4 ms·

> No discovery - no business. I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up t

> No discovery - no business. I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less. We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating. I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again. As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"

motbus3 9mo ago
Same where I work for 30% on some regions and for those where they put money only saw a minimum increase. I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime. We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic. F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.
Aperocky 9mo ago
Perhaps SEO will become a business to churn out large amount of digestable text with friendly robot.txt and hoping the next AI model learns it? This seem to be the solution, just having a slightly longer turn around time.
pier25 9mo ago
I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet. Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.
- usef- 9mo ago
  Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either. The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.
  - pier25 9mo ago
    IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.
    - usef- 9mo ago
      They made money by licensing their search technology to other sites, as well as selling physical search appliances for businesses. They were considered by some to be struggling to find a way to monetise well. Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human existence. Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.
      - pier25 9mo ago
        It's not only the computational cost though. Hardware requirements are much higher and GPUs need to be replaced every 2-3 years. Plus model training expenses which are considerable. I imagine it's easily 100x more expensive and the margins (if there's ever any profit) will be very low.
      - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
        >Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads. Not at the scale of a trillion dollars, though. You can't make that kind of money back with eyeballs. You either need government subsidies or insane vertical integration. And if your program threatens to neuter the GDP of a country, I don't know how long subsidies will last. At least not in a democracy. People are so mad about immigrants taking jobs, and this would be 10 times worse (and bipartisan, eventually). Even then: we're quickly hitting a resource wall as well. Are we really going to go to war just so we can have some dude generate AI sheep memes? Something's got to give.
zdragnar 9mo ago
The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased? So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here. It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive rather than potential coincidence.
- wombatpm 9mo ago
  If you can identify scraping bots, can’t you just serve them pages and pages of Lor Ipsum text
  - zdragnar 9mo ago
    Not every human visits to buy either. The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause. OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.
- burningChrome 9mo ago
  >> The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased? Yes. >> So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here. When I was reviewing our analytics, I noticed a huge uptick in traffic from IP addresses in Sigapore and Beijing. This coincided with spikes from Linux OS traffic that was higher than desktop and iOS traffic which has always been the two highest OS's for our traffic. Add in a huge spike in direct traffic all pointed in one direction - AI bots and crawlers.

motbus3 9mo ago

Same where I work for 30% on some regions and for those where they put money only saw a minimum increase. I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime. We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic. F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.

Aperocky 9mo ago

Perhaps SEO will become a business to churn out large amount of digestable text with friendly robot.txt and hoping the next AI model learns it? This seem to be the solution, just having a slightly longer turn around time.

pier25 9mo ago

I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet. Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.

usef- 9mo ago
Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either. The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.
- pier25 9mo ago
  IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.
  - usef- 9mo ago
    They made money by licensing their search technology to other sites, as well as selling physical search appliances for businesses. They were considered by some to be struggling to find a way to monetise well. Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human existence. Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.
    - pier25 9mo ago
      It's not only the computational cost though. Hardware requirements are much higher and GPUs need to be replaced every 2-3 years. Plus model training expenses which are considerable. I imagine it's easily 100x more expensive and the margins (if there's ever any profit) will be very low.
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      >Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads. Not at the scale of a trillion dollars, though. You can't make that kind of money back with eyeballs. You either need government subsidies or insane vertical integration. And if your program threatens to neuter the GDP of a country, I don't know how long subsidies will last. At least not in a democracy. People are so mad about immigrants taking jobs, and this would be 10 times worse (and bipartisan, eventually). Even then: we're quickly hitting a resource wall as well. Are we really going to go to war just so we can have some dude generate AI sheep memes? Something's got to give.

zdragnar 9mo ago

The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased? So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here. It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive rather than potential coincidence.

wombatpm 9mo ago
If you can identify scraping bots, can’t you just serve them pages and pages of Lor Ipsum text
- zdragnar 9mo ago
  Not every human visits to buy either. The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause. OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.
burningChrome 9mo ago
>> The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased? Yes. >> So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here. When I was reviewing our analytics, I noticed a huge uptick in traffic from IP addresses in Sigapore and Beijing. This coincided with spikes from Linux OS traffic that was higher than desktop and iOS traffic which has always been the two highest OS's for our traffic. Add in a huge spike in direct traffic all pointed in one direction - AI bots and crawlers.