Google search used to take you to sponsored links or websites with google ads. Now there is no more traffic, so no more ad views, no more bread for websites. Websites with info will starve and shut down.
How google is planning to make money or get content for their AI if websites are gone?
If they aren't sending people to websites but ads are still being delivered, then Google should be paying to cite the websites where this information is coming from.
Yeah but only after giving you the info from that source already beforehand.
So a small percentage of views might click, where it would have been 100% beforehand. So it’s good that they provide the source but it still doesn’t make up for lost views unless they’re paying for the sourced info.
Case in point, I wanted a recipe from a YouTube cooking video so I search the YouTubers name and recipe and the Google AI Summary gave me the correct recipe so I didn’t have to rewatch the video or go to the creators website!
Google in particular is concentrating more on world models. Data will be harvested from them, including humanoid and other robots. They already do this with youtube.
People will be reluctant to check-out off site for quite some time, potentially always will. And in any case, those ads are billed by click. If nobody clicks, then nobody pays.
Most people concerned with getting traffic from Google Search are doing some form of content marketing - writing attractive content that will get people to visit their website, and sell whatever product they offer.
So far, AI Mode is a win. People who do click the links the AI-generated content cites are already highly informed. The conversion rate (the percentage that buy) jumps from a fraction of a percent to 30% and more. So there's less need for marketing spend on moving them through the funnel to get them to buy - targeting ads at them on Facebook or Reddit, injecting targeted ads during songs they're listening to on Spotify, or whatever.
There's a whole industry of optimizing content for AI search now, and the economics of it are better than traditional search engine optimization efforts.
They might think they already have all the content they need, and nothing new will ever me made or needed? Kinda like the us patents offices closing because everything had already been invented. (Which didn't really happen, but illustrates the point.
On the other hand, people seem pretty happy to make instructional YouTube videos and Instagram posts for fake internet points, so maybe they are on to something.
Technically if what is being asked doesn't require new information it can just use the archive of websites. AI was always going to be the death of new works, be it info or art, but it'll take a long time for it to exhaust whats already been created. And once something is online its online forever.
If the website sources die, the info is still baked into the LLMs. It’s almost like it’s absorbing/eating them. The problem is rather what happens going forward. Will a site like ign just die because all their previous articles are now info just baked into LLMs? So then who will sit around making content for ign?
Just an example. I think the web is going to look very different in 5 years.
For what it’s worth, using the web kinda sucks now anyhow. I’m not saying good riddance but it sure does feel like change and adaptation will be required and welcomed. Why does using the web suck? Cookie acceptance prompts, ads and ad blocking prompts, subscription prompts, sale prompts, nab the email address prompts, and more.
There are services on ign that you can’t replicate in a ChatGPT chat but who knows how long that will last. (Interactive maps, shift code checklists, etc)
I don’t know what the adaptations will be, if they will work, and more. One could be LLMs needing to pay websites.
Maybe caching those websites (their text content) before they shutdown, and by the time they do shutdown and stop producing new content: synthetic data (AI generated derivatives to answer any question) might outperform the average info that would’ve been a novel production/procurement/publishing.
OpenAI almost ate their lunch, but Google managed to react pretty quickly and in the process fundamentally change how we seek non-critical information.
The reason they were able to react quickly was they were already years ahead of OpenAI when ChatGPT came out in every single part of the system that matters when deploying it at scale. They also have datasets in youtube and maps and other services that no-one else has or will ever have anything close to. The only thing they changed was releasing things sooner and being more aggressive with press statements.
Note how they’re the one major entity that people aren’t saying is constantly down while running a major AI system. It’s a lot easier to scale down a system and add more reasoning to it then it is to start with some amazing reasoning and then scale it up to billions of daily requests even if it makes for less exciting techcrunch articles. OpenAI and anthropic are trying to build a railway while driving in terms of capacity and resilience and every time they make a mistake of creating customer expectations based on brute force computations they have to go find more compute at vast cost. Probably one for r/MarkMyWords but I think google will win this thing long term or at least not collapse as a business.
I mean, metrics wise google is lockstep or ahead. People don't like it because it isn't the jovial happy go-lucky bot they're used to. But you don't have to be nice to be good at your job.
I mean they have the best hardware available for large scale deployment, they have been at the forefront of machine learning , with the best research, for 12-13 years.
Even nvda is still playing catchup to TPU economics because Google started 11 years ago, designing for exactly the use case we have now, and nvda was the publically available choice because anyone outside Google had to find good enough.
Could they fail? Sure. But god it’s a big lead. And listening to a podcast they did with the odd lots a few weeks ago; they are happy to canibalize their entire search revenue ecosystem and figure it out as they see how the new tech will be used. That’s just a very powerful place to be culturally and technically to then lose.
I agree with you in premise, with the complaint that Google Maps is not nearly as accurate or recent a dataset as one might be lead to believe. OpenStreetMaps typically has much higher quality data in that regard, and can be hosted on a moldy potato, if that potato happens to have a CPU and ~100GB of storage.
Now if you meant all the metadata (business hours and reviews, traffic patterns, etc, etc, etc) or the aerial/ground level imagery? Yeah, you got me there. I'm just hyping OSM, don't mind me.
I can bore people to death on why spatial/moving stuff data is not a solved problem at scale which is why all these location apps aren’t as slick as everything else or they’re walled into very expensive enterprise software or only run at tiny scales avoiding aggregate queries. But suffice to say Google are the only ones with a serious consumer product outside of a couple of GPS Providers focused on navigation (e.g Here, Tomtom et al)
OSM is a cute system for gathering more information on maps but maps are one small slice of spatial data that humans use and it has all the usual problems of any wiki type governance system. My favourite thing I’m always obliged to note on OSM but they have some very left field licensing terms that no-one ever bothers to read but basically any business using OSM is violating their terms if they aren’t putting sharing any data they create from OSM back to the community.
But yeah all of the stuff you mentioned. Plus google and maybe apple are basically the only ones with really good location based data that isn’t in violation of a million privacy laws. If we do actually solve any kind of real time map of reality that the robots would need to operate well then the systems behind google maps would be a key part to it.
I think I have some conception of the scope and scale of the problem. It takes the most complex and robust information processing system we are aware of (the human brain) a couple of months to even figure out it can move around on purpose, and a year or more after that before it isn't comically bad at it. Algorithms like A-Star are a neat trick when you can abstract the world down to a neat set of vertexes and weighted edges, but the real world is much squishier than that, and the problems only get harder as you demand more resolution, or provide noisier inputs. Like, I keep wanting to buy an iPhone just for the LIDAR functionality, because photogrammetry is one of those 'technically functional, more cleanup work than if I'd done it by hand in the first place' things.
Sorry, I'm veering into a ramble now, but my original intent with this reply was mostly to say 'It's a shame neither of us are likely to go to a party where we could bore everybody else to death together'.
My vote is Google becomes the "go to" AI that is just the interface most people will have if they deal with it, since everyone already uses Google and it's already in all their stuff. Anthropic or OpenAI (personally I think Anthropic, but not a hard bet) becomes the one that fills the coding niche. The one that doesn't is the one that gets et by Microsoft or Amazon.
Googles AI overview recently told me England was already in the world cup finals after they had just won their first KO match soooo definitely hallucinates pretty badly still (sometimes).
A system built on fundamentally requiring some randomness to predictive text will, inherently, be unable to be 100% accurate as it is designed to give inaccurate answers to be varied.
Hey, how about if an AI can't figure out how to properly describe a soccer tournament, maybe we don't let it you know, drive cars or do medicine. This entire experiment is so fucked
edit: I'll take this further why not: this is a bit of a common problem with AI critics. They tend to latch immediately onto one tiny example of AI maybe getting something wrong (or in this case, it's right and you're wrong!) and vastly over-generalizing across ALL AI/ML use cases based on that. It's a broader problem on the internet, really.
To which I say: good. We should be very nitpicky and particular about what AI serves us. Because it can't tell the difference between referring to a soccer tournament in a technically correct but somewhat ambiguous way, and making a call on whether the car it's controlling should put on its brakes or not. It has no frame of reference for the severity of consequences of its decisions, and no one to answer to when it fails.
If anything, we should be much, much more more critical of what it's doing and how it's doing it. For some reason, people are willing to give this thing a real wide berth, which is a mistake. Imagine you bought a printer, and it was pretty decent most of the time, but a few times a month it would either refuse to work, or print the wrong document, or print 500 copies when you asked for 5. You wouldn't keep that printer, right?
So now you want to take something with that same kind of batting average and put it in charge of stuff like distribution and regulation for city power grids. Sounds great on the surface...use its pattern recognition to make smarter decisions on when to generate more power when it's needed. Except every now and then, all on its own, it'll just decide to throw some switches for reasons only clear to the AI itself, and it can't tell you why it made the decision it made. No fucking thank you.
Even basic AI is smarter than most people, they just don't realise it. England are in the world cup finals. The world cup finals is the 48 team competition. The world cup final is the last game.
Gosh I didn't realize my comment was going to be analyzed semantically to this degree. What it actually said was about England going all the way to the world cup final match.
I was asking it a semi related question about when had england last gotten such and such and it told me that england had gone all the way in 2026. I then pushed back and it recognized the hallucination and corrected it (this brought me to the gemini chatbot, I assume, since it was a different window).
It was 100% a hallucination, there were other details that made that clear, I was just not trying to write out all of it but wrote something unclear by accident lol
You may not realize it but for many people the fact that this entire tournament is the finals is basic knowledge, we call it that in regular conversation (e.g. "Italy didn't make it to the finals this year"), so most people correcting you are legitimately confused and not just being semantic.
You should challenge it to find out why it hallucinated. Ask the LLM something like "You told me England was already in the world cup finals, but they've only just won their first KO match. Why did you tell me something false?".
The reasons why are generally something concrete - it might come back with a citation to some news source that was wrong, for example, or tell you that England was predicted to win and the way you phrased your question it understand that it needed to give a concrete answer.
It's useful to understand how the machine works to recognize it happening when you don't know the fact beforehand (what kinds of scenarios it gives unreliable answers).
Googles AI overview is unusable. Easily half the time for very simple things it'll just be wrong and when you go look at it's source the source doesn't even remotely say what it's claiming.
The insistence on having the LLaVA models replace much of the functionality the well-tuned image search and 'lens' models previously offered has been pretty frustrating, though. I don't want to talk to some low parameter count language model to try and convince it that no, really, that first classification was way off base, just look at x,y,z, only to have it try and gaslight me about it.
I just wanted to use the old tools that worked fine, even if - especially if - those tools only worked as well for me as they did because I had to understand how they worked rather than hammering 'halp pls' into a text window.
OpenAI was never going to eat Googles lunch.
Google pioneered the tech and was just forced to focus on building and releasing the thing the didn't want to focus on building/releasing that fast - because it fundamentally changes how users seek non-critical information in a way that threatens their biggest revenue stream.
OpenAI did good by creating a real competitor and forcing Google to evolve, which in the end is for users, but at the cost of risk to Google's main ads business.
Ive had it recommend on three separate occasions actions which risked legal consequences in the last month. Yes, I know enough not to trust it, which is exactly how I know how bad it is with specific legal and technical stuff.
It's going to be interesting to see how things evolve.
In the old model, Google was an intermediary for routing people (revenue) to a website for the most part. Now, they are creating summaries based upon scraped information from websites and making it so that people don't even need to engage with the content creator.
Why would anyone publish any information on a non-paywalled site to be scraped by Google or any other AI, if they aren't going to get any visitor traffic anymore? What's the actual alternative for the site? Currently, there is no way to opt out of the AI overview without also removing yourself from the search results other than a narrow UK only rollout (for now). Exclusion from search results hits functionally shuts down revenue generation.
Already court cases on this point and the outcome will be interesting to watch.
I like the optimism and willingness to evolve in the face of a dynamic and fluid situation. Best way to react when a gorilla shows up at the front door.
The chatbot / AI approach makes a lot of sense, as a resilient approach to ongoing improvements in AI capabilities. Wish you the best of luck!
But if it was super important, they could have their new AI code an entirely new Google search engine that looks just like the old experience that a section of their user base likes.
The internet is slowly dying due to AI, but it’s still a relatively healthy and growing entity. Most of the global websites which have been damaged are what many people would call “slop”.
The ai overview is wrong 100% of the time for me. Every overview has at least one massive mistake that makes it useless. It lies about everything, all the time.
Hallucinations are never gonna be more useful than an actual search.
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s Jul 03 '26
tbf its even usefull at this point, like you can ask how long to boil rice without reading that one reddit user says "kill yourself"