AI summarized search may bring an end to endless how-to articles
Right now the business model on the internet for Android sites is 1) Appease Google for SEO to get traffic, 2) be ranked helpful, 3) appear in the top 5 or so results, 4) Profit from page / advertising impressions.
That might be about to change. Probably is, but I like the idea it only might happen.
I’ve written a bit about how all these how-to articles are killing Android sites. The idea is that if they have enough how-to articles and enough Helpful mojo from Google that Google puts them out front in search results. Just a quick glance at Android Police and there are four How-To articles before I reached the second page. This isn’t about Android Police as a note, just using them and the first one I found as an example.
An AI summarized search doesn’t promote the websites, it summarizes them into the answer you want. This means the site operators don’t get an advertising impression, paid, etc. You can already see how this works just asking an AI – here’s Bing’s response:
This gives the user (me) zero reason to go to any of the sites that were listed. The AI did the summarization for me and I didn’t have to wade through a couple of sites that paid big money to be top of the list. The downside here is the people who actually did the work on writing useful articles … well… their page is never going to be seen because Google/Bing/etc have summarized it and given it to me. No clicking through tons of sites to answer my question.
The only entity that might make anything off of this, besides Bing, is Bein’ Classy if I clicked to play the video.
I strongly feel here that I don’t have a strong feeling about this. Most bloggy Android sites have bent over backwards and resorted to churning out junk content that’s not related to their lane, but it’s also kind of soul crushing to work to write a how-to that’s valid and have it churned back out by an AI rather than having traffic directed to your site to maybe give you a couple of cents ad impressions and perhaps a follower.
Meh, it’s the future where people don’t have to tread to the information source that might offend their sensibilities. I wonder if there will be a noAIindex spec for denying AI the ability to summarize a page or site, or if this won’t be an issue.
Once this happens I suspect the news to follow. One AI news summary of tens of different reports of an issue. The rebloggers and AP cut and pasters will be gone in an instant.
Maybe.
This is coming from the guy who thought computer mice were a stupid idea in 1982 so take it for what it is… Probably someone wrote this better a couple of months back but I’ve been out of the loop for 70 or so days.
Did you make it this far wondering why I didn’t call it a semantic search at any point?
