Comment by munchler
1 hour ago
If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.
They don't think they really need any more content outside of a few deals they can cut directly with publishers. And they already have YouTube, which produces limitless free content for them to use as they see fit. My blog from 20 years ago, or indeed all of our blogs today, are not something Google feels will be any loss to their product.
Someone will search for "Kylie Jenner" and they will get some kind of shopping opportunity (with Google getting a commission) and links to her profile on YouTube. And maybe some publisher content on the subject. In all cases they'll probably want to angle to get more of an "aGeNtIc" experience, where Google just reads you the story or buys the lipstick for you, without you leaving google.com.
There won't be "websites" anymore, it will all just be Google. Other behemoths that generate original content (that aren't AI) like sports, news, entertainment will either be big enough to sign individual deals on pain of litigation or just force-scraped (as is happening now) by bots that are indistinguishable from human users.
We got to that point a while ago. Many of the major social media’s are essentially uncrawlable.
Communities have moved from public forums to private discords. Most of the major social media’s are unviewable without an account.