I don't doubt people will do that as they have every other shady SEO technique, but Google will continue to fight it as spam.
At the end of the day I think quality content is still king and the only viable long-term SEO strategy.
Will the ELIZAs learn to know each other somehow and throttle input, or will we someday approach the critical mass necessary for endless GPT-3 comment chains? Is there a similar term for Kessler Syndrome, but applied to comments?
Google already provides no-click search answers by scraping data from a website and bolding a paragraph that may answer your question. The branding of the original site is removed on these snippets.
How long before Google decides not to link out the website altogether?
Google has strategically bought every browser address box. It has eliminated the referrer , so websites don't know what search keywords led them there. It owns the whole process, and at this point , web content is just fodder for the next iterations of NLP models. It's already become cheap enough and it will become unmonetizable (unless it's opinion content, which is fodder for endless social media rambling).
Currently the most monetizable content is video. This might take longer to commoditize as deepfakes are still too early.
B - Google does and will continue to capture that traffic, and it will continue to get better. Case in point, I read earlier this week an article about a site devoted to celebrity net worth and how their business was eaten up by the change.
C - Agree that more involved information is safe or safer.
But you know, it is obvious that Google will continue to eat up more and more queries. I don't know what percentage they are currently able to eat up and keep to themselves, but they are surely devoted to upping that rate. So as a long term play, do you really want to put yourself in competition with all the Google data scientists?
I think it's the best strategy. If you have a business, like the celebrity net worth one, you're in trouble. It's worth keeping in mind these days if your business has long term staying power based on the trends we know are currently underway.
You can absolutely "win" at some of those without kingly content.