Google’s broken link to the web

Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy i... See more

There is simply no path forward for a news outlet of any meaningful size trying to support itself on social and search traffic. So what will be the A.I. platform publishing strategy? Well, I’m going to make a couple predictions and we’ll see how I do:

1. The conversational A.I. search results will get better and quickly make the human-generated results

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A sense of dread as I see this. We are slowly seeing the end of the open web. - AI search powered experiences take away clicks from high quality publishers in aggregate + - Crawlbots from AI companies not playing by the rules leading to - High quality publishers are looking to get paid *now* for "the value of their data" to compensate for traffi... See more

Everything that Google has done to make people stay on the page and make results more accessible has resulted in a set of editorial decisions that mean we’re no longer getting straight search results that take us away from the page, but are in some kind of Upside Down Google Funhouse Internet where the content is brought directly to us, and the int... See more

If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what’s the incentive to put new content on the web? What’s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the w... See more