AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences:

AI summaries can give users all the information they seek without ever clicking through to the original source of the content. Meanwhile, search result links are pushed further down the page, lowering the number of users that find them.

If I’m searching something on Google, I’m probably looking for a quick answer. That usually means landing on a site covered in ads, which I block anyway. So I’m not sure my lack of traffic is hurting a whole lot. Honestly, I think the cracks started showing long before AI. People were already gaming SEO to climb the pagerank ladder; SEO slop was here long before AI slop.

That said, if AI is profiting off your work you deserve to be compensated. That part does bother me. But I also don’t want to see LLMs turn into the next digital ad silo.

I will say, AI aside, one thing that always keeps me coming back to Google (over Kagi or DuckDuckGo) is pretty simple, and it keeps me from visiting web pages too. It’s the way they list business information like store hours, how busy they are right now vs their normal traffic, and their phone number. On Kagi, I have to go to the website, usually get redirected to some random location 500 miles away because I use iCloud Private Relay, change “my store”, and then go digging through their menus to find my way back to their store information. All while dodging javascript popups for promotions and email capture.

I guess my point is this: I’ve never found a site I loved through Google. The stuff I care about — blogs, indie sites, weird corners of the web, etc. I’ve found through online communities. If I like a commercial site (404 Media, for example), I subscribe. I visit their site directly. Google isn’t part of that relationship at all.

At the end of the day, I think the economics of the web are just shifting. What they’re shifting to, I have no idea. I think the web will survive though.