The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues :<p>- quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait<p>- SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it.<p>And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 years and this issue only became problematic starting in, oh, late 2022 or so.
The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.
I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions…<p>I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many
Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts.<p>That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.
I don't think CNET can blame AI for its downfall, it's just not a very good site.<p>It used to be a good place for tech news (after all, they are "news.com"), but now they are mostly a review site with shallow reviews seemingly based on what they read on manufacturer and retailer product pages... and of course, with lots of affiliate links so they get their cut if you buy a product based on their review.
Looks like those whose business model is producing shitty content are struggling, and those that provide quality content, are doing well.<p>Wikiepdia: Good
Quora: Bad
Reddit: Good
CNet: Bad<p>It makes sense, as LLM content is of mediocre quality, if you want something of good and reliable quality you go elsewhere.
It's basically the same situation as the .COM bubble. Some companies used the internet to an advantage and thrived. Others slapped ".COM" on everything but didn't really understand what they are doing.
I can attest to this. I run Bear Blog, and it has seen a dramatic rise in signups month-over-month. My suspicion is that other platforms are getting covered in AI generated content, and while Bear isn’t perfect, there is a lot more curation and a strict no advertising policy.
> Yet, despite the challenges, Quora still pulls in just under 1 billion visits a month.<p>Man, those a big numbers. I would have bet two orders of magnitude lower.
My search pattern has completely changed. I just go to chatgpt or meta ai directly these days for topics/queries I need help recall or summarization with. This is usually most of the searches. The only reason I use google is for maps based info.<p>I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is it, the same info can already be summarized by an LLM today. That habit is powerful and what will give these sites some time to pivot if they can<p>Over time as genAI becomes better, everything that doesn't have any time based function will be consumed by it.
the analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation<p>- reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and they're consciously boosting it
- wikipedia clearly doesn't have increase in page views
- substack as a product has been on rise, more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with the content on the platform
It seems to me that this article has no way of telling whether these are actual people visiting or AI agents/bots visiting to get content. I'm betting it's the later in all cases.
It's organic food vs plastic noodles. But it goes only as long as people can hope to tell real fish apart from artificial ones in the pond. We are desperate and running back to our biological habitats - with real people, real talk and real imperfection.
I would expect there to be a measurement error here (although maybe not a significant one): individuals and services have repeatedly complained about AI companies engaging in aggressive crawling. Given that, one might expect to see traffic increases to data sources like Wikipedia and Reddit.
If your service is simply prompting an AI model, your company will be eaten be obsoleted by AI.<p>If your service acquires real world data specific to individuals and organizations that is used to make better decisions, your company will not be eaten by AI (immediately).
While AI may technically be leading to less traffic for some sites, they didn’t deserve most of that traffic in the first place. Also most haven’t lost 90% of their traffic yet, so AI, please continue your killing - you’re not done yet!
The decline in cnet might suggest people are using LLMs for product reviews and recommendations? I'm surprised because I personally wouldn't trust an LLM for that.<p>Maybe the new frontier of SEO is gaming LLMs to recommend your product.
I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like:<p><pre><code> - What is platos frios
- Can you download Netflix videos to your local device
- Who composed the Top Gun theme
- Who have been the most successful American Idol winners
- If I check-in the day before a United Airlines flight, can I still buy additional checked bags when I go to the airport
- If I'm buying a Schwinn IC4 indoor spin bike, do I need a floormat for it also
- What is pisco
- In the US, what is the format for EINs?
- Is it bad to use tap water in your humidifier?
- Which NBA players are on supermax contracts
- What are some of the best steakhouses in Manhattan?
- How much and how long does it take to procure a DUNS number?
- In terms of real estate, what is historic tax credit development
</code></pre>
LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use Google basically as a <i>proxy</i> to find websites that I'd then have to sift through to find the answers to these questions. It was another layer of indirection. Now that I can have an LLM just tell me the answer (you still need to approach it with a skeptical eye, since it can certainly get some things wrong), I don't need to "search" the search results pages themselves and read multiple articles and blog posts to hopefully find the answer to my question.