.
      • quectophoton 1y ago
        Likely with some expectation of receiving attribution for your effort, even if only sometimes.
    • djeastm 1y ago
      The incentive was often creating a community around a shared interest. Good luck doing that with AI summaries stopping people from visiting the sites.
• benrutter 1y ago
  A lot of the comments here are along the lines of "websites are often hostile, and AI summaries are a better user experience" which I agree with for most cases. I think the main thing to be worried about is that this model is undermining the fundamental economic model the internet's currently based on. If I create content like recipes, journalism etc, previously I had exclusive rights to my created content and could monetise it however I wanted. This has mostly led to what we have today, some high quality content, lots of low quality content, mostly monetised through user hostile ads. Previously, if I wanted to take a recipe from "strawberry-recipes.cool" and published it on my own website with a better user experience, that wouldn't have been allowed because of copyright rules. I still can't do that, but Google can if it's done through the mechanism of AI summaries. I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing content on the web altogether. The most likely one is that search/summary engines eat up money that previously came from content creators. The best one is that we find some alternative, third way, for creators to monotise content while maintaining discoverability. I'm not sure what will happen, and I'm not denying the usefulness of AI summaries, but it feels easy to miss that, at their core, they're a fundamental reworking of the current economics of the internet.
  • nicbou 1y ago
    It's crazy how few people see it that way. Big tech is capturing all the value created by content creators, and it's slowly strangling the independent web it feeds on. It's a parasitic relationship. Once the parasite has killed its host, it will feed on its users.
  • pjc50 1y ago
    > I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing content on the web altogether Quite clearly heading in that direction, but with a twist: the only people left will be advertising or propaganda, if there's no money in authenticity or correctness.
    • layer8 1y ago
      There was little to no money in authenticity or correctness in the heyday of home pages and personal blogs. People published because they were excited about sharing information and opinions. That was arguably the internet at its best.
• xpressvideoz 1y ago
  Some HNers said AI overviews sucked and they would never use them, and here it is.
• bomb17982 1y ago
  AI Overviews are great for users but brutal for publishers. Studies show sites lose roughly 40–50% of clicks when these summaries appear. It feels like another step toward Google keeping users on the SERP, instead of sending traffic out. If this sticks, creators will either need to optimize for being included in the AI answer or focus more on direct channels (newsletters, communities) to survive.
• maurits 1y ago
  (forgot what type of flour you need for bread in supermarket) innocently googles 'flour bread' half the screen, CONTINUE WITH GOOGLE - stay in browser, click COOKIES We and our 917 partners CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY, click, click, NEWSLETTER, NEWSLETTER, click, rotate screen because the overlay is to big, click Im sad person who's doesn't want daily bread in his mailbox. APP APP APP, install APP, click click, can't hit the x, let it be LOG IN WITH YOUR FOOFLE ACCOUNT, click 5 pages with autoplay video and SEO slop I'm enjoying AI, while it lasts.
• einrealist 1y ago
  At what point does this remove the 'platform provider' defense for wrong or defamatory information generated by Google & Co?
• Escapade5160 1y ago
  It's unfortunate, but websites now make content for AI. We used to use a browser, to view a site, to gain information. Now we use an AI, to tell us the information.
• karel-3d 1y ago
  I just wonder if AI will destroy the internet... what it will use to train the next generation on? If people go to AI instead of reddit and stack overflow, what will they train the next models on? They have used reddit extensively to train the first GPT models. I guess that's "tomorrow's problem" though
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    > if AI will destroy the internet... what it will use to train the next generation on? Spying on you when you're fixing your carburetor and then making a how-to guide for other people.
• mrkramer 1y ago
  Google introduced its Google Knowledge Graph in 2012 and for sure it caused the drop in website clicks but I would say not that significant. People want quality content and they will always look for quality websites with or without AI overviews. My digital marketing professor once said that customers who look beyond first page results are the most valuable ones, because they are dedicated users and customers. People who read AI overviews won't be your first class users and customers.
• RamblingCTO 1y ago
  I think it's a google problem. The AI summary is often times wrong so I don't bother. But the pages are garbage as well, so normal users won't click on that looking for information. Dark forest and all that. Pages started to optimize for Google and not humans. Humans don't visit anymore. Duh
  • garylkz 1y ago
    Yep, I can't remember when was the last time I've visited a SEO optimized site but I still had the bitter taste that I felt when I last visited it: - searches for "How to do XYZ" and click one of the site - "what is xyz" - "why xyz matters" - "preparations before xyz" - "what you might encounter when xyz" Sounds reasonable and in theory should be useful, but the actual useful info are only stuffed in 1-2 lines of multi paragraphs on tons of sections that I don't care about.
• OhioMan2943 1y ago
  Working as designed :) enjoy the upcoming informational dark age
• nelblu 1y ago
  This is all nice while the AI overview has no ads in it. Wait until it gets enshittified, and I have a feeling AI overview would be so infested with ads that people would rather block it and proceed to reading the actual links. All this said, I am guilty of using this a lot these days - while it is still ad-free. I just ask chatgpt.com to give me a recipe of "XYZ" and it gives it immediately without any annoying repetitive content.
• da25 1y ago
  AI systems still struggle with hallucination, especially when your intent of the query is to obtain the latest information. These models have become very good at handling stored information, but their ability to stay updated remains slow. There is a large volume of queries whose responses and underlying concepts don't change much, and the current AI systems, through innovation and user-friendly interfaces, has managed to cast a wide net over such pre-learned responses. However, unless these AI base model businesses create strong enough incentives for information owners to provide updates and engage in information pipelines that provide fresh data, the current moat of AI might not extend far enough to cover the full spectrum of queries. The “fossil fuel” of LLMs-static public internet data-is running out. Current efforts in RL help systems answer queries beyond their pre-learned knowledge by expanding on the user’s prompt, wherein the system ventures into unknown data territories through agents and self-talk, resulting in action-result memories. These, in turn, serve as a large enough context-rich prompt to have all the needles-in-hay-stack that form the final answer or response. This is made possible by large context windows. For live internet queries, RL can work by expanding context with latest results fetched from the public web using a crawler. However, this is often done without the explicit consent from information providers and offers them little incentive beyond a link in the AI’s response summary. As a result, some providers have started withholding data, and many services now offer tools to block AI crawlers. Meanwhile, multimodal AI systems-capable of understanding text, visuals, and audio-are developing agents that can access content through simulated browser use, effectively bypassing traditional crawler firewalls. This reality highlights the need for a good incentive system for information providers, one that encourages them to share dense, efficiently and ai-structured data. Certain domains have already begun embracing this and sharing their information in ai-native formats, since they have no moat in that information and rather see positive incentives - for example, certain documentation websites for tools and frameworks now provide formatted versions of their docs at /LLMs.txt links. If the information is the resource exchanged on these internet pathways, businesses fundamentally operate either by generating this resource or by retrieving it once it exists, and the other businesses enable this whole endeavour. Ultimately, individuals and organizations will, seek, share and exchange information in ways that enables them to efficiently take decisions and their next actions. Therefore, the incentive to access the most up-to-date information becomes critical when those actions depend on accuracy and timeliness.
• indymike 1y ago
  The web is dying.
• jgalt212 1y ago
  If searchers (people, I assume) are not clicking on content links like they used to, it's safe to assume that they are not clicking on ad links as well. Google is digging their own grave here. That being said, given the zeitgeist, they really have no choice but to offer AI summaries at least on par with the competition.
• dana321 1y ago
  I installed a plugin that removes them, most of the time the answers it gives are complete dogwater
• ponys 1y ago
  I've written a bit about this issue as well, coming from someone working at a company that partially relies on organic search results. It's been interesting (And slightly worrying) to see the shift and layoffs happening here already. https://sasjakoning.com/blog/how-google-s-new-ai-overview-is-messing-up-the-seo-landscape https://sasjakoning.com/blog/how-google-s-new-ai-overview-is... I have to say that the comments here do offer a great alternative perspective as to how terrible the web has been to navigate before AI Overviews became a thing.
• DanielKehoe 1y ago
  I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon), and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing good work that people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of people over four decades. A year ago my ad-supported website had 100,000 monthly active users. Now, like the article says, traffic is down 40% thanks to Google AI Overview zero clicks. There's loss of revenue, yes, but apart from that, I'm wondering how people can find my work, if I produce more? They seldom click through on the "source" attributes, if any. I wonder, am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Arguably because I'm among those that built this dystopia with ever-so-helpful technical content.
  • mvieira38 1y ago
    Unfortunately for you this kind of content does seem to be going the way of Blockbuster. But the writing was on the wall for years now with how much Google Search became useless due to over-SEOification of every website, LLMs were just the dagger
  • lofaszvanitt 1y ago
    The pattern repeats itself. Come, use our services, it's free, it will be good for you. Users elevate the service to a monopoly. And then the behemoth thinks that the users - who gave their blood so the behemoth could grow - are now more like a nuisance and kills those that are the most vulnerable. Every year they put the threshold higher and it results in more and more people getting burned. Of course the big, established brands are protected. So they don't want the average joe's opinion. And they don't want to funnel money to you, now that you have fulfilled your purpose.
    • boringg 1y ago
      What you describe is more like the traditional VC structure for most businesses. Provide low cost services while they need to grow user base -- as user base is established the model now needs to extract value from the users - quality drops and the costs increases. It happens for all VC based products since the drive on returns of invested capital is so high. Put another way -- early stage products that every uses and love (in most not all cases) should not be assumed to be the end product.
• paffdragon 1y ago
  I use a user agent switcher extension to tell Google I am browsing with Lynx to remove some of the annoyances.
• mvieira38 1y ago
  Maybe the future is "LLMO" instead of SEO, where pages are optimized to be more easily readable and navigable by LLMs and agents. Ironically this would make them better IMO, less Javascript bloat, faster load times, no cookies or tracking...
  • wmeredith 1y ago
    This is not the future. It's already a thing. The content_marketing subreddit has been talking about this for months: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/ There isn't a clever new acronym for it yet, but I'm sure it's coming. Right now people are just calling it LLM SEO. I assume the discipline will someday be shortened to AIO or similar. Here's a relevant post from 22 days ago with some good methodology and results: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1lq04yd/we_reviewed_500_syndicated_content_pieces_to_see/ https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1lq04yd/... Here's one from 2 months ago with methodology of findings and action items for executing LLM SEO: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1kzafm9/seo_vs_geo_i_may_have_cracked_a_way_to_rank_on_ai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1kzafm9/...
    • mvieira38 1y ago
      Nice! Thanks for the sources
• FiddlerClamp 1y ago
  My Google feed (the one that shows up on some Android phones) is 90% articles that could be answered in the headline: "This one ingredient improves the taste of your potato salad." Of course you have to click through and read, read, read till you find it. It's why things like /r/savedyouaclick exist.
• twodave 1y ago
  There is (IMO) still a lot of value in having a searchable Internet index. If AI summaries were the only option it would be very difficult to know whether something is influencing the AI. The problem is, of course, that we've already lost that battle with Google and other search providers. We know they're influencing the results. There is no open Internet anymore, but at least we can check the different search indices against each other. Checking different AI summaries against each other seems a pretty fruitless endeavor.
• droidHZ 1y ago
  Tool websites and game websites should not have such a big impact
• cokeandpepsi 1y ago
  [dead]
• Henchman21 1y ago
  More and more it seems the internet is headed to the outcome seen in “Altered Carbon”: populated by AI almost exclusively, full of slop, invisible by the humans that created it originally. An abandoned outpost on a long line of things humans have abandoned.
• EcommerceFlow 1y ago
  I've got years of professional SEO experience, and it's clear SEO is dead for information, especially once you use o3 type Ai models daily. To be frank, good riddance. Information sites were being manipulated on such levels it was ridiculous. Anyways, I expect e-commerce CTR to get SO MUCH better, so overall it'll just be a shift away from SEO over to PPC, or maybe a little bit of both.
• majkinetor 1y ago
  This is most definitely because AI is first thing on the top. If it was the last one, the situation would be much different. Nice tactic to further hype AI.
• 6thbit 1y ago
  It is time to bring back the search index. I believe there is a place for a new but totally different “pagerank”. Perhaps one where “likely to be human made” scoring is the central metric. And figure out how to keep crawlers away.
• guluarte 1y ago
  I think this will be the end of Google as a search engine. I don't see how website owners don't start charging bots for scraping their content.
  • Karawebnetwork 1y ago
    See: "Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access" https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/
    • IAmGraydon 1y ago
      I love Cloudflare, and they're very wise to spin up this service. I wonder how well it will work.
  • IAmGraydon 1y ago
    It's definitely the beginning of the end of Google Search IMO. Extremely small sample size, but me and many people I know have started running the majority of searches that end in a question mark (actual questions) in an LLM, and not Google's LLM. Google is only used as a sort of phone book - when I need to look up the URL of a site by inputting the name, or when I want to find a particular article I previously read. I would say my usage of Google has reduced by about 75% (seat-of-the-pants estimate). It's just better to do it this way, and I have to imagine that this sentiment will spread. Google will have to survive on other products, like YouTube. I see a massive contraction of their employee base in the not-so-distant future. Low-return products that are subsidized by the massive revenue of search will likely be cut as well if they can't be monetized more effectively (which will ruin them).
• grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
  The enshitification of search engines is driving me more and more to LLMs for all their warts. I can usually force them to provide sources and do my search that way.
• p0w3n3d 1y ago
  For some (unknown to me) reason the web pages that used to sustain themselves on very small, quiet ads that were shown on sides of the page, now require full page, annoying, shouting, focus stealing, one-minimal-x-closing-after-few-seconds ADS. Therefore AI summary is a panaceum for this sickness. However I understand that pages that have articles written need money to pay for those articles. For some another (unknown to me) reason reading something by AI and summarizing it is not a copyright violation, but the work that has been done to prepare the valuable content (article) will not be rewarded, therefore extrapolating it to future I can see that the 'dead internet theory' is coming right up. People will stop writing because they don't get rewarded, so AIs will start speaking and discussing with other AIs and the entropy might lower (as in the amount of information present in the internet) leaving us to AI generated content only.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• hackitup7 1y ago
  A lot of startups like Profound are going after the "AEO" (basically SEO but of AI engine) space and absolutely blowing up. Marketers are freaking out. It's crazy to see the search juggernaut finally getting threatened.
• AshleyJanssen 1y ago
  As one of the creators whose entire business relied on website clicks for long-form, high-quality content, which is now being amalgamated into AI slop, I can confirm that search clicks are WAY down. I write a free bi-weekly newsletter/blog, which has been the primary lead gen for my consulting business. No particular effort at SEO, but up until 6 months ago, I was highly ranked on many terms. Now, my newsletter signups and leads are almost at a standstill.
• mrinterweb 1y ago
  Knowing that your content is unlikely to be seen by many humans, and is mainly just feeding an AI is pretty discouraging. AI is great at detecting patterns, if content creations is discouraged, and more AI content is generated, AI content is likely to become so homogeneous that the internet becomes more of an echo chamber (than it already is).
• coalbin 1y ago
  Hard to take a publication seriously when its content is editorialized to this degree. Even the title is trying to impose itself onto the reader.
• tj-teej 1y ago
  If Google just copied and pasted the content from my blog and put it on their own website which had ads that paid them, preventing customers from going to my blog (and thus seeing my ads which I get paid for), that would be obviously wrong. How is this any different?
• system2 1y ago
  Warms my heart. Clicking ad-infested bullshit articles and wasting many minutes trying to find the line where the answer lies was the worst internet experience of the last decade. I am glad crappy ad-blogging is dying.
• tomnetherland 1y ago
  I don't like having both AI overview and search results in the same page. I am looking for either one and not both usually...
• julienb_sea 1y ago
  I pay 20$/mo for chatGPT. I find searching through websites for information feels very outdated. I have some websites I specifically visit (e.g. aggregators like HN, journalism like WSJ), but if I want information I am going to have chatGPT present it to me in a manner tailored to my specific investigation. I do still google things when I want to find a particular thing, such as a product link, but for general information I am going to use an LLM.
• nkotov 1y ago
  I feel like there should be two modes - search and answer. It's helpful to get an AI summarize answer like 90% of the time. But the other 10%, I am searching for something specific. I use Perplexity's Comet browser part-time now. I feel like what makes me annoyed about AI overview summaries is that sometimes I really just need to get the actual site itself and not a summary. For example, I needed to find EC2 pricing information and Perplexity's default search gave me a summary answer. I was looking for Vantage.sh's instance info site.
• andy_ppp 1y ago
  I find I read the AI summary then realise I prefer and trust ChatGPT’s answer more so copy my query into that and go from there. Having below average “chat” suggestions in a non-chat interface with loads of SERP cruft feels pointless.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• fahhem 1y ago
  In other news, water makes things wet
• johnnienaked 1y ago
  I type -ai every time
• edwin2 1y ago
  people forget why users search - to find what they are looking for. as the saying goes, “No one wants a drill, they want a quarter inch hole.” the first time i realized Google had a problem was when i used ChatGPT to search for Youtube videos, and compared to Youtube’s search, it was an order of magnitude easier to find the exact videos i was looking for. Hallucinations are not a problem in a query like this, because i have what i need to evaluate the results: did i find interesting Youtube videos to watch? did i find what i was looking for? generally speaking, users seek to minimize the effort required to achieve their goals.
• MagicMoonlight 1y ago
  It saves so much time looking at slop websites like arstechnica. Those kinds of websites are already made up content anyway, so there’s no real difference in the factual content.