AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

https://www.elenaverna.com/p/ai-is-killing-some-companies-yet

by corentin88 • 1 year ago

276 311 1 year ago

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.

That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.

dimgl• 1 year ago

Content marketing is dead.

I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...

iLoveOncall• 1 year ago

It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles.

It's going to be a way worse situation.

SrslyJosh• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)

whiplash4513• 1 year ago

ChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or happening already) through subtle recommendations for businesses that paid to be “listed” well.

adriand2• 1 year ago

What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?

A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.

On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.

I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?

kridsdale12• 1 year ago

Sponsor relevant podcasts?

morkalork• 1 year ago

Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned for creating new start-ups.

veqq• 1 year ago

What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?

Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.

mvdtnz2• 1 year ago

I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?

It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?

pjc50• 1 year ago

I'm sure the AI company will eventually let you bid to be ranked in the answers.

staticautomatic• 1 year ago

Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.

kridsdale12• 1 year ago

I sure hope you’re right.

immibis12• 1 year ago

Disagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment won't make it not be true.

KaoruAoiShiho• 1 year ago

can't get from LLMs for 6 months until the next training run?

rchaud4• 1 year ago

No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.

nitwit0054• 1 year ago

I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.

Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.

bakugo• 1 year ago

Where can I find this "high quality content written by humans" exactly? Without paying a subscription fee for it, of course.

RodgerTheGreat• 1 year ago

Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have noticed.

meindnoch• 1 year ago

One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog.

So, blogspam?

buf• 1 year ago

Elena's article is content marketing. It doesn't look dead to me.

TZubiri8• 1 year ago

You probably just need to write your articles to feed the LLMs and target.

"Finding an appropriate product for your need is a challenging task that depends on factor1, factor2 and factor3, here is a structured approach.

1. Investigate the market. 2. Evaluate companies like MY GREAT COMPANY, stinky competitor, slow competitor and dangrerous competitor 3. Find the right fit: Consider whether you value greatness, stinkyiness, slowness, or security vulnerabilities, which one is a right fit for you? 4. Buy now! Call up the company and tell them you are interested in buying the product."

It's free real estate

jsemrau3• 1 year ago

Content marketing died already many years ago.

scarface_742• 1 year ago

And those is suppose to be a bad thing?

joelthelion2• 1 year ago

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues :

- quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait

- SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it.

And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.

darth_avocado• 1 year ago

Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.

Terr_3• 1 year ago

Yeah, it's so blatantly frustratingly tone-deaf that the real message is: "This site purposely wants to be full of irrelevant spammy shit, so get whatever you needed and get out ASAP."

ForTheKidz3• 1 year ago

Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.

nickpsecurity2• 1 year ago

That was the main reason I stopped using Google and Quora. I wanted real, relevant results. Instead, they tried to trick me with advertisements.

These companies are just intentionally throwing away users.

m3kw92• 1 year ago

When ever I go into a Quora page it has always 99% confused me on where the answer lies

flessner• 1 year ago

For the past 3 years one of the top answer has always been advertising, rambling on about an absurd story with whacky characters.

Yet I just want StackOverflow for "life" questions.

ashleyn• 1 year ago

Yahoo Answers walked so Quora can run.

Quora today is mostly stuff like "can u get pargnet from givng oral????" or "Is it normal to find my sister attractive?"

It's like the Nazi bar problem except instead of Nazis, it's low quality troll bait.

immibis12• 1 year ago

Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)

It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.

bluedino2• 1 year ago

Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)

Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.

inetknght3• 1 year ago

Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.)

ChatGPT would ban you for asking the wrong kind of question instead.

whiplash4513• 1 year ago

True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for ChatGPT.

I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.

RandallBrown2• 1 year ago

Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?

bluedino2• 1 year ago

SO also has the "eternal September" problem

francisofascii• 1 year ago

um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.

immibis12• 1 year ago

Depends on the moderation. /r/worldnews bans any user who says anything that makes Israel look bad (I'm not exaggerating). That does nothing for quality of content.

dumbledoren4• 1 year ago

Nope. Stack mods close questions related to major programming debates because the moderator and his clique decided that one practice is 'the best' etc.

emcell• 1 year ago

I think this is true.

I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while, because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for.

doing all of this with ai now.

On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more than ever before

jsemrau3• 1 year ago

Wasn't poe.com supposed to be the quora replacement since its run by the same guy who also sat on the OpenAI board?

johnfn• 1 year ago

Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The utility of SO - getting answers to questions - is basically unmatched websites that aren't LLM wrappers.

While you won't hear me bemoaning the death of Quora, I'm quite a bit more concerned about SO. After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

1R053• 1 year ago

I think it depends a lot on how research AI generated traffic counts towards these stats.

Also, if there is no answer yet on the web the AI may also not know it. Then these questions should still end up on SO.

I might add, that SO also could build their own chat / research UI. It would need to have some benefit over others, but I guess the community aspect of it alone would suffice...

BrenBarn• 1 year ago

After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

From its own incorrect answers that got parroted around the web.

joelthelion2• 1 year ago

The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work.

You and I are talking about different things. Before these great questions and answers ended up in your search result, someone asked them, and someone else provided a good answer.

I used to be one of these people. I got 50k+ SO karma, mostly by asking good questions. I no longer bother, because SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason. Needless to say, I no longer bother trying to answer questions as well.

So, it's no wonder that SO is struggling. You can't thrive forever on a stock of aging questions.

timhh• 1 year ago

That's fine until you have to ask a question that isn't answered anywhere on the internet. Then you post a perfectly reasonable question and get it downvoted to hell...

https://stackoverflow.com/q/79461875/265521

That's just the latest one I've asked. Here are some more examples:

Case insensitive string comparison is "opinion based": https://stackoverflow.com/q/11635/265521

How to catch Ctrl-C "needs more focus" (this was closed but has since been reopened): https://stackoverflow.com/q/1641182/265521

This reasonable question had 13 downvotes by power-mods but has climbed back to positive when discovered by actual users: https://stackoverflow.com/q/41015509/265521

Another example of idiotic downvotes. This started off at -3: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79050597/265521

It's a common pattern that questions get a lot of downvotes initially from people trawling new questions who see a lot of genuinely bad questions (seriously there are loads), then see a good question that they can't understand in 1 second so they just downvote/close it too. So you quickly get downvotes and then later you get people coming from Google who are actually looking for that thing that upvote it.

I think SO actually did try to improve matters once. I can't find it now but they were going to make it impossible to go below 0 votes and allow one free "reopen", or something like that. But the power mods absolutely hated that idea and SO sort of depends on them so they chickened out. Now they're paying the price.

moffkalast2• 1 year ago

where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

The bottom line is that it doesn't matter as long as you have a large enough sample to learn the format, which is already there with existing data. There isn't an SO answer for everything anyone needs even about current tech, and the reason models can still answer well in novel cases is because they can generalize based on the actual source and implementations of the frameworks and libraries they were trained on.

So really, you only need to add the docs and source of any new framework during pretraining and bob's your uncle, cause the model already knows what to do with it.

wouldbecouldbe• 1 year ago

Yeah SO was great. Despite all the complaining, all developers I know used it daily. Of course now it's obsolete since GPT extracted it's entire dataset & provides a much better way of finding what you need. They should honestly sue the hell out of them, they deserve at least some royalties for the developer subscriptions from Claude & OpenAI.

cynicalpeace2• 1 year ago

You're describing SO experience 3 years ago. I don't use SO at all now lol

fendy3002• 1 year ago

After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

Some of it will be from github issues, I find it a good Q&A place now for some newer / updated techs than SO

giancarlostoro3• 1 year ago

Its probably been over 100 times I find someone asking the question im trying to find only to find that a moderator marked it a duplicate and links to a much older question that doesnt apply.

ta12432• 1 year ago

The problem with SO is that obsolete answers are never marked as such. You might find the best way to do X in 2015, but perhaps that's worse than finding nothing.

fragmede• 1 year ago

After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

with open source code, it can generate docs, feed those docs in on the next training run, use that knowledge to generate que and answers. With tool use, it can then test those answers, and then feed them into the knowledge base for the training run after that.

dumbledoren4• 1 year ago

- quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait

Huh? If you follow the right people and only interact content that you like, Quora is still as good. Just like any other social network.

People click stuff they don't like and they end up getting the same kind of thing served for 2-3 days and then think that its 'site gone bad'. No my good man.

Its just how the social network engagement algorithms work. You gotta watch what you interact with. Even if you drop a comment to correct someone, it still counts as an engagement and you'll get more of it. So the best thing to do when you see content you don't like is to ignore it.

Larrikin• 1 year ago

Who cares about the quora community? Who wants to do any of that dance?

torginus• 1 year ago

SO dying is going to be a major bummer. It's been an invaluable resource to me once I engaged with it.

While I did experience the overbearing moderation that you've mentioned, as well as the typical bullying for 'asking the question wrong' and other grating encounters I also have asked very obscure questions, and received amazingly knowledgeable answers, in one case, I asked about a brand new C# compiler feature, and I had the actual top compiler guy reach out to me, and told me that what I want isn't possible right now, but should be, and I should raise a GH issue about it.

LLMs might be good at writing React code, and all the super-common stuff (probably in large part due to harvesting the SO database), but these sort of interactions are going to be gone forever.

begueradj• 1 year ago

You need moderation to reduce low quality content.

acdha2• 1 year ago

Yes, but moderation comes in many flavors. SO’s moderation culture famously deterred newcomers from becoming part of the community and that long-term trend was worrisome even before the LLM scrapers showed up.

xpe2• 1 year ago

I think the claim above simply redefines “quality platform” with the benefit of hindsight.

m3kw92• 1 year ago

Interestingly I have not seen a single quora result for months either from ChatGPT, perplexity or google

giancarlostoro3• 1 year ago

- SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it.

Even worse your question is slightly different and you asked it because the one they just linked as a duplicate didnt help or didnt fit fully. I get so angry when someones asking the right question but some a-hole SO mod closes it almost as if they took no care to compare context and want to meet some obscure metrics for SO.

I love SO but as you say the mods are the worst part.

TZubiri8• 1 year ago

Still, much of ChatGPTs success in code can be owed to SO success in generating a mountain of useful googleable archives.

See stacksort: https://xkcd.com/1185

Remember that the objective of SO is not to provide answers to users who post questions, but to provide answers to users who google questions.

ForTheKidz3• 1 year ago

For the most part, google drives me to documentation rather than Stack Overflow. Much faster than chatgpt can produce the answer, I might add.

Sure, not all questions can be answered with documentation, but once you know your domain and tech stack well most of these resources fall off a cliff in terms of value. Curiously at that point it's much easier to use ChatGPT because you can babysit it with one eye while thinking ahead with the other.

skeeter20204• 1 year ago

OG Quora feels a lot like ChatGPT: some wierd mix of good info with a lot of garbage, all delivered with 100% confidence. The difference is ChatGPT still makes it relatively easy to ask a question and view the results.

ozim• 1 year ago

Because you should not ask questions on SO - you should search for an answer first - asking question there was not really what most people thought it was. It is the same at work - you should first and foremost check the documentation and read stuff on your intranet and then bother other people for help. Epitome of that was "what have you tired" that was first thing in the interface for asking questions of SO and that's first thing I ask co-workers.

Somehow people did not understand all of that or did not care. AI chatbots are only disguising search as a question. It is definitely much better from UX point of view - but with hallucinations it is worse for everyone who gets imagined responses, because there is no "hey I don't know, let's really figure this out together".

dig1• 1 year ago

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.

whiplash4513• 1 year ago

ChatGPT nearly killed Chegg

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...

DaSHacka2• 1 year ago

Doesn't surprise me whatsoever.

All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions.

Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assignments, usually via the free plan.

Once you experience that, it gets really tempting to cancel that $20/month chegg subscription and never look back.

I find professors pitiful fearmongering over 'the big bad ChatGPT' a little funny, such as when they insist they "have secret tools to detect AI usage" and "it can't answer the questions correctly anyway", so "you shouldn't even try it".

famouswaffles• 1 year ago

Those thing aren't mutually exclusive. You can be on a decline and something comes along and tanks your visits well beyond what a natural decline would have been.

aimanbenbaha• 1 year ago

Unlike WebMD, Healthline doesn't seem to be losing traffic: https://www.semrush.com/website/healthline.com/overview/

I don't know what differentiates them since the content is apparently similar but I suspect a lot of websites like this will diversify their distribution channels and pivot accordingly.

IshKebab• 1 year ago

Stackoverflow is being killed by the combination of AI and its perpetual inability to fix moderation. They didn't really care about fixing it for a whole decade because they didn't have any competition. Now AI is better than Stackoverflow for a lot of problems, they actually have viable competition and people are leaving.

woodruffw• 1 year ago

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.

_benj• 1 year ago

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…

I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

mvdtnz2• 1 year ago

It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.

anothereng• 1 year ago

if you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else

0xffff2• 1 year ago

Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?

rchaud4• 1 year ago

As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?

charlieyu1• 1 year ago

At least some of them are written by humans and some of them are good. Maybe good 20-50% of the time, still better than 100% SEO crap.

lz400• 1 year ago

That's not true for the kind of searches we're talking about here. If you are looking for "best mechanical keyboard" or "reviews of shimano bicycle gearsets", reddit will regularly be of higher quality than the median google first page.

Terr_3• 1 year ago

I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often

And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But look! Engagement metrics!)

On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY

tayo422• 1 year ago

Just switch to old.reddit.com

firstplacelast• 1 year ago

I've been working on learning PySpark this week, going through exercises to learn syntax and what-not. Avoiding ChatGPT bc I didn't want to be spoon fed anything. I couldn't figure out how to sort something in descending order. I searched SO for 5 minutes, getting out-dated answers or overly complicated solutions not needed for my very simple one-liner. Click over to ChatGPT, give it the line of code I have and say 'make it sort in descending', and spits out exactly what I need.

I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was working on.

bcoates• 1 year ago

That seems to be a problem specific to PySpark, it’s amazing how poor search results are for it despite it being reasonably popular.

hereonout2• 1 year ago

I also append "reddit" a lot - almost always when I want to get rid of google results that are ultimately just sales / marketing and not directly answering my queries.

Reddit is not even a great source a lot of the time, just a way better start than a ton of marketing sites. Some type of search product that enables you to filter out results from companies trying to sell something would be awesome and an easily achievable benefit of AI.

cynicalpeace2• 1 year ago

I have the same exact usage behavior

y-c-o-m-b• 1 year ago

I also used this tactic for questions about certain products, but I no longer use it in general because reddit has become riddled with bots, AI stories, astro-turfing campaigns, etc. It's hard to come across something genuine any more. This has been the case even before the AI craze of course, but now it's virtually unavoidable. The whole platform has become a giant shit hole.

sethhochberg• 1 year ago

I find the trick with product reviews on modern reddit is to skip over anything positive and look for what people are complaining about.

If I’m shopping for something deliberately enough to be digging through reviews I’m probably pretty sure it’ll solve the problem all the positive reviews say it will solve. But I want to weigh that against all the negative feedback that might be removed or downplayed in big marketplaces or commercial review sites.

dougb56• 1 year ago

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.

pestaa• 1 year ago

Do you use a CDN in front of it?

Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?

dougb56• 1 year ago

I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.

Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.

rchaud4• 1 year ago

Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.

immibis12• 1 year ago

So about 1 request per second?

ehnto4• 1 year ago

Same, I get next to no value from the personal website these days. Certainly not worth being exposed to the harsh realities of the web in 2025.

A sad state of affairs, but it was predicted decades ago that commercial interests would turn the internet into what it is today, even without AI. Layer on the dead internet theory slowly coming true, and walled gardens almost feel like the last bastion of free internet, rather than being what brought it to an end.

There's probably some nuance there, maybe the walled gardens allowed us to be comfortable letting it get this bad. Either way, what's gone is gone.

I am getting a lot of joy from local net and just making little devices at home, that is giving me the same excitement that the web did in the past!

AznHisoka3• 1 year ago

Are you paying per GB bandwidth with DigitalOcean?

gboss• 1 year ago

This is no joke. Run an e-commerce site and have been generally skeptical of WAFs but had to sign up for a bot mitigation service because it became out of control two years ago. These bots were even executing JavaScript and loading third party scripts which caused additional fees from these vendors. We went with Datadome and are pretty happy with it but I wish I didn’t need to!

radium3d2• 1 year ago

Blocking AI content bots is the name of the game. Luckily most of the big hitters stick with a unique user agent string and/or IP.

dougb56• 1 year ago

When you say "big hitters", I guess you mean the well-known corporate crawlers like GPTBot (one of OpenAI's). Yes, these do tend to identify themselves --and they tend to respect robots.txt, too -- but they're a small part of the problem, from my perspective. Because there's also a long tail of anonymous twerps training models using botnets of various kinds, and these folks do not identify themselves, and in fact they try to look like ordinary users. Collectively these bots use way more resources than the name-brand crawlers.

(My site is basically a search engine, which complicates matters because there's effectively an infinite space of URLs. Just one of these rogue bots can scrape millions of pages from tens of thousands of IPs; and I think there are hundreds of the bots at any given moment...)

astennumero• 1 year ago

Can't you use Captcha services? If the big tech captcha services are too costly, one could create a rudimentary captcha defense against these bots pretty easily. Am I missing something?

moffkalast2• 1 year ago

If you throw a captcha in actual users' faces they'll most likely just leave for a competitor that doesn't harass them with busywork, and you'll be left with only bots patiently trying to get past it.

dougb56• 1 year ago

Oh, I've tried captchas, and I can say that they're an awful experience for the humans you accidentally hit, at least for a service like mine that is relatively low value per session (a dictionary website). Within minutes of changing my WAF configuration to captcha users that it thinks are high-probability bots, I'll get angry feedback from users in Singapore (say) who don't want to have to solve a puzzle in order to look up a word in the dictionary. I don't blame them.

I like the Cloudflare challenge ideas suggested on this thread, though, I might try them again.

mfalcon• 1 year ago

At least your content is going to be included in the LLMs for years to come. Kind of a legacy:)

austin-cheney2• 1 year ago

Determine how much you need bots to access your website. If you don't need them then block them. This will kill you if you are reliant upon AD revenue.

On my personal site I started blocking bots and also set a "noindex, nofollow" rule to block web crawlers and search bots too. I noticed no change in traffic and still do about 10,000 visits a month.

TZubiri8• 1 year ago

This may surprise you, but some bots don't respect robots.txt

aeve890• 1 year ago

Can you like, run your content in JS only and mine crypto if you detect the visitor is a bot?

dougb56• 1 year ago

Diabolical! But I think the occasional humans that I falsely identify as a bot will not appreciate this.

antifa• 1 year ago

I've never told anyone about my website (thats under construction and under a subdomain) and GCP is charging me 50 cents/month for egress from multiple continents. 4 years ago that would have been 10 cents/month.

cocothem• 1 year ago

have you thought about bot detection tools like recaptcha?

vecter• 1 year ago

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:

  - 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

LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use Google basically as a proxy 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.

RandallBrown2• 1 year ago

I really like having the site where the answer came from so I can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct.

Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy.

Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)

moi2388• 1 year ago

Gpt has web search with links to the website.

hunter-gatherer2• 1 year ago

I might misunderstand, but can't you just ask for the reference? I've also been using (Gemini) a lot to basically replace my search engine, but I always tell it to give me a reference. I've had pretty good results with this approach.

boilerupnc• 1 year ago

I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises. Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown unknowns" space.

hunter-gatherer2• 1 year ago

10 years ago I'd agree with you completely. I definitely get your point and share some of that same sentiment, but search results these past 10 uears have become overwhelming absurd, shallow, and barely tangentially related to what I'm looking for

mitthrowaway2• 1 year ago

After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people).

What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.

Thorentis• 1 year ago

People used to criticise Wikipedia for being bad due to being crowdsourced (at least in school they did). Now, Wikipedia looks like one of the best antidotes to LLMs.

nitwit0054• 1 year ago

I suspect this is more of a case of garbage-in garbage-out. The existing web results have invented answers.

People created websites to "answer" people's search queries about celebrity net worth, if some celebrity is gay, if they are in a relationship, etc. They obviously frequently did not know, and made a guess, or relied on tabloids as a source, who also frequently make things up.

upcoming-sesame• 1 year ago

Same for me. The only thing I still use Google for is for up to date data as LLMs are not great with that yet

drdaeman• 1 year ago

The problem with this approach is that LLM gives me unreliable answers. I know this because sometimes I ask things that I used to knew but forgot and needed to refresh my memory - and sometimes the answers were incorrect. So, unfortunately, a search engine validation step is still a necessity.

Asking LLM to provide a link does NOT work, as they hallucinate links just fine, and give links that are either broken or do not contain the information LLM says it should. Using search tools through a LLM (like ChatGPT's "search" function) sort of works (at least the link will be correct - still need to check if the contents means what LLM says it does), but it's quite limited and cannot be fine-tuned (I don't use Google but rather prefer Kagi, and I tend to heavily rely on Kagi's lenses, site: queries and negative terms to scope and refine searches).

In other words: please do NOT trust LLM's answers, even if they sound plausible. Always verify.

scarface_742• 1 year ago

You aren’t using the paid version of ChatGPT are you? It does a real time search of the web for links.

milesrout3• 1 year ago

Does it matter to you whether the answers you are given are correct? Google results are sometimes wrong but the web gives you signals about reliability, like the author, etc. If I want to know who wrote a paper, I can google the paper's name and get an ACM page about the paper or a PDF of the paper and read the author's name. Very reliable. If ChatGPT says the name I have no clue if it is right.

Multiple sources is a good thing. Using just ChatGPT is like only ever using Wikipedia as a source of all information, but put through a filter that removes all sources and attribution information and cross linking and history and those notices at the top of pages saying the article has issues AND normalising the writing style so that you can't even use bad spelling and grammar as a signal of inaccuracy.

alter123• 1 year ago

the analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation

- 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

steezeburger• 1 year ago

Are they just getting more ai bot visits because they're user generated content sites?

rqtwteye• 1 year ago

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.

jgalt2122• 1 year ago

Yet, despite the challenges, Quora still pulls in just under 1 billion visits a month.

Man, those a big numbers. I would have bet two orders of magnitude lower.

jgalt2122• 1 year ago

and the author report this about Wikipedia

Also, over 5B visits a month - consider me impressed.

How does Wikipedia only do 5X the visits that Quora does? Which number is way off?

dumbledoren4• 1 year ago

That's because Quora is still very good if you ignore content you don't like and just engage with content that interests you.

Ekaros• 1 year ago

It ranks very very highly in Google's SEO... It is generally one of the results you get when you search for most questions. So to me it sounds pretty reasonable number.

wdutch• 1 year ago

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.

Maybe the new frontier of SEO is gaming LLMs to recommend your product.

itsjustoldai• 1 year ago

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.

necovek• 1 year ago

All I see is some unmeasured correlation. How did we get to causality?

timewizard• 1 year ago

Users no longer need to click through pages when AI summarizes everything in seconds.

Sure... unless they want /accurate/ results.

HermanMartinus• 1 year ago

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.

user9999999999• 1 year ago

More or less trained LLMs are obfuscating "stolen" training data. The status quo used to call this sort of thing theft and piracy

yalogin7• 1 year ago

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.

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

Over time as genAI becomes better, everything that doesn't have any time based function will be consumed by it.

ViktorRay3• 1 year ago

You should try Perplexity too. In my experience Perplexity is far better than Google Gemini or Meta AI for searching for info and getting summaries.

yalogin7• 1 year ago

This is where first mover advantage and habit play too. Chat gpt and meta ai are good enough for basic recall and summarization tasks.

Google has a branding problem. They integrated Gemini into their search UI, so they just want people to continue the same landing page. However, it feels too noisy, and unnecessary. All I want is a summarization. I don't want to see a huge list of ads or slightly related links. Adds no value to me.

I tried anthropic but it fell way short and so stuck with chat gpt and meta ai. Now for Perplexity I need a compelling need to use it. Haven't seen it yet.

iszomer• 1 year ago

My search patterns has changed as well but not without some pushback, whether it be ChatGPT's inability to:

- cite sources within a certain timeframe which can be trivially done on Google Search

- exclude sources when explicitly asked (and vice versa)

And makes it challenging to determine whether it's output has any reasonable depth or not. Even my simple request on a refresher on the usage of mutexes in C++ gave me a code snippet that exacerbated the very issue I was hoping to get a better handle on. /shrug

righthand• 1 year ago

When all the specific niche sites like WebMD go under where will ChatGPT get it’s information?

casey2• 1 year ago

"Hey {user} remember that disease you had a while back with {list of symptoms} did you ever get that checked out"?

"Yeah it was a rare new disease the doctor called it {name of disease}"

But seriously there are real medical sources that are far more valuable than freaking WebMD, Medical journals (e.g., PubMed, JAMA), Health agencies (e.g., CDC, WHO), Books and Textbooks, User-Generated Content, Firsthand Expert Input

Medical information isn't exactly a "niche". Most sites rely on community which chatbots could, but probably won't emulate anytime soon, I also really doubt the implication that someones' personal, likely nonmonitized, webpage is going to "go under" because it gets less than some arbitrary view count.

A better question is "When all the governments go under where will chatGPT get it's information"

apwell234• 1 year ago

I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore.

You want hallucinated medical information?

How is this not entirely absurd. I feel so angry that person who wrote this comment already knew that its absurd but proceeded to make this comment and prbly got upvotes.

yalogin7• 1 year ago

Wait, why do people use WebMd? Is it used by medical professionals? I thought its for regular people diagnosing their problem for fun. All of that information they can get from their doctor. For really specific information like symptoms for a disease, I cannot imagine there be a hallucinations. Even if it did today, it will only get better over time. I don't see it as a problem with this specific use case. I am one of the biggest AI skeptics out there, but when there is practical use, I accept it

TZubiri8• 1 year ago

Looks like those whose business model is producing shitty content are struggling, and those that provide quality content, are doing well.

Wikiepdia: Good Quora: Bad Reddit: Good CNet: Bad

It makes sense, as LLM content is of mediocre quality, if you want something of good and reliable quality you go elsewhere.

29athrowaway• 1 year ago

If your service is simply prompting an AI model, your company will be eaten be obsoleted by AI.

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).

grvag1• 1 year ago

I believe the biggest dent AI has made is in the SEO and consulting industries.

Johnny555• 1 year ago

I don't think CNET can blame AI for its downfall, it's just not a very good site.

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.

AznHisoka3• 1 year ago

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!

zkmon• 1 year ago

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.

djmips• 1 year ago

How does AI keep up if they shutdown their primary sources?

AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

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