Comment by burningChrome
2 days ago
> 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"
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Google and Anthropic probably won't stop training though.
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.