I feel like there is something here, but I wonder if second order effects make it trickier than it appears atm
So if you have a low effort website that's factual and text based, you're going to get your lunch eaten by GPT, if you have a higher effort website (subscription gated with lots of multimedia content and user engagement) you'll be fine.
Think of all the blogspam recipe sites that are going to run into trouble when ChatGPT learns to cook well. Lots of text, little additional value, no community. There still will be America's Test Kitchen because people on the upper end of the value curve don't just want a recipe, they want pictures + video of that recipe being made and a place where they can ask questions and get answers.
I guess to get the bots to tell your lies.
I like to think of ChatGPT and the like as an on-demand personalized Wikipedia: a good starting point, comes with strings attached, not always correct (but some are fine with it).
ChatGPT doesn't link sources yet but I saw that the beta test context search from Kagi had them.
There was congressional testimony by the founder/owner of "Celebrity Net Worth" about how Google made it impossible for them to stay in business. Whenever somebody would search "How much is <celebrity X> worth?", the answer would just show up directly on the Google results page. There was still an attribution link to Celebrity Net Worth, but nobody ever clicked on it anymore, so the result was Celebrity Net Worth had to shut down.
You can certainly argue fairly whether sites like CNW deserve to exist in the first place, but it's not hard to see how there is still a huge financial problem when ALL the ad revenue goes to the search engines and they don't even leave any of the slim scraps to the publisher sites.
It builds a paragraph answering your query but it has a lot of footnotes that link directly to websites.
Ex:
"geopolitical reason for palm oil being banned and why it's bad for health"
The EU has banned palm oil in biofuels due to its negative impacts on health[1] and its geopolitical implications, such as favoring alternative crops grown in Europe[2]. Palm plantations are also a major factor of deforestation[3], leading to the loss of habitat for endangered species[4]. Indonesia's President Joko Widodo recently announced a ban on the export of palm oil, which could backfire due to its importance in the global market[5].
1nih.gov 2weforum.org 3theconversation.com 4triplepundit.com 5carnegieendowment.org