Comment by Andrex
9 hours ago
Free speculation: I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources. Presumably, the new web will require users to memorize websites/brands and go directly to those sites if they see a lot of their results are being provided by one source.
Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
> Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
The situation may be even worse. Back in the labor of love era, at least webmasters could get feedback from readers. In the LLM era, readers may not even know that the site exists. Without feedback/community, the overall quality of those sites will decrease over time.
>I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources.
ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted.
My speculation is all information worth anything is going to be behind some kind of wall.
> ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted.
Maybe I'm just #builtdifferent, but I click these a lot. Especially if I'm trying to research or make a decision on something, I want the actual source and not the potentially-fudged summary.
I click those all the time if it is something that matters and I wanna verify that the AI got it correctly.
Seems like a great way to end up knowing no real information and with no ability to analyse literature or think for yourself?
Not to mention the hallucinations
Google's AI summaries already do this. I occasionally click through to see the underlying source the AI summary leaned on to generate the response, but probably only ~20% of the time.
I rely far more on bookmarks and memorised URLs now.
It seems like they should have a model similar to YouTube. If I watch a video on YouTube made by someone, they get a little cash, and it ads up.
Similarly, if I use Gemini uses a website for an answer, it should pay something to those sites for the information it gathered. Sites would need to sign up to earn via Google, and I'd imagine there would be a certain threshold to cross to make it worth cutting checks... but that would make all these AI search tools feel much less scummy while providing site owners an incentive to keep sharing information on the internet.
Where a model like this would get messy is with sites like reddit. It's a very popular source for AI search, but the value comes from the users, not the platform itself.
Actually it cannot work this way, content creators make far more money from ads in the video itself compared to the one yt gives them. If it were for yt money alone basically we will still be in the 2010 yt: folks that doing it just for fun.
The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all.
> The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all.
This depends on implementation. I primarily use Kagi for any LLM stuff. I cites pretty much everything and links out to the source. I regularly use this for search. The normal search results may not have what I need, but a line in the AI results sounds better and I click through to the source to get more context.
I find clicking through to the source is important, as I've often seen the AI get it wrong. The page has what I need on it, but the AI grabbed the wrong thing and got it backward. I'm probably in the minority, I'm guessing most people don't use LLMs like this.