[rorylaitila]

Unfortunately I think pissing into the wind. Information websites are all but dead. AI contains all published human information. If you have positioned your website as an answer to a question, it won't survive that way.

"Information" is dead but content is not. Stories, empathy, community, connection, products, services. Content of this variety is exploding.

The big challenge is discoverability. Before, information arbitrage was one pathway to get your content discovered, or to skim a profit. This is over with AI. New means of discovery are necessary, largely network and community based. AI will throw you a few bones, but it will be 10% of what SEO did.

[fennecfoxy]

>AI contains all published human information

No, it most certainly does not. It was certainly trained on large swathes of human knowledge/interactions.

A model that consists of a perfect representation/compression of all this info is a zip file, not a model file.

[rorylaitila]

AI providers have scrapped and will continue to, all internet published information or virtually so. Since "Information" is infinite, AI cannot contain "all information" in a complete sense. But it certainly answers almost everything that matters for any existing search query that has ever been targeted by a webpage that is crawlable.

In any case, as manifest by real world SEO, which is plummeting in traffic for informational queries, the effect is the same. This real world impact is what matters and will not be reversed, regardless of attempts at blocking.

[ozgrakkurt]

You are assuming LLMs will replace search engines. Why is this the case?

To me it seems like there has to be so much optimization for this to happen that, it is not likely. LLM answers are slow and unreliable. Even using something like perplexity doesn’t give much value over using a regular search engine in my experience

[rorylaitila]

LLMs will not fully replace search engines, but Google and Bing are evolving to be LLM first, anyhow. So "what is a search engine" today is not what it was yesterday. Let's call the time before LLMs, traditional search. LLM first products bundle some aspect of traditional search. And traditional search is adding LLM answers.

Traditional search will still be highly useful for transactional, product, realtime, and action oriented queries. Also for discovering educational/entertainment content that is valued in of itself and cannot be reformulated by LLM.