The Great Decoupling (Or Why Your Clicks Are Down and Impressions Up) | Hacker News Reader

The Great Decoupling (Or Why Your Clicks Are Down and Impressions Up)

ahrefs.com

23 pointsduck11 comments

I am facing this problem. It’s devastating to think that my job is now to prepare LLM training data. I am still doing useful work translating the real world into useful guides, just with half the audience and half the pay. If the trend continues, I will need to stop doing this full time.

Google and other AI companies effectively killed the incentive to share text on the internet. With it dies an important chunk of the independent web.

I have ahrefs blocked from accessing my webserver as they don't consistently respect robots.txt. I suggest everyone do the same.

Agree. Ahrefs is part of the seo garbage industrial complex.

I have them blocked as well. Solidarity.

> Searchers can get all the information they need to resolve their query without leaving the search results page.

The best thing Google has done in the last decade easily.

There could not be a worse idea than to put all trust in one institution, even if its reputation was still clean.

Google has continally abused trust on ethics and on accuracy.

Yes, it would be nice if there was a button you could push to ask any question and get a simple answer. No, we are not there yet. No, there are no shortcuts in life. You have to go to a source and evaluate its information and its trustworthiness in its own context otherwise you are not meeting your responsibility of diligence.

>even if its reputation was still clean.

That's a good laugh...

For most queries the AI summary works. If it doesn’t, oh well.

Yesterday I looked up how much a certain car weighs. The AI summary gave me an answer. It may be the wrong one, but I looked it up out of curiosity, so it doesn’t ultimately matter.

> It may be the wrong one, but I looked it up out of curiosity, so it doesn’t ultimately matter.

Now this has to be the most surprising thing I've read this week, until I thought about it for long.

It doesn't matter if it's correct because you googled it out of curiosity? I think you might be confused. When you're curious, you want the answer to be correct (there's related questions that are raised and consistency checks that a curious person does in their mind.) I think what you are is addicted to the internet. You searched something because that's you brain's kneejerk reaction to whatever the trigger was in this case. The act of searching is what your brain was looking for, not the actual information.

Its accuracy is around 50% for queries I do, which is low enough that I actually consider it a negative to my experience using Google, and has made me think about looking for a different search engine for the first time.

I disagree, it's a short-sighted decision. We want our sites to be visited, they've disincentivize users from adding new content.

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