You can thank Prabhakar Raghavan. He was in charge of search at Yahoo and then went to Google, where he pressured the search team to improve their metrics by getting more searches made so more ads could be shown. So results were intentionally worsened, which lead to more searches, and so on and so forth.
As we presently stand, Google aims to remove search altogether and replace it with an AI “experience” where the results are dynamically generated by an LLM from the scraped web. This completely denies all websites any revenue from traffic, because they’re not going to get any but LLM feeder bots. Google aims to profit off this by auctioning off the words that the LLM produces to advertisers. Pay more, get your product mentioned earlier or with greater gusto or with greater frequency.
You can thank Prabhakar Raghavan. He was in charge of search at Yahoo and then went to Google, where he pressured the search team to improve their metrics by getting more searches made so more ads could be shown. So results were intentionally worsened, which lead to more searches, and so on and so forth.
As we presently stand, Google aims to remove search altogether and replace it with an AI “experience” where the results are dynamically generated by an LLM from the scraped web. This completely denies all websites any revenue from traffic, because they’re not going to get any but LLM feeder bots. Google aims to profit off this by auctioning off the words that the LLM produces to advertisers. Pay more, get your product mentioned earlier or with greater gusto or with greater frequency.