SEO Is Dead. Long Live GEO. - by Gaurav Vohra

[rcjordan]

https://substack.gauravvohra.com/p/search-is-dead-long-live-llms-winning-in-the-era-of-llms-ai-overviews-and-geo

[ergophobe]

I wonder how much of the difference in Wikipedia citations (5.7% for Google, 8% for ChatGPT) is a function of different weighting and how much is a function of the nature of the questions.

In other words, if I'm looking for La Sportiva TC Pros in size 39, I will be using Google (and probably clicking on some ads). If I want to know how the density of water varies with temperature, I will probably be using 1min.ai for a first pass.

Since Google is basically an ad engine first and foremost, it makes me wonder if the future of Google is simply to be a shopping engine. Right now I pay (sort of - lifetime 1min.ai for however long they define a lifetime) for LLM answers, but I use ad-supported search.

Could it bifurcate into a paid service for when you have more factual or abstract questions and an ad-driven service for finding things to buy?

Or, assuming the more likely scenario, what happens to the quality of ChatGPT answers when *it* becomes first and foremost an ad engine?

[Brad]

Two things:

1. This reminds me of the First Internet Bubble. Right now AI usage is relatively cheap, underwritten by all the speculative money flowing into it, but AI is expensive and the prices will have to go up and a lot of users both commercial and personal are not going to be able to afford the increase.  Do the Ai companies inject ads at that point?

2. Backlash.  What happens when the webmasters retaliate and figure out how to block AI bots from real new information or paywall it for AI bots?  The scammers, propagandists, con-men and other bad actors will create sites and leave them open and free to AI bots and then AI fills up with garbage or the owners of the AI's will push their own agendas like Musk and Grok.

AI is just a new level of enshitification.

[ergophobe]

>> AI is just a new level of enshitification.

Sorry, but no it isn't. This is like saying "The internet is just a new level of enshitification."

First, my broken record moment: don't say AI when you mean LLMs. There is all kinds of AI that is working in the world that has nothing to do with ChatGPT, transformer tech and whatever is running LLMs. This is the equivalent of saying "the internet" when you mean "the web." Big difference.

To stay on that analogy, I don't think the internet has been enshitified. What has been enshitified are most for-profit products that use the internet.

So... what you mean to say, I think, is that the enshitification of AI products is inevitable as the cash tsunami slows down and they attempt to turn a profit. This very very different from saying that AI is *just* a new level of enshitification.

In the same way that the internet was transformative, AI will be massively transformative. To say otherwise is to be like the idiot in 1994 saying, "People don't want to buy books online. They want to browse."

Yes, that idiot is me. I had no clue a) how online shopping would transform my life and b) how thoroughly enshitified Amazon would become.

So, yes, Amazon is next level enshitification. But the internet is not.

ChatGPT will likely be either thoroughly enshitified or, very unlikley, vastly more expensive.  But AI in general is going to be a massively important tool.

I think it will be a much bigger breakpoint in culture than the before/after WWW breakpoint. If you think of the hugely disruptive technologies like the internet, atomic power, even electricity, none of those fundamentally changed the way schools, especially universities work. The reason we're seeing such a weak response to AI from the universities is that it has rendered their fundamental model untenable. Unlike the web or electricity, they don't yet see how to integrate it within their current model of lecture and test.