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> LLMs are not search engines, and I'm not gaining any followers or customers in any meaningful way because an LLM indexes my site.

Counterpoint: my wife owns an accounting firm and publishes a lot of highly valuable informational content on their website's blog. Stuff like sales tax policies and rates in certain states, accounting/payroll best practices articles, etc. I guess you could call it "content marketing".

Lately they have been getting highly qualified leads coming from LLMs that cite her website's content when answering questions like "What is the sales tax nexus policy in California?". Users presumably follow the citation and then engage with the website, eventually becoming a very warm lead.

So LLMs are obviously not search engines in the conventional sense, but it doesn't mean they are not useful at generating valuable traffic to your marketing website.

> LLMs are not search engines, and I'm not gaining any followers or customers in any meaningful way because an LLM indexes my site.

^^^^

This

For the moment, and for the foreseeable future, you are just giving your content for free (and have to pay the hosting bill).

And the freeness cuts both ways — if I could, I'd happily open my content to Mistral and all the other totally-free/open-source-releasing LLM companies' scrapers. But I can't; they're going into big corpuses or scraped directly by the commercial actors with funds to scrape the whole kit & kaboodle.

> LLMs are not search engines, and I'm not gaining any followers or customers in any meaningful way because an LLM indexes my site.

Friends of mine run a service company, and they already see a significant number of customers reach out because they found them using ChatGPT (et al), not Google. By significant I mean ~20% or so.

Also, for e-commerce, Deep Research from OpenAI, is way better in doing product recommendations than Google. That's my goto place to find most stuff novadays (e.g. I purchased dancing shoes, pants, air cleaners, an air conditioner, supplements and a ton of other things using the recommendations of DR - no search engine comes even close to it)

> Deep Research from OpenAI, is way better in doing product recommendations than Google

Interesting, that’s not my experience and I’d be the first to replace Google if I could. I’ll have to try again.

Hm, example queries that failed you? Also, did you do DR from OpenAI, or others? (OpenAI's is a different league, and people sometimes confuse that with Perplexity's or Google's).

For me, the main place where it fails is specific links to the stores and specific prices / opportunities. But when I want to find an item that fits a need (e.g. "quietest mobile AC" or "best ultra short throw projector for my specific use case", "collagen supplement that has clinical confirmation of the quality...") it works way better than Google. And I tried many product categories.

FWIW most of the inbound traffic to startups websites that I know enough to ask about is coming from ChatGPT.

> If there was a paid-only search engine with dubious ethics practices that was overwhelming my site with traffic in order resell search trained off of (among other things) my personally generated content, I would absolute block it.

Let’s compare Google with OpenAI:

Paid-only: neither check; both have free tiers, eventually supported by ads (Google took 10+ years before it got littered with ads, I promise OpenAI will make the ad experience even stinkier because they keep you on the site as opposed to Google who only have you for a few seconds. The ads will be blinky, and they will be nested into the content.

Dubious ethics: both check.

Overwhelming bot traffic: both check.

Make money on your content: both check.

> LLMs are not search engines, and I'm not gaining any followers or customers in any meaningful way because an LLM indexes my site.

So paywall it?

The Anubis PoW captcha is an option, too. Then you will block trainers and allow agents.