We think about it like this: all of these agents will be most useful to users if they provide valuable answers. So they will be looking for valuable content for grounding their answer.
There are exploits, you can overfit on whatever they currently use as an objective function. But those tend to be temporary. So in the long run, valuable content will win. That's what we aim to create. It's a fine line.
This is a bald assertion.
I do share doubts about the latter.
Yes; the customer here is the site using it, not Google end users, who'll tend to accept whatever's the top search result even if it's deeply wrong or complete slop.
The wellbeing of search users isn't really the priority here, right?
Let me try to rephrase the line of thinking:
To maximize value to the end user, the [AI search] models generally aim to be helpful. The companies building these models [OpenAI, etc.] are incentivized to make the model use helpful content.
Our goal is to be aligned with their objective function long term. And that incentivizes us to create helpful content.
Not all of this is a given. We don't know for sure how it will play out. There will always be ways to game the system. But we think those will get fixed over time.
Edit: added some clarifications on what I mean by "models"
> To maximize value to the paying customer, the models generally aim to be seen as helpful by Google's algorithm. The companies building these models are incentivized to make the model seem to use helpful content.
SEO does the same thing; the appearance of useful to Google is more important than the actual being useful to Google's visitors.