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Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site,
by ekidd 5mo ago
Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?
- whazor 5mo agoWebsites tend to be updated and considered to be the source as well.
- Andrex 5mo agoFree speculation: I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources. Presumably, the new web will require users to memorize websites/brands and go directly to those sites if they see a lot of their results are being provided by one source. Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
- victor106 5mo ago>I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources. ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted. My speculation is all information worth anything is going to be behind some kind of wall.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago> ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted. Maybe I'm just #builtdifferent, but I click these a lot. Especially if I'm trying to research or make a decision on something, I want the actual source and not the potentially-fudged summary.
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoI click those all the time if it is something that matters and I wanna verify that the AI got it correctly.
- microtherion 5mo agoAbsolutely! And I also click them to get an idea how good the source is.
- dbetteridge 5mo agoSeems like a great way to end up knowing no real information and with no ability to analyse literature or think for yourself? Not to mention the hallucinations
- runako 5mo ago> Websites may go back to being simply labors of love. The situation may be even worse. Back in the labor of love era, at least webmasters could get feedback from readers. In the LLM era, readers may not even know that the site exists. Without feedback/community, the overall quality of those sites will decrease over time.
- Andrex 5mo agoI've been mulling over your comment for a few days now. On the old internet, "know one knows that you're a dog." On the new internet, "know one knows (for sure) that you're an AI." In a mixed discussion consisting of both AI and human participants, AI could generate interesting discussions and recite novel-sounding statements for ongoing ones. It doesn't sound plausible to me that an avalanche of profit-driven LLMs would even post -- I would think they'd be the lurkers. My take would be that LLMs actively participating, depending on the content they post, are also labors of love by some nerd out there trying to make the best LLM. Drain all the profit motives and rent-seeking from the web, and even something like AI joining discussions doesn't sound scary.
- al_borland 5mo agoIt seems like they should have a model similar to YouTube. If I watch a video on YouTube made by someone, they get a little cash, and it ads up. Similarly, if I use Gemini uses a website for an answer, it should pay something to those sites for the information it gathered. Sites would need to sign up to earn via Google, and I'd imagine there would be a certain threshold to cross to make it worth cutting checks... but that would make all these AI search tools feel much less scummy while providing site owners an incentive to keep sharing information on the internet. Where a model like this would get messy is with sites like reddit. It's a very popular source for AI search, but the value comes from the users, not the platform itself.
- vb-8448 5mo agoActually it cannot work this way, content creators make far more money from ads in the video itself compared to the one yt gives them. If it were for yt money alone basically we will still be in the 2010 yt: folks that doing it just for fun. The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all.
- al_borland 5mo ago> The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all. This depends on implementation. I primarily use Kagi for any LLM stuff. I cites pretty much everything and links out to the source. I regularly use this for search. The normal search results may not have what I need, but a line in the AI results sounds better and I click through to the source to get more context. I find clicking through to the source is important, as I've often seen the AI get it wrong. The page has what I need on it, but the AI grabbed the wrong thing and got it backward. I'm probably in the minority, I'm guessing most people don't use LLMs like this.
- vb-8448 5mo agoMaybe there are some exceptions, but my[0] behaviour changed a lot in the last 3 years: - in the past Google was the entry point for everything, I was opening every single site at the top of my search and navigate through it. E.g.: if the site was a Reddit or HN post I was reading comments, following links, ecc - today I'm using google 1 in 3 times and I mostly read the "AI Overview" section. The other 2 out of 3 I go directly into chatgtp, claude or gemini and rarely follow any links. [0] But I see the same pattern basically in all of my colleagues, friends and relatives.
- Manuel_D 5mo agoGoogle's AI summaries already do this. I occasionally click through to see the underlying source the AI summary leaned on to generate the response, but probably only ~20% of the time.
- sleepycat801 5mo agoI rely far more on bookmarks and memorised URLs now.
- Andrex 5mo agoThis is the future I see happening. And, I don't think it will be a total apocalypse. The web will endure.
- chadgpt3 5mo agoIt's kind of like any extinction scenario though: Yeah, there will still be a big ball of rock after the nuclear apocalypse, there will still be life on the rock, and probably even still humans, but that only makes it slightly less tragic.
- Andrex 5mo agoI have to focus on the silver linings or things are too sad. :(
- Unai 5mo ago> Websites may go back to being simply labors of love. If I'm gonna lose my job, at least give me that in return
- pflenker 5mo agoA couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then. This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money. So the company took the deal. History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
- iamtedd 5mo agoReal-world Prisoner's Dilemma.
- jonshariat 5mo agoIt always comes back to game theory haha
- khana 5mo ago[dead]
- drcongo 5mo ago"Nice data you got there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it"
- vb-8448 5mo agoThe fact is that internet is already "tech giants own realm": the power is way beyond public imagination and affects all of us in real life on daily bases, but there are still people thinking they are not the "evil one" here.
- thelastgallon 5mo agoThis reminds me of Walmarts squeezing strategy with all the manufacturers. Business with us at the price we say or out of business.
- thedelanyo 5mo ago> then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites? Mention
- lacewing 5mo agoIt's worse than that. They train their models preferentially on what they consider to be high-quality data. But if you look at the usual "references" on search queries, they're often just a post-hoc BS justification that links to spam blogs or Tiktok videos.
- swarnie 5mo agoAllow? Deep down, do you think you have a choice? Mechanisms might exist to make you think you have one, the same way copywrite should prevent millions of books being gobbled up by TheZuck but ultimately do you really have a choice? Rules and laws don't exists for you.
- alt227 5mo agoYes, Google advertises its crawler IP ranges and it is quite easy to keep track of this and block them. But only if you control the infrastructure that your site runs on of course.
- rolph 5mo agostego your site, google sees the red herring version, intended users see the payload. this has been done before, quite often, but toward ends morally askew.
- account42 5mo agoYou think they'll stick to those IPs any more than robots.txt when it comes to that?
- alt227 5mo agoYes I do, I also think they will continue identifying themselves in the user-agent header. https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/overview-google-crawlers https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...
- coldpie 5mo ago> allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites As far as I know, you don't have a choice. They have no obligation to respect your wishes, and LLMs are legally allowed to scrape & republish your content.
- margalabargala 5mo ago> They have no obligation to respect your wishes I have no obligation to not send all scraper-looking traffic to a black hole full of zip bombs.
- charcircuit 5mo agoYou do have an obligation because what you are describing is illegal, at least in the US under the CFAA.
- margalabargala 5mo agoOkay, nix the zip bombs. What's my obligation to treat bot-shaped traffic as something I should reply to?
- charcircuit 5mo agoYour obligation is not to cause harm to the requester.
- chadgpt3 5mo agoSending them a zip bomb didn't cause harm. It was their choice to unzip it. Is jwz liable if a child sees his testicle eggcup macro when visiting via HN?
- charcircuit 5mo agoWhy send a zip bomb if your goal is not to cause some amount of a denial of service attack to the crawler. Showing porn to a minor is not legal either.
- tedd4u 5mo agoVastly less but still more traffic than if you didn’t participate. I’m sure they will calibrate it just so.
- wvenable 5mo agoIt's a catch-22. Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic. AI summarization has already causes issues for sites like rtings where people are no longer visiting the site but still making use of the data presented there. Leading to rtings not getting enough traffic to continue to post their data. It is an existential crisis for websites and when they go away it'll be an existential crisis for AI.
- monooso 5mo agoThat's some catch, that catch-22.
- BubbleRings 5mo agoI see everything twice!
- Boxxed 5mo agoIt's the best there is.
- elevation 5mo ago> Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic What about the stories of marketing managers who learned months after the fact that their credit card had expired and their google ad spend had ceased with no affect on traffic? Google isn't always an effective promotional vehicle.
- deaton 5mo agoWhat you gain? Nothing, but they and other AI companies have decided not to respect your robots.txt
- loloquwowndueo 5mo agoThere are other ways to block robots from crawling our sites. I have a robots.txt but place no faith in it, it’s just there because it’s cheap and does stop some of the crawlers.
- pokot0 5mo agoInternet is more and more becoming a commercialization platform. If you are selling something on your website, you still want Google (or ChatGPT for that matters) to expose customers to your product. The gate is the actual delivery of the product is behind a purchase/signup. Google and others want to control the entire customer journey, to the point the your website is simply a way to pass metadata to them. They are actually achieving this! this kills the entire internet vibe of the 90s, early 2k
- nine_k 5mo ago> is more and more becoming a commercialization platform FTFY: "couple of decades since has become". The vibes of passion-driven 1990s started to be overwhelmed by the din of money right when the Internet has become a major commerce venue, some time in early 2000s.
- 1718627440 5mo agoThe content has long been commercialized, it's the platform itself, that it is now undergoing that change.
- soco 5mo agoMaybe it's time to think about alternative ways to market your products, if search engine ranking and SEO got broken. I have no idea how, I don't need or do that, but it seems we're past breaking point.
- franze 5mo agowell its already happening and people are fighting over traffic crumbs already, they call it GEO
- UltraSane 5mo agoCan you actually prevent Google from crawling your site?
- prinny_ 5mo agoYou're allowed to exist on the web. The alternative is you are pushed out, your site is not indexed and google / chrome labels it as a security risk when people are trying to reach it directly. The mandate is clear: give up the data or give up the spot.
- jefftk 5mo agoI write things on the internet because I want to share ideas. If someone reads my post and tells a friend, that's great. If an AI crawls my posts and passes along the ideas that's great too. (It doesn't work for ad-funded writing, but while I have substantial sympathy there this has historically been an unpopular argument on HN)
- kennywinker 5mo agoSetting aside ad-driven revenue - the ideas, when spat out by an llm, are disconnected from the author. If people like your ideas, they aren’t becoming fans/followers/long-term-readers. That means good luck leveraging some interesting writing into a book, a speaking tour, a podcast, or even any kind of consistent readership. The llm slurps up your content and monetizes it while you get nothing.
- jefftk 5mo agoI'm not interested in a book, speaking tour, or podcast. I've never had consistent readership because I write about too many unrelated things. I blog because I have ideas I want to share; I don't feel at all ripped off.
- arcatech 5mo agoAnd do you think that’s how everyone should feel? If not, how is it relevant to people not liking what Google is doing?
- jefftk 5mo agoPeople are certainly welcome to feel a lot of different ways, not trying to be prescriptive here. My parent asked: "what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?" and I was describing what I get out of it, in the hope that others might feel similarly.
- kennywinker 5mo agoFair enough, sounds like you won’t be impacted. But the vast majority of people i read online are able to write the content i enjoy because there are paths to earn a living off it. I expect the future of llm search will leave only hobbyists and slop producers standing.
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoMaybe you want your ideas to spread? If your sites purpose is getting ad impressions then yea no point. But if your purpose is to spread ideas then it is still useful.
- nicbou 5mo agoI have spent nine years putting out free information. Surely you realise that I have to pay rent and buy food while I do it? My income isn’t ads, just getting a cut of the sale on the complex products I help you buy. Even that sort of curation takes time and effort. Even for all the things I do for free without any revenue whatsoever - most of it, really - I do want to feel some recognition. I don’t want the interaction to be mediated by an advertising company.
- account42 5mo agoGoogle is not going to be spreading ideas that they don't approve of.
- nine_k 5mo agoIf your site is all about disseminating information (like Wikipedia), then Google would provide a free mirror of sorts. If your site is about your product, Google won't be able to serve the sign-up page from AI; the traffic would come your way. Same for a site that sell something: the traffic you're interested in would arrive at your checkout page. Paid-content sites and ad-supported sites are screwed though, on top of their being screwed by archive.is and ad blockers.
- afavour 5mo agoThe really confusing part about the ad-supported sites is that most of them are supported by Google's ad products. So Google is eating their own lunch here.
- rchaud 5mo agoSearch Engine Result Page (SERP) ads shown on Google itself are far more valuable than display ads that get shown on random websites. Google has been slashing payouts to those sites for over a decade. More recentlt, they've been slashing search impressions to those sites as well. With search engine ads + Youtube ads + Play Store ads, they can probably cut out the third - party site ads business altogether and not miss a beat.
- watwut 5mo ago> Google would provide a free mirror of sorts. That is not what "free mirror" is. Like, that is not the same thing at all.
- esseph 5mo ago> what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites? Site traffic
- nicbou 5mo agoThat’s the thing, they have altered the deal. You still feed the machine but you get no traffic. Keep writing that helpful stuff though!
- rdedev 5mo agoSites pay good money to appear on top search results. Looks like the future is going to be sponsored AI sources. It's going to be even more difficult to figure out if google is presenting you with actual information instead of just an ad
- try-working 5mo agoThat's Google making way for its disruptor. We'll see who that is. Imagine a search engine that just presents search results. Groundbreaking.
- daemin 5mo agoMore likely you're going to get a search engine which returns results as short 5 second AI generated video clips with an infinite scroll. (Torment Nexus rules apply here)
- duskdozer 5mo agoAs it turns out I found out some people use tiktok as a search engine. How exactly, I am not sure.
- jazzypants 5mo agoYou search for a term and then you watch videos until you're satisfied. I don't think it's a very good way to learn about a topic, but millions of people seem to disagree with me. It makes more sense when you remember that 21% of the American population is functionally illiterate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
- hansmayer 5mo agoIt was exactly my opinion after thinking about this for a while. This is essentially Google making their search engine into yet another website. Sure, there is certain inertia - people used to using Google - but it will fade out with new generations. They've shot themselves in the foot, they just don't see it yet, and it will take some time for it to become obvious.
- chadgpt3 5mo agoThanks for the optimistic view. We could use more of that. I can only hope it comes about...
- gerdesj 5mo ago(You misspelled someone as some) Google has always crawled your site and been an arse! Now you get to decide whether they are hallucinating! You can drop pointers on Masto and other socials to your sites - that has not changed. Do we need something else? ie you drop a link to somewhere else.
- lifis 5mo agoThe expected purpose of websites is to spread information, so whether users get it by making a request to your website or to Google is irrelevant. In fact, if they get it from Google it's better because it reduces website load. If instead the purpose of your website is to manipulate users for financial gain (for instance by showing media attempting to manipulate their purchasing decisions, after receiving a bribe from a vendor), and the information is just a way to lure users, then maybe this malicious business model will finally be no longer possible.
- AlexandrB 5mo agoOn the one hand, this is an interesting observation. The internet as it exists today is filled with product placement slop and real information is a rare commodity. The loss of these kinds of sites is a blessing. On the other hand, Google played a big role in creating this problem in the first place. The search results have trended downwards towards this kind of SEO slop for the last 10 years and Google has been unable (or unwilling) to fix it. Plus, the AI results Google shows are not free from commercial influence and will probably only get worse in this regard. Except now this money will flow to Google instead of $random_internet_spammer. I don't know if that's any better. The idea that Google won't eventually "manipulate users for financial gain" with Gemini is comically naive. That's how they're going to make money from this thing.
- ymolodtsov 5mo agoDepends on what you're trying to do. Sell ads over your content? Probably not great. Sell goods? Still good for you. Become influential and spread ideas? Good for you. It's the news media that will suffer the most.
- saddist0 5mo agoHonestly, a majority of news media are just AI generated content (echo chambers). I personally feel Dead Internet Theory is true and has arrived already.
- ymolodtsov 5mo agoIt's like saying that most YouTube videos are bad. Sure, but there's a power law and most people consume the top content.
- conradfr 5mo agoWho can lobby the EU for the right to abstain a website from being used for training data?
- 1718627440 5mo agoCopyright already exists, the issue is that these companies are doing it legally anyway. For me it is the same issue as with privacy: I'm deeply uncomfortable with the current situation, but there is no political fight for me to fight, because the law is already how I want it to be, it's the public perception, that needs to change, but that is hard to influence, without being rich.
- duskdozer 5mo agoIt should have been a clear extension of the intent of existing copyright/licensing that training would be disallowed without consent, but "move fast and break things"/"possession is nine-tenths of the law" win out
- gblargg 5mo ago> then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites? Making the information available that you put up your site for?
- larodi 5mo agoExactly nothing, nada, zero. And given it does not only crawl, it trains on it, so that never ever should people come back to search for it again.
- vdelpuerto 5mo agohonest question here, why there are lot of comments about SEO is dead?
- chadgpt3 5mo agoSearch engines are dead. The industry has moved to GEO.
- vdelpuerto 5mo agoThanks. I'll take it a look
- le-mark 5mo ago> then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites? The counter argument is that sites are becoming more AI slop or may intentionally provide poison they don’t want to train on. There may be a cut off date after which training must be carefully curated; and the main body of data has already been collected. Sites may still get traffic from agents searching for current information. Maybe even the resurgence of RSS? One can dream.
- chadgpt3 5mo agoThe opportunity to feed it false information?
- gsky 5mo agoI asked the exact question back in 2011 when they were showing images directly leaving me pay for bandwidth out of my pocket
- Minor49er 5mo agoIt's the Google AMP controversy all over again
- watwut 5mo agoNothing, but idea is that you wont be able to prevent it from happening. In that case, the consequence will be that people will stop having webs. It is already happening with personal and niche sites.