this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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That was the plan. That's (I'm guessing) why the search results have slowly yet noticeably degraded since Ai has been consumer level.
They WANT you to use Ai so they can cater the answers. (tin foil hat)
I really do believe that though. Call me a conspiracy theorist but damn it, it fits.
SEO has been fucking up searches long before LLMs were a thing.
It's not that wild of a conspiracy theory. Hard to get definite proof though because you would have to compare actual search results from the past with the results of the same search from today, and we unfortunately can't travel back in time.
But there are indicators for your theory to be true:
Now, all of the points listed above can be proven. If you put all of that together it seems at least highly likely that your "conspiracy theory" is in fact true.
I'd argue that SEO was one of the biggests causes of search result degradation and consider any complaints coming from them as highly suspect due to conflicting interests. Eg, a change that makes it harder to game the search engine algorithms is good for searchers but bad for SEOs.
I hope the whole industry dies (or already is? I don't hear much about it these days lol). They are just marketers whose whole job is to get you to look at their shit instead of the most relevant results.
Yeah, search has degraded along with the Internet, you almost need an LLM now to filter out all the garbage hits. For a while, adding "reddit" to your search term was an OK high level filter to remove blogspam and e-commerce sites, but interacting with reddit is so annoying now that it's barely an option and many of the quality reddit posters have moved on while the state and corporate astroturfers are running the show. Never mind that the "reddit filter" also removed results from much better sources, like specialist forums.
Yeah, I think SEO is pretty much dead by now, and probably because web search as we knew it is kind of dead as well. You'll probably need to spend ad money if you want visibility. But I'm no expert on SEO and I could be wrong.
You mean Google.
All of them. I use DDG as a primary and even those results are worse.
In Google Search's prime DDG was still terrible and not a viable competitor even with the privacy advantage. Now both services are almost comparable, so it's kind of a no-brainer to ditch Google.
And Bing, and searches that use google and Bing results (DDG, ecosia)
Search results have been degrading for a lot longer than LLMs have been a thing. Peak usefulness for them was around a decade ago.
They WANT you to use Ai so they can ~~cater the answers~~ sell you ads and stop you from using the internet.