Lauren Weinstein
Report shows AI search and AI chatbots are destroying the sites they feed on, with abysmal click-through rates (91% to 96% fewer than
traditional search)
As AI scraping surges, AI search traffic fails to follow: Report
https://searchengineland.com/ai-scraping-ai-search-traffic-report-453160
Lauren Weinstein
@mark As we know, the G search ranking algorithms are ... complex. However, my sense is that it would be a mistake at this time to overthink what's going on. It's obvious that AI results (whether "Overviews" or in some other form, and largely irrespective of how inaccurate they are in full or part) are disincentivizing users en masse from clicking beyond the AI answer. This is reality, not merely perception, and this reality is going to affect the regulatory view of Google and other firms in major ways going forward, since Google et al. are increasingly being viewed as essentially website vampires.
Mark T. Tomczak
@lauren It makes me wonder how this impacts Google search results in the large, because way down in the stack for Google's ranking algorithm has always been CTR and click-bounce.
I have no idea if they're controlling for AI (and their own OneBox surfacing's) impact on those signals. Be interesting if that were one of the explanations for the perceived enshittification of search results.
Mark T. Tomczak
@lauren It's been interesting to me to watch website vampirism (which used to be, if anything, welcomed---"Please, please, please scrape and share my data, I put it up for people to find and use!") become a bad thing.
Second time in my life I've witnessed a behavior that was near-universally accepted as fine transitioning to unacceptable in multiple spaces. Smoking was the previous one.
Rich Felker
@mark @lauren Um, nobody ever put up a site wanting it to be scraped and represented without credit or (more importantly for many of us than credit!) without any of the provenance information needed for someone reading it to know if it's right or meaningful, or from what perspective it should be taken.
Rich Felker
@mark @lauren For a very large portion of people who produce things meant to be free for the reading/use of others (free software but also lots of analogous things), the compensation we're getting is standing to speak as a trusted source on the matters, things which we usually have some deep care that they're done right or at least in a way we find agreeable.
When it's just taken without attribution - or even worse, with attribution, but adulterated with all sorts of wrong stuff mixed in - that's completely negated and the social contract by which the sharing took place is broken.
Rich Felker
@mark @lauren Can you shed some light on what specifically you put up that you wanted scraped?
I'm not talking about "professionals" or "academics". I'm just talking about people who spend their time creating things they believe will be useful or fun to other people.
Yes if you're making memes you want them to be be used by others, but you're probably making them with an intent that you're creating or influencing the direction of culture. If your original meme got intetionally buried by someone twisting it into something contrary to your values that wasn't even clever/funny, and just spammed all over the place, that probably wouldn't be fun.
Mark T. Tomczak
@dalias @lauren When I was a kid, we did that all the time. That's how memes worked / still work. Perhaps you mean "nobody professional" or "nobody in academia?"
The web was a playground until it wasn't.
Rich Felker
@mark @lauren He was quiet about it for a long time then expressed frustration and disapproval at one point, but never did anything about it.
Mark T. Tomczak
@dalias @lauren I'd have to ask the guy who did Pepe the Frog because IIUC that's exactly what happened with it when GamerGate adopted it.
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