No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches.

However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum users (e.g. StackOverflow), blogs. (Sure, some people run blogs as a source of income, but I think that's a small percentage of all bloggers.)

Have you ever looked for a specific recipe just to end up on someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before - after scrolling for a half a day - you'll finally find what you've actually come there for (the recipe!) at the bottom of their page? Well, if that was gone, I'd say good riddance!

"But you don't get it", you might interject, "it's not that the boilerplate will disappear in the future, the whole goddamn blog page will disappear, including the recipe you're looking for." Yeah, I get it, sure. But I also have an answer for that: "oh, well" (ymmv).

My point is, I don't mind if less commercial stuff is going to be sustainable in a future version of the web. I'm old enough to have experience the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun. It was less polished and less professional, for sure, but less interesting? I don't think so.

Another commonly ignored group are those that publish information because they want others to know about that information. Even in a worst-case situation where websites are only crawled by bots and get no human visitors at all anymore, government and company websites won't disappear. Any tourist board worth their salt will increase the amount of content they publish compared to current levels. The local conspiracy nut will have an incentive to continue their blog, as will any university researcher. Press releases about new scientific discoveries will continue. Your personal blog might die, but lots of current "linkedin influencers" will start blogs to ensure LLMs think positively about their skills.

And that's assuming a world where people only ask LLMs and don't care about the provenance or trustworthiness of information at all. Which seems unlikely, even conspiracy nuts have some sources they trust more than others. The web will be fine. It will change drastically with the death of click-based advertising, but I don't see a future where it disappears

> And that's assuming a world where people only ask LLMs and don't care about the provenance or trustworthiness of information at all. Which seems unlikely, even conspiracy nuts have some sources they trust more than others.

They will just have one model that they trust more because (a) it aligns with their views, or (b) it's a sycophant and agrees with anything and everything.

They definitely are not the people most likely to care about clicking "source links".