The web as we know it is over.
Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.
The "website" of the future will be an API optimized for LLM crawlers, serving plain-text content that no end-user will ever view directly. The SEO game will change to LLMAO.
LLM agent is the new browser.
We had internet before we had browsers, then the browser took over as the main method of consuming the internet. It has a lot of problems and e.g. mobile apps are trying to fill the void, but they have their own problems. Next stage is the personal assistant agent, which will be the single entry point to the internet.
Alternatively, we can collectively "fight back" by not using Google and teaching others around us to do so as well. There are plenty of decent [1] and great (better) alternatives, where you're not the product [2]!
[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr...
[2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...
I can recommend https://noai.duckduckgo.com. It works pretty well.
Fighting back is stupid, these things are inevitable, and honestly probably for the best over the long-term.
Nothing is inevitable, and long-term effects of google's move are unknowable.
There is actually another way that was just hinted at a few days ago demonstrated by the EU courts reaffirming a law from 2019 against Meta, just force google et al to compensate publishers:
https://www.epceurope.eu/post/epc-welcomes-landmark-cjeu-rul...
That translates to "Force Google to give money to these specific organizations and newspapers which EU leaders wish to benefit". It won't help any individuals who has made great websites with important and popular information.
Well that's just an example, You could mandate an API to allow bots pay their fair share; could ban google from using content it stole without compensation; could shatter google into a thousand pieces.. There are music rights organizations with small time artists to huge celebrities, they are strong organizations that collect revenue from big platforms and redistribute it to all artists as well. Lots and lots of ways to address this problem.
My appeal is just to realize that our implicit assumption that we can't do anything ever at all besides appealing to completely ineffectual individual action is in and of itself a strongly ideological and politically radical position to take.
> Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.
The current zeitgeist of them will, but I think not all.
My first website (GeoCities) was either before Google existed or very close to it. Connected to people via WebRings and directory listings. More recently, RSS feeds.
Yeah there will likely continue be a small underground of old-style websites I guess. But you'll have to be in the loop on how to find them, and very few people will pay to advertise on them.
> very few people will pay to advertize on them
That sounds like an unalloyed plus. The perverse incentives caused by advertising have been the biggest driver of the web's decline, IMO.
That sounds like absolute hell
Here is what I think the future web may look like:
> SEO will finally die.
On the contrary, it will flourish. It’s just that it’ll shift to whatever can trick LLMs into recommending your product.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
Or more likely move towards substack or newsletters where the pitch is - Don’t let the LLM chose the output for you, go directly to our Substack/newsletter instead.
This will happen especially with things like conspiracy theories because the choice might be to pollute the output or share the general consensus. Like searches for Apollo landing conspiracy theories can either chose to present “alternate facts” so that people can “do their own research” and conclude it is fake or LLM auto corrects to “Apollo landing happened”.
Not every website is a blog. Substack is not suited to guides and evergreen information.
Newsletters have a webview fallback with a public URL that makes them just as susceptible to scraping. If that ever gets fixed, Google will just scrape the full-text content in Gmail instead.
Newsletters have been around forever and never taken off like the open web and free blogging have. Slapping a Stripe integration on the backend hasn't led to Substack becoming a sustainable business not propped up by VC cash.
The truth is out there!