> No discovery - no business.

I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.

We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating.

I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.

As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"

The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased?

So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.

It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive rather than potential coincidence.

If you can identify scraping bots, can’t you just serve them pages and pages of Lor Ipsum text

Not every human visits to buy either.

The real signal is conversions. If the percentage of people who visit and then buy / sign up remains constant, while traffic goes down, you can conclude LLMs are part of the cause.

OTOH if traffic goes down but conversions goes up in percentage, then it's hard to say LLMs are having a negative consequence.

>> The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased?

Yes.

>> So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.

When I was reviewing our analytics, I noticed a huge uptick in traffic from IP addresses in Sigapore and Beijing. This coincided with spikes from Linux OS traffic that was higher than desktop and iOS traffic which has always been the two highest OS's for our traffic. Add in a huge spike in direct traffic all pointed in one direction - AI bots and crawlers.

I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet.

Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.

Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either.

The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.

IIRC Google had no monetization at all until ads. Even then the cost of providing search with ads is orders of magnitude lower compared to running LLMs.

They made money by licensing their search technology to other sites, as well as selling physical search appliances for businesses. They were considered by some to be struggling to find a way to monetise well.

Computational cost is indeed higher than search (though remember, search has been heavily optimised for many years!), but search and web companies were one of the lowest cost, highest-margin businesses in human existence. Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.

It's not only the computational cost though. Hardware requirements are much higher and GPUs need to be replaced every 2-3 years. Plus model training expenses which are considerable. I imagine it's easily 100x more expensive and the margins (if there's ever any profit) will be very low.

>Many higher-cost businesses have been supported by ads.

Not at the scale of a trillion dollars, though. You can't make that kind of money back with eyeballs. You either need government subsidies or insane vertical integration. And if your program threatens to neuter the GDP of a country, I don't know how long subsidies will last. At least not in a democracy. People are so mad about immigrants taking jobs, and this would be 10 times worse (and bipartisan, eventually).

Even then: we're quickly hitting a resource wall as well. Are we really going to go to war just so we can have some dude generate AI sheep memes? Something's got to give.

OpenAI could be profitable (easily) if it stopped training new models. Whether they will make that choice or not, who knows.

That would be short-termist though. So, quite unlikely. In my usage (code) they are still better than everything else I have tried. Point being that I am looking predominantly for the one llm that gives me the best code output. If they risk losing that advantage for immediate profit, guess I will cancel like I did for claude... (I still got a gemini subscription, for some reason it has a good UI, fast for common non technical requests).

Seems to have been my pattern of behavior with all these tools.

>If they risk losing that advantage for immediate profit, guess I will cancel

We call that "when the bubble pops". Can't wait.

Google and Anthropic probably won't stop training though.

Same where I work for 30% on some regions and for those where they put money only saw a minimum increase.

I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime.

We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic.

F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.

Perhaps SEO will become a business to churn out large amount of digestable text with friendly robot.txt and hoping the next AI model learns it? This seem to be the solution, just having a slightly longer turn around time.

Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the centralization of power is really something.

There's nothing cheerful in that comment, it describes a danger that inexorably draws nearer and nearer.

My post was meant to underscore the parent’s post, not argue with it.

Maybe he meant this in more general way. Or this is how did read this.

I don't think any power is as centralized as Google is to search about 10 years ago? Or Facebook is to social media in the same time frame? What has changed other than the players?

Google still offered a path for business/individuals that allowed both sides to profit immensely via advertising. Google also guided people to sources of information once you look past the ads.

With the AI companies, they suck up all freely available and proprietary information, hide the sources, and give information away to consumers for mostly free.

The dynamics. Discovery benefits all parties, and the middle man can take a cut in several ways (Google chose ads). The middleman never had to open up but that tube spread value instead of extracting it (at least, until they started renting seeking with the tube).

Being the one stop knowledge hubs that sucks from everyone else only benefits the leech long term.

I think this phase of centralising power is part of the never-ending cycle of centralisation and distribution - mainframes -> PCs -> websites -> apps, and so on round we go. We will get a "data centres -> Personal LLMs" phase of the cycle which distributes it again.

So my hope is that LLMs become local in a few years.

We've been sitting around 16Gb of RAM on a laptop for 10-15 years now, not because RAM is too expensive or difficult to make, but because there's been no need for more than that for the average user. We could get "normal" laptop RAM up to 16Tb in a few years if there was commercial demand for it.

We have processor architectures that are suitable for running LLMS better/faster/efficiently. We could include those in a standard laptop if there was commercial demand for it.

Tokens are getting cheaper, dramatically, and will continue to do so. But we have an upper limit on LLM training complexity (we only have so much Internet data to train them on). Eventually the race between LLM complexity and processing speed will run out, and probably with processing speed as the winner.

So my hope is that our laptops change, that they include a personally-adapted very capable LLM, run locally, and that we start to see a huge variety of LLMs available. I guess the closest analogy would be the OS's from "Her"; less typing, more talking, and something that is personalised, appearing to actually know the user, and run locally (which is important).

I don't see anything stopping Linux from doing this too (but I'm not working in this area so I can't say for sure).

Obviously we'll face the usual data thieves and surveillance capitalism along the way, but that's part of the process.

Last 3 years of discourse in a nutshell. Sinclair's quote rings true once again... Just a shame people don't think of the long term cost to this trend chasing.

But then again, it wouldn't be a trend if people thought long term, would it?

> as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery

In my limited web dev experience with these tools, they suggest and push Tailwind CSS very often when asked for advice.

The Tailwind company wasn't selling that, though. They were selling premium packages of components, templates, and themes. The demand for that type of material has dropped off significantly now that you can get an LLM to do a moderately good job of making common layouts and components. Then you can adjust them yourself until they're exactly what you want.

> most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery

What about restaurants, transportation, construction, healthcare, or manufacturing?

Will those go out of business too?

The better question is how well they do in a world where you have to pay OpenAI to be included. A local restaurant can likely survive on local advertising, neighborhood traffic, etc. but I’d bet a lot of categories further consolidate to favor larger companies who can negotiate LLM placement deals.

So what you're saying is that LLMs will replace not only search but Google/Apple Maps as well?

As a user and customer, I see that as a good thing.