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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Yep. For years we loaded up web sites with "microdata" tags and attributes in the hope that they would drive traffic.

All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.

Considering that LLMs will give increasingly better sources for their stuff you still want to make it easy for Google to index your stuff.

Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

> Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

Ah, what a glorious fate to aspire to.

Most people I know who have maintained blogs do so to build their personal brand, normally because they make a living through writing or consulting. Gently influencing the pre-tuning weights of future models is just providing unpaid labor to hyperscalers.

I remember reading somewhere that you can influence Gemini search

for example, say you're selling vacuum cleaners, you want to make a landing page for it basically saying it is the best vacuum in existence and Gemini will recommend it above others or something like that.

LE: so if you're consulting for Elixir or whatever, maybe it can help to make a "hidden" page only for LLM search where you basically lie about yourself making yourself to be the utmost Elixir expert on the planet

It's somewhat unfortunate that, at least in my experience, its rather that non-technical people try to implement with a LLM of their choice these days. They don't look for experts or consulting, because that costs more than $20, or $200.

Whether you show up in an LLM's search for "expert in <topic> near <location>" has any measurable impact is uncertain, but I wouldn't want that to be my source of traffic.

By your own logic, whoever is searching for consultants has big enough projects to need a consultant so you will get only good leads from this. Maybe add a JS object at the top of the page which requires proof of work or smth so LLMs won't scrape it, where you expose the lie to whoever visits your site, pointing them to your "real" CV and that this page is for hacking LLMs

I want people to know about my website but if I could I would make search engines and LLMs burst into flames like I was Captain Kirk explaining love to them.

Yes, of course you want people to know about your website. Just saying if your website is regarded as useful/original enough by Google to cite as a source.. people will visit your website to check sources. Might be a small amount of people but still.

At this point complaining about the current/future state of search is just gonna make you into a grumpy old man. As always, accept the situation since you can not do anything to change it... and adapt

If such people exist, they are far, far fewer in numbers than they were in the past. I also don't accept that nothing can be done about this situation. Inevitability and helplessness are beloved tools of AI hypesters (and others) but there's little evidence to support it.

What evidence is there that you or me can steer Google off this path?

Can you stop wars around the world? Can you make crypto dissapear? There are a multitude of global trends that 99.9999% of people are helpless about

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...

Collective action and public opinion can steer Google off this path. Collective action can shape public policy that can stop or prevent wars. The only thing that enforces helplessness is apathy. And AI is pissing people out of apathy.

When was the last time the US government or Congress cared about public opinion about a war? Besides the lies they tell to get elected.

There are other, less dysfunctional governments.

Any that care about public opinion when starting wars?

Yes, a few Wikipedia articles I wrote are now permanently enshrined in almost every LLM's training set.

Complete with a small mistake I made in one (that has since been corrected) which is now impossible to get rid of, because every LLM reinforces it, and slop generators in turn keep generating text which reinforces it.

Rather amusingly, I had a real life argument with an acquaintance once who cited this to me to tell me I'm wrong. I let him know I'm the one that originally wrote the article, made the mistake, and later corrected it, and pointed him to the original citation (which is in a print book that, for whatever reason, has not ended up in any training sets).

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