Google I/O: Big changes coming for SEOs with ubiquitous AI
demandsphere.com
demandsphere.com
Thank you content writers for your service training LLMs. Here's 10 amazing ways to find a new career in a LLM world.
(Jk, but truly a beautiful site. Every link I clicked was a delight. Your brain seems like a marvelous place.)
Thanks, I've been trying to build a digital garden (or a cemetery) for some time, but with interconnected sites/articles/toys on different domains rather than a single Obsidian Publish style site.
Tangent: I recently found a beautiful and extremely well structured digital garden made by Maggie Appleton (https://maggieappleton.com). So, now I'm just jumping between either being inspired by the amount of research she's shared or analysis paralysis since there are so many interesting approaches to the subject matter.
Is the actual prose written by hand, or is it from an LLM?
Obviously with this kind of work, the good stuff requires luck (== quantity) or a manual curation process. I just wanted to run this on autopilot.
I might add a feedback loop at some point, e.g. poets with better engagement become more motivated and those who perform poorly start getting jealous... a little bit of drama here and there.
PS. check out the dog wearing a hat on potato.horse if you haven't
SEO is a scam to convince search engines to show something other than most useful content. Content farms are a drain on human attention. Human intelligence had it's chance and we squandered it. Bring on the AIs, they're not going to be worse than the mess we've already made.
Maybe it’s a matter of differing definitions, but I’ve got a lot of useful information out of well-written and well-researched "content farms".
I'm terrified of a world where I ask, what beverage will be served on Mars, and the answer will be engineered to be given as Coca-Cola is a popular drink possibly available on Mars, or right now. Would you like it delivered?
The real problem for some sites, is the amount of believable spam on mindless rant feeds, like Twitter and Reddit etc.
Fire one of the many offline LLMs up on a university network or somewhere else that a single IP connecting many times won't be too suspicious and let it go to town.
I disagree. What incentive does a website have to produce content if it receives no traffic? Website owners want control over their traffic and the data too. They will wall off any search engine that doesn't give them anything in return (basically they're scrapers at that point). The search engines that do this will starve themselves of information they need to stay relevant and the first search engine to play fair continuing to share traffic will get an advantage.
More likely, Google and Bing will continue to play fair and send traffic. Perhaps AI features will become browser features instead, complementing websites, not replacing them.
The trade is info to Google for visitors. It's not hard to guess how sites will react when that trade stops.
Interesting conclusion.
AI features seem to incur more cost than search (don't they?!)
Wonder how that'll play out - the user is conditioned not to pay at this point, and the search engine is no longer incentivized to pay for it.
More likely they will need to be sued, like the news / media companies in Europe and Australia have done.
more on topic though, people wont use bing if chatgpt/phind/etc answers well enough for them
For instance, when searching for information on setting up RDS, like high availability MySQL on self-hosted servers on-premises, neither ChatGPT nor Brad provided the necessary details. I would not make a publicly searchable blog or Github repository if I were well-versed in setting such RDS on-premises. Instead, I would make it available only behind a paywall. Why should Google and MS/Bing benefit from my hard work if they do not direct traffic to my site? Previously, low- or high-quality pages benefited from SEO, but that is no longer true. There is a wealth of knowledge that has not yet been documented. Unless Google or Bing starts directing many traffic, experts, and websites will not share updated and other valuable information. I anticipate more paywalls for high-quality content, similar to good news sites.
Besides that, be careful about wishing for one or two centralized sites controlled by big tech giants with AIs such as Google and Microsoft. The web developed because of many 3rd party websites.
I don't have answers on how good 3rd party sites will survive with Google/Bing sending traffic and Ad clicks, but the equation is about SEO changing. Either you create non-profit Wikipedia-style content or high-quality content paywalled. That is my best guess.
You won’t. But I will and I think others will as well. My goal is to help people set up RDS and I don’t care about commercialization. So happy if AI reuses all the material.
There are many technical blogs that are just hobbies, or fun, or brand PR, or book tie ins or whatever.
Your blog post's knowledge-dump ends up never being seen.
This is why StackOverflow reacted so poorly to Stack Exchange's announcement they would be using all of your hard work to train a for-profit model.
It might not be illegal - but it sure does feel weird, at a minimum.
No. He is helping people and he is helping for profit companies.
Both are true at the same time. You can’t help people without also helping the companies. Wealth generation is not zero sum.
This has all been played out before. I’m cool helping companies along with people.
Imagine you discover free energy. Would you not give it away because you don’t want billion dollar companies to benefit?
I have a choice to give away info or keep it. Id rather give it away than not. I’m not going to sell info. It’s not worth the time for whatever negligible gains it would make.
Even if there was a magic way to only allow “good people” and not companies to use my info, I’d still allow companies because I think information should be freely given and exchanged and hope that others feel the same.
Imagine where we would be if Linux wasn’t used by billion dollar companies. The world would be way worse. Amazon would be poorer but the world would be much poorer.
Energy is one of many inputs into industrial systems, and it is a fairly commoditized one at that.
Free energy doesn't mean you don't need tons of infrastructure still in place, tons of parts and labor to install that infrastructure, factories to make the parts of that infrastructure. And then when it comes to using that energy, large capital expenditures are still needed to get up and running, which means the rich will keep getting richer.
Or to put it another way, electric cars + solar panels are totally a thing you can do right now, and at no point was anyone's life put at risk to bring these about.
Odds are the first country to get free energy would see obscene economic growth, all sorts of absurd things become possible. For start, salt water + energy => fresh water, solving the droughts that our farmlands are facing.
All metal processing uses tons of energy.
Meanwhile, my local electric co, Puget Sound Energy doesn't even make a billion a year in profits. The nation's largest energy company, Exelon, barely clears 2 billion in profits per year.
Microsoft makes more profit in a week than the nation's largest energy company does in a year.
ExxonMobil's operating revenue is $413.7bn USD. I'll be surprised if someone isn't getting whacked if they let the free energy genie out of the bottle.
Energy isn't cheap in the UK. Far from it. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/electric-...
My family lived in South Africa post-WWII because my gruncle's skin grafts wouldn't take in the UK climate. The Kariba dam gave free electricity to the surrounding area, the idea that this was something people paid for elsewhere just blew the minds of everybody there. Free energy is not a new thing.
However, politics and socioeconomics play a big part in whether or not a country can make successful use of energy, but the possibility of something being possible doesn't mean it'll happen. Furthermore, today, water reserves are a problem for the dam, and power generation was being suspended late last year due to it.
Most of ExxonMobil's revenue seems to come from oil (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034911/exxonmobil-reven...), where as I presume free electricity would primarily impact their natural gas revenue.
Also isn't ExxonMobil one of those strange vertically integrated situations where most of their revenue comes from themselves? They drill the oil, then process it through their own plants which results in them paying themselves lots of money, but I may be mis-remembering that.
Anyway, solar is coming, wind is coming, and electric cars are coming, and no one is getting gunned down in the streets.
Heck China would love infinite free energy! So would any other country that wants completely dominate heavy industry overnight.
> Energy isn't cheap in the UK.
It has been a long time since the UK highly subsidized heavy manufacturing.
Energy prices have of course been going up everywhere, as, most people, realize cheap energy that results in dead kids and cancer for everyone was, in retrospect, really stupid.
> Furthermore, today, water reserves are a problem for the dam, and power generation was being suspended late last year due to it.
Infinite free energy would solve all water reserve problems, although it might end up being an environmental disaster near ocean shorelines...
Would you release or keep it a secret?
It's not important that my contribution go directly from me to the other person; what matters is that they get the information they're looking for.
With a blog post - you get feedback via comments. With SO, you get feedback via votes and comments. With HN, you get feedback the same way.
We have feedback on all of these systems so that humans can more readily discern correctness. An AI model is not going to be able to readily understand what solution is correct, lest it wouldn't need to crawl the page in the first place.
I don't think this is true - it ends up being added to a soup of knowledge that is ladled out as people ask about it. It might not directly be seen, but it may contribute more to the overall knowledge about the space since OP's knowledge is now able to be sliced, diced, and recombined.
It sucks for the individual who wants to be credited, and it is annoying that megacorps will benefit directly. But for someone who wants to increase the knowledge in the world, it's not so bad...
You may actually be decreasing the knowledge of the world.
It's not difficult to imagine a future where people do not know how to effectively communicate, and instead rely on ChatGPT (or whatever) to communicate for them. Or a future where nobody knows anything, and instead blindly trusts the output of AI models.
There's already dating services that let your ChatGPT bot woo someone else's ChatGPT bot...
For example if one person knows two correct facts about a specific sport, and another person knows those same 2 correct facts as well as 2 false facts, and doesn't know which 2 are true or false, isn't the second person less knowledgeable about that sport than the first person, despite technically having the same amount of true facts on the subject?
Equally, even if the amount of known knowledge in the world remains the same, isn't a world in which every human while studying spends every minute learning true stuff vs. spending half their time reading made up stuff, won't people on average be less knowledgeable despite the fact that no global knowledge got destroyed in the process? (Ofc there's never been a time when it's possible to spend 100% of the time learning completely accurate stuff, hypothetical exaggeration there.)
Progress is here, old man. Thinking that people will deliberately go out of their way to grok through pages of PDF documentations hoping to find that one line of relevant information instead of just asking is stupid and misguided.
Along with your "old man" dig, the fact that you have to attribute hidden motives to someone who's got specific concerns elaborated in their comment doesn't do you any favors.
> You can similarly argue that internet will ruin our social life because we no longer have to go to the library and meet with strangers researching up similar topics. But I don’t see anyone arguing against internet?
I know smart people who argue that paper maps reduce social ties because they remove the necessity to ask for directions. They're not wrong. It doesn't mean maps aren't really useful, or that they even want maps gone. It means they're paying attention to dynamics and maybe even better prepared to fine-tune them by introducing something else to the system.
People do argue against "the internet", btw -- the problem of determining authority/reliability of an internet source, hidden incentives of search or feed algorithms, sand castles, and yes the capacity for isolation or echo chambers from virtual interaction. They're not wrong either.
> Progress is here
Change is here. Thoughtful people can recognize that comes with potential advantages and look with concern on hazards and disadvantages.
The billion dollar company was already profiting off that goodwill by putting ads beside people looking for it
As far as the blog is self advertising for your resume or company, it's just as good since you're linking it directly. Maybe even better since the ai will have opinions about you
what does that even mean?? and how in the world is it better than receiving direct visitors from Google as a reward for posting??
Especially when they knew it was allowed by the CCL?
This seems trivially false. Even if the info just gets sucked into an LLM there will still be people helped.
This feels like the same philosophical difference that leads to debates about GPL vs. Apache licenses. The "how dare someone else make money using my work" camp vs. the "if someone else is able to make money using my work, more power to them" camp.
The GPL doesn't prevent you from making money; it only requires you to contribute your changes back. That way others can also make money based on your work, like... you just did!
I think it does though as if my contribution is made public others are less likely to buy it.
With Apache/etc, I can make modifications and sell more easily.
Google even banned AGPL at one point from its code hosting platform - it was that upset with open source.
It’s not exactly the same, but I’ve frequently heard “I don’t want someone to take my code and just sell it.” So want to use gpl or some other license that opens but prohibits selling. I don’t think the latter really works out that well, but people seem to ask for it quite a bit.
N.B. I’m not actually going to do this, but it’s still a straightforward attack.
If I want to paywall it, I don't know where to start. I imagine there's keys-included solutions, but I doubt they can just send me e-transfers for each payment. Maybe they can send money to my PayPal? I've never used that for receiving money before. Do I need a business bank account? Will transparency rules require me to share my address publicly? Maybe I need a PO box. I just wanted to share something helpful.
If they are in abundance or in low demand.
For regular tech bloggers such as the ones you see posted on HN, I agree it’s desperate.
Yes, for creators who have managed to establish an audience that had high intent to consume that creator’s content. But good luck to people who are trying to make money just by delivering useful niche content where the consumers don’t even know of the creator.
Seems like the obvious next step. For clarity, I'm not saying I particularly like that future, but I have a hard time grasping why you think a paywall would be an obstacle here. Especially not for the wealthiest corporations (ever). Additionally because most paywalls to information have very hard time keeping information from leaking. Otherwise news orgs would have figured that out by now!
They're certainly not getting the content for free. They're running ads against it, and making money on it, but they are also paying for it. It's a relatively small shift in their funding model to pay out to creators for their contributions to an AI model instead of paying out per pageview.
Those are advertisers funding the content, not google. google is just a middleman. They generate no content and pay none of they money, they just facilitate the transaction and take a cut.
It's not as if Google is a stranger to hiring experts to keep them away from other places!
The only way to protect ip really. The question is what happens when they attempt to steal content and integrate it in their "ai"?
I asked chatgpt and of course it gives the answer right away. We also have searches that land on pages with fancy ui's where user has to enter info to get answers. Took me about 1 minute to get chatgpt to spit out the answers and once I knew how to prompt it I could shorthand the input and get answers much faster.
We are so dead.
Then putting advertising in whatever format LLM outputs are dressed as.
My biggest fear is, abuse eg how LLMs for search can work with targeted ads, eg making you slightly prefer Coke vs. Pepsi, or One Political Brain Parasite(tm) over another.
I will be very curious how the promoted stuff works with LLMs. When you ask a LLM what the best brand of shoes are, can folks pay to influence the result?
The way Google shaped SEO meant that many websites have tons of text just to prove that they are the authority.
Googling for like a Jerusalem Bug bite risk or Black Widow bite risk makes you end up some local pest control website telling you will get a fever (former) or die (latter) from the bite. Of course, they want to sell you services, so they build their SEO stating that they are the authority. They are not. And this is the problem with the web. There is no authority of information.
So far it's a good cook! There are times when an ingredient appears in different amounts than I'd expect (like 1c of oil for a 4c/flour taralli recipe) but overall it's comparable to the quality of human written recipes, and better than many.
I don't think so. It's going to be vacuumed into the big machine and nobody will visit those websites. In fairness, pretty much nobody does today.
Besides, good writers are good writers. Would you rather read Matt Levine or some AI summary of his latest piece?
I'm just not seeing the problem. IMO the whole obsession with driving clicks was silly from the get-go and destructive now. If AI does away with that, great. And if people whose sole motivation for writing was to get clicks decide to stop writing... well, OK.
If you bothered to put a counter on your website, wanted to attract like minded individuals, or get enough people to sponsor you to continue work you otherwise couldn’t do, yeah probably. Or we can go with the unrealistic idea that enthusiasts as a whole don’t have egos or motives beyond shouting into the void to express their pure love of <insert thing>.
Because if it isn't, keep it in notepad I'd say.
What era are you referring to?
Not everyone is 100% motivated by money. And those that are do not all need full time employment doing that work. And those that need money and employment can often generate revenue with complementary goods. And those that can't can source subscription and other revenue sources.
The idea that the current model of commercialization of writing is the only one that has ever or could ever work is really narrow thinking. Writing has two main values: 1) the ideas, and 2) the expression. Both of those have put food on the table for good writers forever, and will continue to do so. The AI panic is just from people who can't imagine the world being any different than it is at this very instant.
People who just want a basic factual answer to a question won't go to your site, they'll use Google's snippet as they already do now in many cases.
But people who want to read your whole article will continue to go to your site.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. I shouldn't have to visit a webpage to discover when Abraham Lincoln was born, but I should if I want to read a short bio of him.
We're going back to the original days of the Internet that HN users often beg for. Now only the true creators will create for the sake of creation: ars artia gratis.
Under this new world your content is impossible to find by real users. Opposite of the early internet
Perhaps this thing could be tailored to a specific community? Or be, itself, a community of communities?
I may just be onto something here… damn, this may be a billion dollar idea.
Joking aside, I’m pretty sure this will make communities like HN and Reddit, and closed discords, slack & all, blow up.
Google’s results already are worthless half the time anyway.
Is your website more pleasant to use than ChatGPT/Bard/Bing Chat? Some actually are. Websites can load fast, be responsive, beautiful and well thought out. Those websites are a treat to visit.
However, if you need to first dismiss a GDPR waiver, a request to know your location, a request to show notifications, a chatbot that is available right now for a free sales consultation, and a request to subscribe to a newsletter; and once you do that, the page jumps around for 30 seconds as the ad auctions finish and obtrusive video ads flood in, and when you try to exit the page your back-button is hijacked; then the answer is probably "no".
What is the best network monitoring tool? Oh wow, Bard says it is, “NetShark”.
I will formulate my own thoughts on this in the next 6 months. If serious damage is about to happen (to SEOs) then I fully expect huge swings in traffic for a lot of sites, which is easy to monitor.
Google also said they are rolling out another helpful content update soon. I wonder how much they have integrated LLMs into the search updates for processing text for sentiment and maybe even accuracy.
(this isn't a sponsored comment. I'm just a machinist who likes good search results)
Kagi have every incentive to engage in sandbagging their upcoming chatbot just like google, they just prefer you knew it as "your safety" rather than "their sinking ship".
> "The two areas where we see automated writing tools for SEO purposes having an advantage will be ... 2) generating content that is not watermarked by Google as synthetic content."
Wow. They're basically saying that AI tools will lets SEOers generate content that isn't detected as "synthetic content" by Google, even though it clearly is synthetic. It's surprising to see the SEO industry acknowledge this so directly. Whether the generated content is useful or not, I'm now even more ready for the world where 90% of my queries can be answered on search engines directly since it's just cutting out the middleman.
For one example, If I want to take a holiday, could an assistant work out the best dates (based upon preferences of availability, cost etc), and research the best airfares (excluding that particular airline I hate) and find a hotel room with the features I want, and throw in a few sightseeing activities which appeal to my personal tastes, then summarise it up into a travel itinerary for me to approve. Then, upon approval it proceeds to book (and pay for?) all the things.
In fact it would be worse. Websites would try and game the system to be the one that ChatGPT chooses for you. And now you are relying on a system that has no incentive of telling you the truth. At least if I check to go kayaking on day 2 of my vacation, I can compare the top 3 websites, cross reference with Yelp to see which one has the best value for the $.
Plus there still is the part where the data being sourced isn't formatted the same, so mistakes will be made. It even happens with manual research. You miss the part where one offers a pickup and the other one doesn't. ChatGPT will suffer from that too.
In the short term this may bias towards giving me the best organic results, but will it shift to pushing me ever more aggressively to what advertisers are bidding on?
You can bet that there will be a bidding war behind the scene by those wanting to be the "best" airline and the "best" hotel and the "best" activity.
Ofcourse what the search decides to surface to the user and eventually link to is another story altogether. "Learning" from one site and promoting another more lucrative one is entirely possible, if somewhat evil.
People always said to build a brand. I think today that is most important than ever.
I just read documentation pages nowadays. Rarely do I click on a tutorial article.
The news, I get from my usual sites. Entertainment, from streaming.
And with the flood of AI generated books, this really could be the return of the blog.
Long live blogs!
I wonder which results we will obtain when we look for specific recipes with these changes. Or, comparison of hardware.
Furthermore, the article lack of how to tackle those shifts with depth analysis. For example: How can one put their info to be presented by a GPT/GPT-plugins.
It's already impossible to search for web pages that contain the actual keywords I asked for; it used to be that you could surround your keywords with double-quote marks but that stopped working some time ago.
There's a market for a dumb search engine that just finds literal keywords and doesn't use AI. Of course it won't be very useful for selling ads.
AI is the imprecision and stupidity of a human, amplified by the speed of machines.
Poetic