Conversation

Google operated on the social contract of providing traffic to sites in exchange for content. Now that #Google is switching to #AI answers synthesized from the content and effectively cutting traffic is there even a point in participation?

Google will keep bringing load to the sites without providing any traffic.

I suspect we are about to see first robots.txt snippets banning Google crawlers like other AI bots really soon. And eventually outright banning Google ips altogether.

I wonder whether we’re also about to see a surge of old-school search engines. With modern technology it’s feasible to run a small search engine from a living room (e. g. https://kukei.eu) on an off-the-shelf hardware and open source software. It doesn’t take the whole Google to operate a decade-old (feature wise) Google search engine. It might be feasible to run a good search engine on small resources that can be paid by simple ads or small subscriptions.

https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-pichai/