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by techpineapple 284 days ago
My guess is that there is a belief that the value extraction is happening closer to the user.

Like before search engines you wanted to be a web page with a recipe for chocolate cake, and you could monetize the value of that recipe with ads.

Then search engines existed and people spent part of their time on the search engine rather than the web page, extracting value there (and possibly redirecting away from your particular chocolate cake tecipe) AI summaries means it is very hard to extract value further down the value chain; neither the search engine nor no recipe website will get as much traffic as the AI summary.

So if people habitually type Google.com and habitually use their AI (or ChatGPT for that matter) there’s no money in being the website that has the info, and the only way to get ahead of all that would be to be native in browser deciding where you go.

2 comments

The logical next step to get between the user and the content may be at the OS level, via the OS’s built-in search. So the user won’t even launch a browser.
This really makes a lot of sense to me now. Thanks a lot for explaining it in detail.

I think it's not going to be easy for them to get that market share from google especially since they’re doubling down on AI themselves.