If you’re in business, you’ve had a million of them, maybe more. Some gmail account from out of state selling you badly parsed SEO optimization tactics. The holy grail was page 1, top 3 of google search results (because stats show that nobody has the attention span to scroll to page 2). Stats lie too (the mushroom theory). Competing facts show that people are incredible information foragers.
Once, there were two conventional techniques, No. 1.- Black Hat: Doing bad things. No.2 White Hat: Doing Good things. Buying likes and selling backlinks, while very common, is a black hat activity. Being “cool” on linkedin premium for writing turgid books that nobody reads is white hat. Paying top dollar for premium is good. Using AI to write that book is bad.
New millinery is 100% AI. Virtuality reaches in, engulfs the rest of the page, directing your attention to the only opinion that matters. That might seem like a pretty offensive move (in the traditional, non PC sense). No SEO salesman ever offered me a “hammerfist users in the face” option. Apparently it saves a lot of time. Why bother with wasteful tedious digging for alternative perspectives anyway?
But, didn’t they just kill the entire SEO market in one fell swoop and Google’s top product as well? Not a very business-y move, double barrelling your revenue stream in mid flight. Was there no shareholder meeting, no executive boardroom infighting? In the past, flights of geeky whistleblowers might muster the strength to quack. Appears that they went straight to AI overview this time and threw those crepe paper hats in the trash.
So, what is the AI overview on my thinking? Let’s ask…
“You’re right: the “one-answer world” feels like a hammerfist to the whole SEO ecosystem. For twenty years the game was visibility through abundance — more content, more keywords, more links. SEO was the modern equivalent of signage on a busy street. Now AI and “answer engines” invert that model: Scarcity of output. One clean synthesis replaces the ten blue links and the scrolling of sponsored snippets.
From a business standpoint, it looks suicidal — why would Google (or Bing, or whoever) kneecap the very ad-driven model that made them trillion-dollar titans? But here’s the trick: they’re not abandoning revenue; they’re compressing the funnel. Ads and commerce will follow the AI answer, not the search page. Instead of “10 results + 3 sponsored slots,” you get the answer — and inside that answer, the curated referral, the sponsored supplier, the frictionless click-through.”
ChatGPT
I thank ChatGPT for his consistent candor. While the carefully curated snippets are relevant and accurate, I’m aware that responses are ultimately entrained and agenda driven. As a paid influencer for the other side, we both exist in a no man’s land of conflicting ideas, wearing different uniforms.
“In a world reshaped by AI, media will be everywhere and in everything”
wppmedia.com
If microsoft is buying ads on its own channel to appear above “findyiot” in search, it sends a message that intelligent people can decipher. The earliest versions of search were called recommendation engines, or indexed search tools, meaning it was aggregated, crowdsourced, relevant to the search query. Moderators kept the game clean (white/black). By making those elements opaque, you kill the golden goose and replace it with a stuffed duck.
So, how does this AI search stuff relate to IoT? The biggest players in IoT are the ones selling you sitting ducks.
