[HN Gopher] AI is killing some companies, yet others are thrivin...
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AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving - let's look
at the data
Author : corentin88
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-02-28 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.elenaverna.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.elenaverna.com)
| corentin88 wrote:
| Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main
| marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our
| company's blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last
| year despite huge efforts.
|
| That doesn't mean SEO is dead though.
| dimgl wrote:
| > Content marketing is dead.
|
| I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten
| increasingly worse over time...
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it,
| it's dead in the sense that there will be much more
| competition with AI-written articles.
|
| It's going to be a way worse situation.
| MidnightRider39 wrote:
| More competition is good though - people are just going to
| be much more picky and if your content is not
| distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will
| perish.
| gscott wrote:
| A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms
| anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to
| the information you want without restating it's purpose 4
| or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words
| of the article.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| This ignores the volume problem. Human written content
| can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of
| different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not
| because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned
| out in a way that is unfixable.
| echelon wrote:
| There will be people paying for premium content and
| people writing it. A new technology doesn't suddenly
| remove human demand.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Exactly. Humans can't compete with AI content filters...
| but AI can.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from
| search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality.
| (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid
| of all the domains that just copy content from other domains,
| content-farms, scam sites, etc.)
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like
| about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily
| bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| ChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or
| happening already) through subtle recommendations for
| businesses that paid to be "listed" well.
| adriand wrote:
| What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche
| B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail
| search result strategy is no longer effective?
|
| A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very
| pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best
| SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the
| first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a
| thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
|
| On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's
| the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github
| repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was
| around ten years ago and not any more or something.
|
| I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the
| chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot
| recommendations?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Sponsor relevant podcasts?
| morkalork wrote:
| Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company
| named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of
| like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned
| for creating new start-ups.
| veqq wrote:
| > What are the effective marketing channels for
| specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that -
| presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no
| longer effective?
|
| Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon
| gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm
| not helping their KPIs though.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e.
| the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot
| recommendations?
|
| It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now
| you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'm sure the AI company will eventually let you bid to be
| ranked in the answers.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good
| riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans,
| with information and insights you can't get from LLMs, will
| reign. Long live curation.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I sure hope you're right.
| immibis wrote:
| Disagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves
| LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment
| won't make it not be true.
| crote wrote:
| I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the
| direction of a strong dislike for _any_ kind of low-effort
| content.
|
| People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so
| any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to
| take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you
| allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall
| content and all the human consumers will leave.
|
| As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated
| content getting labeled as AI-generated because it _looks_
| AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be
| replaced by AI slop, but even _human-written_ blogspam isn
| 't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality
| is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI
| slop.
|
| Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are
| still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will
| inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends
| _somehow_ get their shit together (I doubt it), or we 're
| going to see a shift towards known-good curated content
| like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a
| vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| can't get from LLMs for 6 months until the next training run?
| rchaud wrote:
| No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere
| besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving
| up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful
| articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.
|
| Most topics require data or information in some form, which
| requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at
| the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only
| produce interesting content occasionally.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Most topics require data or information in some form,
| which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited.
| Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can
| only produce interesting content occasionally._
|
| That sounds like a good thing tbqh
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web
| is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are
| leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have
| become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have
| noticed.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented
| articles on our company's blog.
|
| So, blogspam?
| joelthelion wrote:
| The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues :
|
| - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait
|
| - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your
| question the second you've submitted it.
|
| And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on
| every question is completely unrelated to the question asked,
| in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the
| site, the site starts losing its usefulness.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, it's so blatantly frustratingly tone-deaf that the real
| message is: "This site _purposely wants_ to be full of
| irrelevant spammy shit, so get whatever you needed and get
| out ASAP. "
| immibis wrote:
| Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you
| answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section.
| (Happened to me.)
|
| It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any
| more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads.
| Actual content production is too hard.
| bluedino wrote:
| > Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because
| you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-
| section. (Happened to me.)
|
| Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have
| the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority
| (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get
| banned or lose the ability to post.
| echelon wrote:
| We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods
| can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.
| 6510 wrote:
| We get what we've paid for. I wouldn't want the thankless
| work for free job.
| theamk wrote:
| Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know)
| generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much
| spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-
| topic conversations..
|
| Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to
| have interesting conversations.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| And then there are subreddit coups where someone ousts the
| old mods and starts banning people according to a whole new
| set of opinions . . .
| pipes wrote:
| Reddit is awful now. Some sub reddits are so anal about
| following new post guide lines every question I ask is
| automatically removed. And I've tried really hard to follow
| the rules. I have given up asking. Also who thought it was
| a good idea to put a wall of rules text at the top of every
| thread. It is a pain to scroll past and I'm pretty certain
| no one except crazy people read them.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for
| ChatGPT.
|
| I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help
| you much. You'd have to pivot significantly.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Isn't that _because_ ChatGPT is trained on those QA
| platforms? If real humans aren 't answering questions on the
| Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?
| 6510 wrote:
| Make new q&a websites.
| layer8 wrote:
| While true, this doesn't change the problem that Q&A
| platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don't
| see how that is likely to change.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to
|
| These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're
| expected to compete?
|
| If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training
| datasets going to get new information?
|
| This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness
| imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next
| quarter
|
| I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure
| this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
| pipes wrote:
| In my experience, they do seem to be very good at
| synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if
| that will work for edge cases which is one of the things
| SO is good at.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Not entirely. LLMs are smart enough to answer questions
| from documentation or from other sources, even if the exact
| question wasn't asked anywhere.
|
| But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be
| in other sources, so there would be some loss.
| bluedino wrote:
| SO also has the "eternal September" problem
| francisofascii wrote:
| um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for
| overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that
| will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings,
| bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly
| remarkable how good it is.
| emcell wrote:
| I think this is true.
|
| I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while,
| because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for.
|
| doing all of this with ai now.
|
| On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more
| than ever before
| dig1 wrote:
| The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles,
| blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO
| started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever
| you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management.
| IMHO, of course.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| ChatGPT nearly killed Chegg
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Doesn't surprise me whatsoever.
|
| All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for
| homework assignments that typically use per-student
| randomized numbers--so students have to recalculate their
| specific answer manually by following the steps--and
| "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even
| highschool-level math questions.
|
| Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek)
| for tons of assignments, usually via the free plan.
|
| Once you experience that, it gets really tempting to cancel
| that $20/month chegg subscription and never look back.
|
| I find professors pitiful fearmongering over 'the big bad
| ChatGPT' a little funny, such as when they insist they "have
| secret tools to detect AI usage" and "it can't answer the
| questions correctly anyway", so "you shouldn't even try it".
| azemetre wrote:
| I think the issue is when people start replacing their
| capacity to think and reason with these machines. There was
| an intergalactic space jihad about this IIRC.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Those thing aren't mutually exclusive. You can be on a decline
| and something comes along and tanks your visits well beyond
| what a natural decline would have been.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I would expect there to be a measurement error here (although
| maybe not a significant one): individuals and services have
| repeatedly complained about AI companies engaging in aggressive
| crawling. Given that, one might expect to see traffic increases
| to data sources like Wikipedia and Reddit.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Asbestos is killing some people, yet maggots are thriving,
| _benj wrote:
| I've seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending
| "Reddit" to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have
| pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I
| haven't visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that
| perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding
| questions...
|
| I'm just a sample of one, but it's certainly interesting to see
| how apparently I'm just one of many
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit
| threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is
| absolutely appalling beyond belief.
| anothereng wrote:
| if you look for non controversial topics it can have some
| good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so
| you have to use google or something else
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least
| biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're
| looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent
| personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you
| look?
| rchaud wrote:
| As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article
| bursting at the seams with affilliate links?
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| At least some of them are written by humans and some of them
| are good. Maybe good 20-50% of the time, still better than
| 100% SEO crap.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I find myself appending "Reddit" to the end of my searches a
| lot more often
|
| And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability,
| sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the
| page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to
| see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will
| cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress
| and makes you start over.
|
| On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same
| mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
| dougb5 wrote:
| AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's
| discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of
| control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for
| human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten
| very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or
| throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've
| been running the site for 25 years and this issue only became
| problematic starting in, oh, late 2022 or so.
| pestaa wrote:
| Do you use a CDN in front of it?
|
| Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?
| dougb5 wrote:
| I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary
| bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent,
| Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot
| control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives.
| Perhaps I should check it out again.
|
| Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to
| self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me.
| But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
| gruez wrote:
| >and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many
| false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again.
|
| Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get
| flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You
| just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds
| maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that
| require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge
| that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Cloudflare is free. Give it a try.
| rchaud wrote:
| Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB
| bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is
| 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and
| scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password
| protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.
| vecter wrote:
| I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost
| entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I
| need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition
| to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT
| chat log has the most mundane things like: - What
| is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your
| local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who
| have been the most successful American Idol winners - If I
| check-in the day before a United Airlines flight, can I still buy
| additional checked bags when I go to the airport - If I'm
| buying a Schwinn IC4 indoor spin bike, do I need a floormat for
| it also - What is pisco - In the US, what is the
| format for EINs? - Is it bad to use tap water in your
| humidifier? - Which NBA players are on supermax contracts
| - What are some of the best steakhouses in Manhattan? - How
| much and how long does it take to procure a DUNS number? -
| In terms of real estate, what is historic tax credit development
|
| LLMs give me the answers I want immediately. Before, I would use
| Google basically as a _proxy_ to find websites that I 'd then
| have to sift through to find the answers to these questions. It
| was another layer of indirection. Now that I can have an LLM just
| tell me the answer (you still need to approach it with a
| skeptical eye, since it can certainly get some things wrong), I
| don't need to "search" the search results pages themselves and
| read multiple articles and blog posts to hopefully find the
| answer to my question.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I really like having the site where the answer came from so I
| can instantly judge how likely the answer is to be correct.
|
| Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline
| bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or
| not because so many airlines have the same policy.
|
| Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies.
| The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort
| of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of
| Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)
| moi2388 wrote:
| Gpt has web search with links to the website.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| I might misunderstand, but can't you just ask for the
| reference? I've also been using (Gemini) a lot to basically
| replace my search engine, but I always tell it to give me a
| reference. I've had pretty good results with this approach.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| I wonder how many new, strange, surprising and wonderful things
| you indirectly stumbled into during those sifting exercises.
| Hyper-optimized search has some downsides. I love getting
| answers to my specific questions, but that always encompasses
| the "known unknowns" space. Through skimming and sifting using
| websites as proxies, I enjoyed surprises from the "unknown
| unknowns" space.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| 10 years ago I'd agree with you completely. I definitely get
| your point and share some of that same sentiment, but search
| results these past 10 uears have become overwhelming absurd,
| shallow, and barely tangentially related to what I'm looking
| for
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| After some experience and testing, I've become well aware _not_
| to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is
| company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate
| responses (even for well-known people).
|
| What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle
| being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust
| LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm
| careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor
| is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-
| noise ratio left.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Same for me. The only thing I still use Google for is for up to
| date data as LLMs are not great with that yet
| drdaeman wrote:
| The problem with this approach is that LLM gives me unreliable
| answers. I know this because sometimes I ask things that I used
| to knew but forgot and needed to refresh my memory - and
| sometimes the answers were incorrect. So, unfortunately, a
| search engine validation step is still a necessity.
|
| Asking LLM to provide a link does NOT work, as they hallucinate
| links just fine, and give links that are either broken or do
| not contain the information LLM says it should. Using search
| tools through a LLM (like ChatGPT's "search" function) sort of
| works (at least the link will be correct - still need to check
| if the contents means what LLM says it does), but it's quite
| limited and cannot be fine-tuned (I don't use Google but rather
| prefer Kagi, and I tend to heavily rely on Kagi's lenses, site:
| queries and negative terms to scope and refine searches).
|
| In other words: please do NOT trust LLM's answers, even if they
| sound plausible. Always verify.
| alter123 wrote:
| the analysis isn't correct, it feels like a forced segregation
|
| - reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and
| they're consciously boosting it - wikipedia clearly doesn't have
| increase in page views - substack as a product has been on rise,
| more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with
| the content on the platform
| steezeburger wrote:
| Are they just getting more ai bot visits because they're user
| generated content sites?
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