Welcome to the third-party internet. Unless every micro-decision you make while browsing can be stripped down, packaged into neat data points, and sold, you're not welcome here.

I've got a half thought about concept that maybe we need a concept like AMP back. I hated AMP. I'm glad it's dead. But you could use it to define things that you were at least advised that it would be shown in the google ui and carousel. I feel like we need a guarantee from the LLMs that if we provide some kind of meta data in our source material you'll honor stuff from it. Like show our advertisers so we get some revenue still from you showing our content on your LLM site.

Totally vibed version of this:

``` { "version": "https://agent-source.org/v1", "canonical_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/the-cone", "title": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "source_name": "Ninjas and Robots", "author": "Nathan Kontny", "summary": "An essay about embarrassment, public action, and why obvious fixes go undone.", "preferred_citation": "Ninjas and Robots", "source_card": { "headline": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "description": "People avoid obvious public actions not because they are lazy, but because being seen trying is embarrassing.", "image": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/images/cone-card.jpg", "cta": "Read the full essay" }, "allowed_excerpt": { "max_chars": 500, "preferred_excerpt": "People often avoid obvious public action because embarrassment feels more immediate than danger." }, "commercial_terms": { "ads_allowed": true, "sponsor_card_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/.well-known/sponsor-card.json", "licensing_contact": "hello@ninjasandrobots.com" } } ```

But something to get our original source honored better in the LLM. Maybe if one of the LLMs do this, we'd give it more loyalty? Maybe the government needs to compel this kind of behavior? No idea. It does suck though our content is just turned into AI's own tokens and we're left with a tiny "source" link if we're lucky.

This war was already declared a decade ago. By many interests. And victory followed.

I think though a big part of this was YouTube replaced blogs. It's a generational thing.

If it's so bad, people won't use it. If it's good, why be against it ?

You don't write post to reach the biggest amount of people, you do because you're passionate and ultimately you get people following you.

If average Joe doesn't go on your website, what's the big deal ?

I think this feature will be very useful to fight back on the optimized SEO hell that we currently have.

It is not just about replacing search results with text blurbs generated on Alphabet premise either. They're making it so that unless you have an Android certified (Or Apple) smartphone you will not be a human being, you will be assumed to be a bot and blocked by their captchas.

The AI answers provide tons of source links.

At the end of the day, is it really all that different to provide a list of links, versus an answer or overview of a few paragraphs with links to lots of different higher-quality sources?

I follow those source links all the time. Not just to "check sources" but because they provide a ton more detail. And the links are usually much better than what I'll get with regular keyword search results.

> It’s about monopolizing access to information.

Not as long as there are competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, LLM's have provided Google with stronger competition than it's ever had before. ChatGPT and Claude are doing what Bing was never able to.

I don't know if it's Google AB-testing something, but the summaries below usual search result entries (the non-AI ones) are unbelievably bad today. Sometimes the link is a Reddit or SO post, but the summary is from a reply/answer with no vote contradicting the highest-voted ones.

It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.

We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful.

Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.

Well, they are kind of desperate after missing both cloud and AI.

I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.

While they seem against being scraped themselves: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-...

I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.