Google has been shifting towards this for a long time, even before AI came into the picture. Their search engine results page optimizations (featured snippets, Q&As, pulling from Wikipedia) were...
Google has been shifting towards this for a long time, even before AI came into the picture. Their search engine results page optimizations (featured snippets, Q&As, pulling from Wikipedia) were designed to have people stay on Google instead of clicking out. And if you do click, they want it to be an ad.
It's at a point now that I don't even recommend someone to optimize for ranking on Google because unless it's someone looking up the exact name and finding you, no amount of writing content helps because nobody is clicking through to read it. Reaching a new audience through providing information they'd find through a search doesn't work anymore unless you already have brand awareness. I was helping someone build a website for their business, and I know the time spent on creating content isn't going to guarantee enough visitors as it otherwise would have.
I've never liked SEO and the keyword stuffing and all the nonsense that came with it, which is what drove me to shifting away from writing, but the reliance on AI searches for information definitely seems like it'll have a big impact on publishing on the internet in many ways. Maybe it's social media (including LinkedIn and YouTube), Substack, and having a personal 'brand' that's going to increase even more because trust is shifting away from websites or companies towards people. Which is a whole other conversation, but I see this as another move towards having it become more difficult to find reliable information easily.
Just to affirm this: my students use Google all the time but do not click through to sites. They are entirely dependent on Google’s snippets and excerpts. I sound so old and so out of touch every...
It's at a point now that I don't even recommend someone to optimize for ranking on Google because unless it's someone looking up the exact name and finding you, no amount of writing content helps because nobody is clicking through to read it.
Just to affirm this: my students use Google all the time but do not click through to sites. They are entirely dependent on Google’s snippets and excerpts.
I sound so old and so out of touch every time I encourage them to actually look at the sites that get returned. From their perspective, it probably sounds like I’m telling them to make sure they rewind their VHS tapes before returning them to Blockbuster.
Nevertheless, I do encourage them to scan the list of results and click through often, because I think it’s a vital, fundamental internet skill. They roll their eyes just as often, because why look for anything more when the answer is already clearly right there?
Their understanding of what a search engine should be is fundamentally different than mine, and that’s in part because the Google they’ve known has always answered their questions like an oracle, rather than just being an index of sites that they’d have to visit to find their answer.
I must applaud you for doing what must be a uphill battle with this. I think it is a failure of education if the only focus is to get answers and not explanations. These summaries may give a...
I must applaud you for doing what must be a uphill battle with this. I think it is a failure of education if the only focus is to get answers and not explanations. These summaries may give a correct answer, but they will always severely lack context and nuance. It doesn't encourage critical thinking or how to deal with a situation where two sources says different things. I think this bigger shift to only focusing on getting quick "answers" are also part of the reason why we are getting increasingly polarized as a society. Every policy or opinion is framed as either 100% good or bad, because we seek the simple short "answers" and less the longer more complicated and nuanced explanations.
To be fair, students doing the bare minimum to get information is nothing new. Before the internet you had similar behavior where for an assignment students would walk into a library and pick the...
To be fair, students doing the bare minimum to get information is nothing new. Before the internet you had similar behavior where for an assignment students would walk into a library and pick the first book that sort of covered the subject.
Even with a better education system I think that it is difficult to change this behavior. In fact, blaming it on education almost feels to me like you are shifting blame away from Google. Where I think the blame squarely lies with Google and other tech companies trying to create a closed loop information system. One where the quality of information is less relevant as long as the user stays on it.
As a site owner myself, I've been thinking a lot if it's worth to let Google & co crawl my articles. The balance between allowing them to read what I write and the benefits Google gives in return...
As a site owner myself, I've been thinking a lot if it's worth to let Google & co crawl my articles. The balance between allowing them to read what I write and the benefits Google gives in return seems broken, indeed.
That's frustrating. Certainly my own experience with the Google snippets is the lack context (and sometimes are actually wrong!). You're totally right to encourage your students to click through,...
That's frustrating. Certainly my own experience with the Google snippets is the lack context (and sometimes are actually wrong!).
You're totally right to encourage your students to click through, because like anything else you should check your sources and cross reference them.
But alas, here we are.
I wonder how this actually benefits them. Afaik advertisers in Google's search only pay if people actually click on the ad. And even if the page people click on is not a page Google runs, there's...
Their search engine results page optimizations (featured snippets, Q&As, pulling from Wikipedia) were designed to have people stay on Google instead of clicking out.
I wonder how this actually benefits them. Afaik advertisers in Google's search only pay if people actually click on the ad. And even if the page people click on is not a page Google runs, there's a decent chance that the ads it shows are managed by Google's advertisement service - so they'd get a cut of those as well.
On youtube its kinda logical. The longer you stay, the more video ads you see. But why on Google search?
Or have they changed the way their ads work in their search and I simply haven't noticed? I've stopped using Google's search some time ago. For some time I've mostly googled stuff via DuckDuckGo, and currently I'm testing kagi.
People might be clicking links less often, but they are still going to click on links sometimes. You can’t actually buy anything from Google Search, so the most commercially relevant traffic is...
People might be clicking links less often, but they are still going to click on links sometimes. You can’t actually buy anything from Google Search, so the most commercially relevant traffic is still going to leave the search results page.
One example is product listings. Those are ads, too!
By keeping users on google.com, Google increases the probabilities of them clicking an ad. Since it's on their own domain, they don't need to share revenue with publishers/third parties, and this...
By keeping users on google.com, Google increases the probabilities of them clicking an ad. Since it's on their own domain, they don't need to share revenue with publishers/third parties, and this probably makes up to an eventual decreasing in ad clicks.
All I know is that Google is too smart and greedy to leave a cent on the table, so if they are doing this, it's probably the most lucrative way of doing business for them.
From what I know, the banner ads on third-party websites typically cost less (Google also offers this with their display network ads), and the ads on search pages are more competitive and also...
From what I know, the banner ads on third-party websites typically cost less (Google also offers this with their display network ads), and the ads on search pages are more competitive and also cost more since there would be a higher intent to purchase and more likelihood of someone clicking those. Product listing ads are priced even higher and are known to convert to purchases even more. So, it would make sense why Google isn't worried about lowering clicks to the ads it displays in other websites if they're more than making up for it with clicks from their search pages.
I write articles for a regional MSP. We generally don't put a lot of effort into optimizing for Google. Mostly, we try to write articles that answer customer questions. Even so, we were capturing...
I write articles for a regional MSP. We generally don't put a lot of effort into optimizing for Google. Mostly, we try to write articles that answer customer questions. Even so, we were capturing the Google snippet and have gotten qualified leads from AI searches. For a company of 20 employees, we're pretty happy with the results. At the same time, that feels like an exception and I'm always wondering what my next move needs to be to stay employed.
Optimization has become a loathsome word for me. And the way that these media companies — which I think generative AI falls under — continue to blur fact and fiction is unconscionable.
This is how it's ideally supposed to work, with the Google algorithm prioritizing content that's meaningful on a page that's easy for a user to navigate (since they take factors like page loading...
This is how it's ideally supposed to work, with the Google algorithm prioritizing content that's meaningful on a page that's easy for a user to navigate (since they take factors like page loading speed into question). But the main issue with optimizing for Google is that they've been known to make these core updates that completely change how they rank websites and you have to then try to figure out what to do to recover that traffic. Google's recommendation is to just follow their best practices, but I would also suggest keeping an eye on these updates and if you see any change in traffic from what it usually is, that might be the reason. These happen every couple of months, the last one was in March.
I am totally on your side with hating optimization. SEO was THE thing that drove me away but I am glad to have done that. I branched out from doing articles to emails, a bit of branding, and now the most writing-focused work that I do is strategy and website content. But I know others who are still doing writing and doing well, so it's not entirely all so bleak. There's also a market for conversion-focused copy and clearer communication. I came across FletchPMM and what they do is writing, just packaged differently. I also know some who make money writing articles by responding to pitches, and others who have their newsletters with paid subscriptions or Patreon.
Google has been shifting towards this for a long time, even before AI came into the picture. Their search engine results page optimizations (featured snippets, Q&As, pulling from Wikipedia) were designed to have people stay on Google instead of clicking out. And if you do click, they want it to be an ad.
It's at a point now that I don't even recommend someone to optimize for ranking on Google because unless it's someone looking up the exact name and finding you, no amount of writing content helps because nobody is clicking through to read it. Reaching a new audience through providing information they'd find through a search doesn't work anymore unless you already have brand awareness. I was helping someone build a website for their business, and I know the time spent on creating content isn't going to guarantee enough visitors as it otherwise would have.
I've never liked SEO and the keyword stuffing and all the nonsense that came with it, which is what drove me to shifting away from writing, but the reliance on AI searches for information definitely seems like it'll have a big impact on publishing on the internet in many ways. Maybe it's social media (including LinkedIn and YouTube), Substack, and having a personal 'brand' that's going to increase even more because trust is shifting away from websites or companies towards people. Which is a whole other conversation, but I see this as another move towards having it become more difficult to find reliable information easily.
Just to affirm this: my students use Google all the time but do not click through to sites. They are entirely dependent on Google’s snippets and excerpts.
I sound so old and so out of touch every time I encourage them to actually look at the sites that get returned. From their perspective, it probably sounds like I’m telling them to make sure they rewind their VHS tapes before returning them to Blockbuster.
Nevertheless, I do encourage them to scan the list of results and click through often, because I think it’s a vital, fundamental internet skill. They roll their eyes just as often, because why look for anything more when the answer is already clearly right there?
Their understanding of what a search engine should be is fundamentally different than mine, and that’s in part because the Google they’ve known has always answered their questions like an oracle, rather than just being an index of sites that they’d have to visit to find their answer.
I must applaud you for doing what must be a uphill battle with this. I think it is a failure of education if the only focus is to get answers and not explanations. These summaries may give a correct answer, but they will always severely lack context and nuance. It doesn't encourage critical thinking or how to deal with a situation where two sources says different things. I think this bigger shift to only focusing on getting quick "answers" are also part of the reason why we are getting increasingly polarized as a society. Every policy or opinion is framed as either 100% good or bad, because we seek the simple short "answers" and less the longer more complicated and nuanced explanations.
To be fair, students doing the bare minimum to get information is nothing new. Before the internet you had similar behavior where for an assignment students would walk into a library and pick the first book that sort of covered the subject.
Even with a better education system I think that it is difficult to change this behavior. In fact, blaming it on education almost feels to me like you are shifting blame away from Google. Where I think the blame squarely lies with Google and other tech companies trying to create a closed loop information system. One where the quality of information is less relevant as long as the user stays on it.
As a site owner myself, I've been thinking a lot if it's worth to let Google & co crawl my articles. The balance between allowing them to read what I write and the benefits Google gives in return seems broken, indeed.
That's frustrating. Certainly my own experience with the Google snippets is the lack context (and sometimes are actually wrong!).
You're totally right to encourage your students to click through, because like anything else you should check your sources and cross reference them.
But alas, here we are.
I wonder how this actually benefits them. Afaik advertisers in Google's search only pay if people actually click on the ad. And even if the page people click on is not a page Google runs, there's a decent chance that the ads it shows are managed by Google's advertisement service - so they'd get a cut of those as well.
On youtube its kinda logical. The longer you stay, the more video ads you see. But why on Google search?
Or have they changed the way their ads work in their search and I simply haven't noticed? I've stopped using Google's search some time ago. For some time I've mostly googled stuff via DuckDuckGo, and currently I'm testing kagi.
People might be clicking links less often, but they are still going to click on links sometimes. You can’t actually buy anything from Google Search, so the most commercially relevant traffic is still going to leave the search results page.
One example is product listings. Those are ads, too!
By keeping users on google.com, Google increases the probabilities of them clicking an ad. Since it's on their own domain, they don't need to share revenue with publishers/third parties, and this probably makes up to an eventual decreasing in ad clicks.
All I know is that Google is too smart and greedy to leave a cent on the table, so if they are doing this, it's probably the most lucrative way of doing business for them.
From what I know, the banner ads on third-party websites typically cost less (Google also offers this with their display network ads), and the ads on search pages are more competitive and also cost more since there would be a higher intent to purchase and more likelihood of someone clicking those. Product listing ads are priced even higher and are known to convert to purchases even more. So, it would make sense why Google isn't worried about lowering clicks to the ads it displays in other websites if they're more than making up for it with clicks from their search pages.
I write articles for a regional MSP. We generally don't put a lot of effort into optimizing for Google. Mostly, we try to write articles that answer customer questions. Even so, we were capturing the Google snippet and have gotten qualified leads from AI searches. For a company of 20 employees, we're pretty happy with the results. At the same time, that feels like an exception and I'm always wondering what my next move needs to be to stay employed.
Optimization has become a loathsome word for me. And the way that these media companies — which I think generative AI falls under — continue to blur fact and fiction is unconscionable.
This is how it's ideally supposed to work, with the Google algorithm prioritizing content that's meaningful on a page that's easy for a user to navigate (since they take factors like page loading speed into question). But the main issue with optimizing for Google is that they've been known to make these core updates that completely change how they rank websites and you have to then try to figure out what to do to recover that traffic. Google's recommendation is to just follow their best practices, but I would also suggest keeping an eye on these updates and if you see any change in traffic from what it usually is, that might be the reason. These happen every couple of months, the last one was in March.
I am totally on your side with hating optimization. SEO was THE thing that drove me away but I am glad to have done that. I branched out from doing articles to emails, a bit of branding, and now the most writing-focused work that I do is strategy and website content. But I know others who are still doing writing and doing well, so it's not entirely all so bleak. There's also a market for conversion-focused copy and clearer communication. I came across FletchPMM and what they do is writing, just packaged differently. I also know some who make money writing articles by responding to pitches, and others who have their newsletters with paid subscriptions or Patreon.
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