AI literally produces better answers than 99% of ad supported, SEOptimized websites.
That's saying not a lot about AI though. It tells you how utterly awful searching the web is thanks to those sites.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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I'd say AI search summaries are somewhat useful for me 30% of the time. And I click through to the sources to confirm its summaries anyway, because they're often oversimplified.
Often though, they're goddamn useless.
Given how wrong/ridiculously oversimplified those AI summaries usually are, it scares me that so many people would stop there like, "Ehh, good enough".
A lot of my queries only call for oversimplified summaries. Either I'm simple like that or I google stupid shoot no one else would bother. A recent example:
Are there butterflies or moths that don't have mouths? (No but some have vestigial mouths connected to non-functioning digestive systems.) Good enough!
That said, I'm very skeptical about answers if it's anything I care about or need to act on.
The AI answer mostly just parrots whatever the site that has won the referencement war is spewing. If it's easy enough, it can luck out and find an easy ready answer on wikipedia or something. Beyond that, most of those high referenced sites are the shitty aggregators that already pollute the search results.
I often search for the correct way to do do something. For example, there's a lot of baseless bullshit in gardening. If there wasn't an AI answer, I would not trust the first result and stop there, I would look for a few, check what sources they have. I would not even take the wikipedia answer at face value without at least confirming where they got their info.
We know AI doesn't do that. We have examples of it not even recognizing obvious parody, it can't be trusted with recognizing unsourced shit.
On one hand, I don't generate ad revenue for anyone in the first place and would love to see the ad-supported web model collapse. On the other hand, I don't like that AI is destroying things. I'm conflicted.
Hadn't thought of this before.
The AI summary stops people from going to the website, which means the website the AI used isn't getting any page views.
On a long enough timeline, it would kill webpages, then the AI has no new info to steal.
We do not need to worry. The amount of scraping and traffic those ais are doing are already killing every website. At least they all have full backups of the whole internet by now... Right? Righttt?
You had one job.
I'm surprised nobody thought at this before. It was the fairly obvious outcome, inevitably this will lead to the collapse of the information environment we rely on, if nobody puts a stop to this. Ai doesn't seem to care, neither improvements seem to target this. Small websites were already struggling, now they're dying.
People have been talking about it since Google debuted their instant answers years ago.
Nobody listened or cared.
It seems they've been deprioritised entirely, years ago i was able to find actual blogs and forums. But this is going to hit them even harder.
I switched to Kagi for this and they have “small web” and fediverse search.
They are a US based paid search engine and so far have not enshittified.
They’re one of the few US services I kept (low switching costs, low lock in, and a company I like) despite otherwise boycotting most other US products.
Literally everyone has been saying this the entire time.
All that ad revenue won't be surrendered without a fight. Just wait, there will be ads you have to click through to read all of the AI summary.
Google will probably just start playing video ads as soon as you hit. Enter on the search bar.
So I had this joke idea of "they'll just start showing the ads to the AIs", but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I've made myself a bit depressed.
OroborAIos
There is an exploit used by scammers to change the official support number from summaries to theirs.
I dont know exactly how it works but its bad when you call the indian it support instead of your airline supportdesk
While the stats vary depending on who's measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.