alt Hacker NewsNilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...
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It has reduced traffic to my website by around 65%. I live from that website. My income is a function of the traffic it gets.
I spent 9 years of my life putting hard-earned information on the internet, and now big tech uses it to enrich themselves while putting me out of work. Even my backup plan - software development - is being devalued to hell. It's so damn depressing. We'll get the internet that we deserve.
Over the past year to 1.5 years, in the sites I run, I have seen a drop in traffic from Google, which leveled off, and is now slightly rising.
I think if you look through this thread you’ll see a lot of skepticism of the AI results, and I think that is a fairly broadly held opinion. The obvious way to check the AI answer is to click through to some sources.
I think for Google to stop sending me traffic, it would have to be essentially perfect at AI answers. It will never get there, especially as so many searches are opinion-based like “what is the best mobile phone right now.”
This was the promise of Bing that never materialized.
Isn’t Google’s ads flywheel depend on them sending traffic to websites?
The web as we know it is over.
Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.
The "website" of the future will be an API optimized for LLM crawlers, serving plain-text content that no end-user will ever view directly. The SEO game will change to LLMAO.
He also spins a lot of trash talk about an industry he's never personally worked in as any kind of engineer at all. He's a "Journalist Covering Tech" without a degree in journalism, so he's not even a "Tech Journalist"; might as well be the blogger character from Silicon Valley.
> Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Chicago.
His hot takes are best ignored, is just convenient click bait for their entire negativity angle.
Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?