alt Hacker NewsI wonder how this affect Google's bottom line.
Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.
What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?
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You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.
Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.
> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.
This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal.
The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.
wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?
Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.