Hi, I have a question about these AI chat bots. I think this forum section is best suited for this because all these bots are products of these popular search engines. The thing is, these search engine companies are crawling our websites, taking data from us, and then feeding it to these chat bots, which are then showing the result to the user, "without" showing a link to our websites. How is this beneficial for us website owners? I am 100% certain that these popular search engine companies have not hired their own professors and scientists and whatever to come up with answer sheets to feed these bots. Its clearly data from our websites. And there is no benefit to us. None at all. Those "featured content section" we saw in web searchs, that is the answer these chat bots are giving out. Difference is, in "featured content", the user can click a link and open our website. But that is not the case when the same user is using a chat bot, and still getting same answer. Journalists who have used Microsoft's chatbot, they have confirmed that the answer of the chatbot was pretty much the same which they got when they were using the "chat" feature in bing search. Minus the link to the website. In short, we are making websites so that search engines can use our data, and totally prevent the user from opening our website... How is this good? What can we do? Any ideas?
Give away to these bots the implicit ads, like the product placement in the movies. And take the money from the advertisers in exchange for such product placement.
It is logical, but then give a link back also. We are providing content to search engines so that they can send us visitors. If they "refuse" to send visitors, then what is the point?
I will set thresholds. For example, some content can only be accessed by members, and only half of the free content can be seen. You must register as a member to see all the content, because friends who want to see the other half of your content will definitely register, and robots are not Will register, and those who register at the same time may be your potential customers
@dwnb520 You are not understanding this I think. AI chat bots are not showing a link to the websites from where they got the data. How will someone know that the content was from this that website?
My views on AI change as fast as it changes. Right now my thoughts are, it's going to take awhile before the majority of people feel comfortable with using/getting information from these AI platforms (people are slow to accept change). Advertising has always been a huge chunk of Google's revenue and they know the risks. So, they don't want to abandon site owners completely. To counter the loss in traffic, we've been given the green light to use AI to create content. The answer for now is to scale as quickly as possible. Those that don't adapt quickly to AI will get left behind. There's two groups of people with AI #1 complainers or #2 adapters and doers. I know a lot of people don't like the idea of AI content. Some believe that all AI content is of poor quality or that a Human must write it to be good quality. If done properly AI content is better in many ways. If the information I'm looking for satisfies my inquiry and is factual, I don't care how it was produced. I see AI content as a great tool for us in the present moment. What happens 12-24+ months away, who knows, that's why we need to scale quickly now and take advantage of it in my opinion.
Very interesting observation. Yet, the chatbots don't simply scrape the web. If they did then there would be all kinds of weird information in them like "the earth is flat". Somehow their creators manage the knowledge fed to them. However, I agree with you. If they are copying content then copyright precedent says that they have to create referral links.
AI bot is for lazy who can't create article and search and read the results from search engings. It will hurt lots of website owner if many people become lazy in reading
chatgpt is great for writing code snippets. Also pretty good for things like "show me how to install apache on my amazon ec2 server" It composites knowledge that would otherwise have to be cobbled together from many sources. However, sometimes chatgpt is wrong! I just see it as another tool available. It definitely can save me time but you have to use it with the same caution you do anything else on the web. Worries about it becoming skynet and taking over the world are highly exaggerated. ha ha Not any time soon for sure.
This is basically the same shift we already saw with featured snippets, just more aggressive. For purely informational content you will lose traffic, no way around it. What still works is moving away from generic answers and focusing on stuff AI can’t fully replace yet - tools, data behind logins, opinionated or experience-based content, things that need context or interaction. You can also block or limit AI crawlers via robots.txt, but that’s a tradeoff and usually hurts visibility elsewhere. In practice most sites that survive will treat AI answers as the new zero-click search and build value beyond raw information.
Hi. Forgive me if I'm bumping your 3 years old post, but I wanted to share my point of view. What I noticed on my side is that too many professionals are playing the fear and lack of knowledge cards. AI are indeed using scraping technology to get their intel. Python is known to be a language that, once mastered, can be used to scrap all kinds of things. This doesn't mean all AI are using that language and there's definitely more than the eyes can see in that regard. Now, with that in mind, what many pplz miss is that chatgpt, claude, perplexity, etc... are Answer Engines. If we are unbiased for a few minutes, we can all say in all honesty that search engines, Google in particular, don't always meet our search intent. If I type " coffee " at the moment I'm writing these words, I have only one informational result = definition of coffee and the rest are commercial results + Ads. If I type " best coffee ", commercial results also dominate the SERP. What if my intent was to know best flavors of coffee, the most popular coffee cultivating countries and so on ? Before the AI overviews, Json-LD FAQ, Answer boxes and how's to would pop up with People Also asked suggestions. IMHO, that's where Google failed a few years ago by not customizing informational requests. Scrolling diminished and you immediately get what you're looking for with any answer engines. This is what also gave birth to the supposed AEO = answer engine optimization, GEO and LLM. All of them depends on good SEO in the end. No one can make quality content without a SEO approach. AI do quote their sources and everyone wants to appear there, but do AI really skyrocket profits ? If my site appears on " best recommended content writers ", would that really give me business opportunities? What about the new talented seo content writers trying to find a job ? What about shady pplz who can manipulate results ? If we have black hat seo, there's definitely going to be some kind of black hat AEO soon. Besides, there are cases where new sites are outclassing well-established ones by appearing as sources in AI. So, what are the criteria to show up there and what proof do we have that this kind of approach will increase conversions or make our company stand out ? I might be wrong there, but I keep on saying that consistency on creating quality content which REALLY HELPS people is the real game changer. People are not patient and the 2000 thousand articles we sometimes write are meaningless, human-wise. Be it on Google or AI-wise, content should just be straightforward and give the users what they want ASAP. Peace out.