Did you actually conduct the experiment? What was the outcome?
Based on my experiments (across hundreds of thousands of LLM chats) llms.txt does not have any measurable impact in the vast majority of scenarios.
326 karma · joined July 7, 2017
Based on my experiments (across hundreds of thousands of LLM chats) llms.txt does not have any measurable impact in the vast majority of scenarios.
The traditional search results suffer a lot because AI and AI content generation have enable a lot of aggressive SEO/spam plays.
Since a lot of websites link to MSN, Forbes, and the NYT, they have a high Page Rank. This is interpreted as "high authority".
With ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, you get all answers directly in the chat. And you can even ask follow-up questions. There is no need to click on a link.
From the data I have seen, 40% of searches on Google used to lead to a click to another website. In ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, this number is lower than 5%. One study (with a small N) even came to the conclusion that the number is 0%.
Gives me a weird/strange feeling.
We would just need a good system to a) keep humans in the loop and b) sort out bad actors.
LLMs cannot in real time find and read thousands of secondary sources. Especially not if some of these might have already disappeared or are not digitalized.
I can see a future where LLM labs a) donate to Wikipedia and b) contribute to it with agents that suggest edits and review facts.
There are many small tasks simple AI agents could handle.
For example: Go to every article in the English Wikipedia of a Spanish city. Check data like inhabitants, major, etc. and compare them to the Spanish Wikipedia article. (The assumption here is that the Spanish Wikipedia will be more up-to-date for Spanish cities than the English Wikipedia.) Double-check what is written in the Spanish article. Update the English article accordingly.
If such an agents is only allowed to create drafts, human editors could review them and we would get a lot of small updates in.
Similar to when Google pushed people to make mobile-friendly websites, fast websites, secure websites, etc.
But it seems that is not the case.
That makes them very fast. But that also leads to a ton of hallucinations. If you ask for non existent things (like the cats.txt protocol), AI Overviews consistently fabricate facts. Ai Overviews can pull the content of the potential source ULRs directly from Google's cache.
ChatGPT is slow because they have to make an external API call to Bing or - even worse - to a scraping provider like SerpApi/Data4SEO/Oxylabs to crawl regular Google search results. That introduced two delays. OpenAI then has to fetch some of these potential source URLs in real time. That introduces another delay. And then OpenAI also uses a better (but slower) model than Google to generate the answer.
Over time, OpenAI should be able to catch up in terms of speed with their own web/search index.
If you try more complex questions, you might find AI Overviews less to your liking.
Google gets away with this because users are used to type simple queries - often just a few keywords. Any kind of AI answer is like magic.
OpenAI cannot do the same. Their users are used to having multi-turn conversations and receiving thoughtful answers to complex questions.
For most bot visits, there should not be a single database request.
No. The AIVO Standard will not become part of the search/marketing infrastructure. Adoption is currently zero.
is it just another attempt to rebrand SEO for the AI era
Yes. The AIVO Standard is another attempt to rebrand SEO/GEO.
Also, AIVO and PSOS are made up concept that nobody but you is using or accepts. Just because you write in a scientific, authoritative manner does not mean a sentence like "cost estimates to ground the framework in practice" have any meaning.
My understanding is they performed work and were paid for it at market rate. So just regular capitalism. Or was there more to it?
Can they not find a private equity investors willing to commit a larger sum? Or is their evaluation risking so quickly that it is cheaper for them to raise every couple of months?
Technically, we can do it.
But unless we go the Chinese route of blocking US vendors, a lot of people will always flock to the better product that has the bigger marketing budget. And there I do not see how Ecosia could compete with Google, Xing with LinkedIn, Mistral with OpenAI, OHV/IONOS with AWS, or Hetzner with GCP.
Source: Similarweb, world-wide