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The other day, I remember an article was posted to HN about something, but it came from a company that provides SEO services to companies by doing something lik
by supriyo-biswas 1mo ago
The other day, I remember an article was posted to HN about something, but it came from a company that provides SEO services to companies by doing something like this:
1. For a given company, analyze their target audiences and the questions they are likely to ask LLMs about.
2. For each such question, ask it to each of the major LLMs, and compute the KL divergence between the pages they want to rank for the question vs. the LLM's response.
3. Rewrite the article to minimize said KL divergence.
In effect, they're performing an iterative optimization of some sort that moves the embedding space of their article closer to the question asked to the LLM, and any embedding model or generated responses are going to prefer said responses over others.
I believe we will keep seeing more of this stuff.
- SoftTalker 1mo agoAnd it's all because of ads. The incentives in an ad-funded internet are just always going to lead to this sort of thing. The most important thing is getting the user to load your page, not actually satisfying their query. Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits, because any that move to ad revenue will become useless for real work.
- locknitpicker 1mo ago> And it's all because of ads. Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy. If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.
- tencentshill 1mo agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank-israel-ai-propaganda https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...
- locknitpicker 1mo agoThank you. Past HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337392 (884 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447600
- nickphx 1mo agoAh nice, the site uses nextjs/vercel and is hosted by AWS ...
- spockz 1mo agoWhy is this significant? Many sites are setup like that.
- mschuster91 1mo agoBecause the pro-Palestine folks just love to drag their pet peeve into literally everything [1]. [1] https://techforpalestine.org/vercel https://techforpalestine.org/vercel
- ChoGGi 1mo agoNot liking companies that support genocide is a pet peeve?
- mschuster91 1mo agoIt isn't even a settled question that there is a genocide. Anyway, my issue with them is that they love to derail every debate on the internet by injecting their personal gripes regarding the conflict. Sure, there are a bunch of morons on the Zionist side as well, but in general, barely anyone spams about the topic on Mamdani related news for example. In a thread about the conflict, yeah, debating the conflict is on topic. But in a thread that has zero business dealing with the conflict at all and just casually mentions a company that happens to be active in Israel? Now that is (for me) pure derailing.
- SoftTalker 1mo agoThat sounds very plausible too. Propaganda/spin has always been a component of mass media.
- bjt 1mo agoThere are incentives other than marketing, but I doubt the SEO company referred to by the ancestor comment is planning to do lots of business in the political propaganda space.
- monster_truck 1mo agoSame difference tbh
- grumbelbart2 1mo agoSure maybe, but the online ad market is USD 400b give or take, which vastly outmatches any such budgets.
- xenadu02 1mo agoSome of us have been predicting this for a while. People with an axe to grind or states with an agenda are already devoting tremendous effort toward affecting LLM models and it is very difficult to determine real from astroturf for humans let alone an LLM trying to train. Much like PageRank now that the cat's out of the bag all the current approaches may prove to be useless in the long run.
- astura 1mo ago>If anyone has the link at hand, please post it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank-israel-ai-propaganda https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...
- kspacewalk2 1mo agoIf by "not really" you mean it's not all because of ads, some governments dabble in it too, you're right. But it's still overwhelmingly because of ads.
- csallen 1mo agoIt's just incentives in general. Humans are self-motivated creatures, and in the absence of meaningful consequences they'll often do what they're incentivized to do, even if it harms others. The internet is uniquely devoid of consequences (esp. reputational consequences, social faux pas, etc.) and makes effort expenditure minimal. So you get lots of bad behavior. I think "ads vs not ads" is maybe the wrong way to model it. Ultimately people are just doing what benefits themselves across every dimension possible.
- trimethylpurine 1mo agoCampaign funding and lobbying being legal activities implies that governments participate in advertising. I can't separate those. But you're right, I think that's what they meant.
- trimethylpurine 1mo agoYou wrote "not really" and then described a literal ad.
- latexr 1mo ago> alternative facts Let’s please not revive that term, it has done enough harm. From its inception, it has just been a way to make falsehoods sounds legitimate. Even the person who came up with it seemed to be swallowing a whole toad while speaking it for the first time.
- rhyperior 1mo agoThen call them what they are - lies.
- rectang 1mo ago> Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits LLM vendors make this hard because you can't trust them with your session data. Yesterday you were opted out of training, then suddenly today you're opted in. It's an extension of the idea that they don't need to care about anybody's copyright. They don't care about preserving the security or privacy of customer data, because there is negligible incentive to do so. For now, there's no substitute but as LLMs get commoditized trusting LLM SAAS vendors becomes an unacceptable business risk.
- moron4hire 1mo agoBut don't you want Technojesus to come save you from never having learned how to invert a binary tree?
- shermantanktop 1mo agoIf you don’t know how to do that now, the fastest way to learn (for most people, surely) is to have an LLM teach you and critique your efforts. And then you’ll realize that it’s unlikely you’ll get practice at doing it from scratch, since the AI is faster and probably better. Human learning is slow, AI production is fast. Very hard to steer a middle path.
- Razengan 1mo agoCan we just ban advertisements and "marketing" at a political level please?
- xp84 1mo agoFor this advertisement for your activist campaign, you are hereby fined 100 credits for a violation of the anti-advertising statute. Further violations will result in loss of privileges.
- setopt 1mo agoIn some countries it is, to some extent. In Norway for example, it is illegal to broadcast ads for political parties, alcohol, tobacco, plus basically any ads specifically targeting children (though the last one is often violated).
- gxs 1mo agoThe sad thing is this is unavoidable, or will be for a long time Look at cable tv - even after going premium, you eventually wound up paying for ads anyway In that case, you could make the argument that you could still purchase premium channels like hbo to avoid ads, but the internet doesn’t work that way - you depend on all the content generated by those ad funded channels You could argue that Netflix changed that, and that’s why I said won’t change for a long time. I don’t think anyone’s discovered the business model yet that will keep content free for consumers while still generating revenue for companies
- boilerupnc 1mo agoThere is a term for the general practice of optimizing responses called GEO - Generative Engine Optimization [0]. A cousin of SEO and equally unsavory in how trust is being eroded through info shaping. Self-discovery by individuals is the victim. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization