IMO, AI-enabled search may be engineering its own collapse. 😆 If AI search platforms try to “own” their audiences (like Google has tried to do historically) and discourage click-throughs, we could see something like this…smaller financial rewards from content —> less human content created / more slop published by agents —> quality of Internet content drops precipitously —> dumber AI models
Another shorter term issue is that AI-powered search is non-deterministic. If you ask for, say, the best women’s running shoes for narrow feet, you’ll get a slightly different set of products and reccos each time. While they’ll most cluster around the mean, this could be annoying for users who may want a broader set of choices.
Totally agree with everything you've said here, Karen! I think the risk of the internet eating itself is a real one. But the most interesting question to me is, what will that look like and how will we (humans, content creators, marketers, commerce in general) meet that situation? It's fascinating.
Interesting question, agree it’s fascinating! My best guess is that we’ll end up with fragmentation…instead of one big web, we’ll see a collection of walled gardens which may or may not share their content with LLMs. This may be starting now with platforms like LinkedIn basically killing reach for posts that contain links.
Great read full of useful info, thanks!
IMO, AI-enabled search may be engineering its own collapse. 😆 If AI search platforms try to “own” their audiences (like Google has tried to do historically) and discourage click-throughs, we could see something like this…smaller financial rewards from content —> less human content created / more slop published by agents —> quality of Internet content drops precipitously —> dumber AI models
Another shorter term issue is that AI-powered search is non-deterministic. If you ask for, say, the best women’s running shoes for narrow feet, you’ll get a slightly different set of products and reccos each time. While they’ll most cluster around the mean, this could be annoying for users who may want a broader set of choices.
Totally agree with everything you've said here, Karen! I think the risk of the internet eating itself is a real one. But the most interesting question to me is, what will that look like and how will we (humans, content creators, marketers, commerce in general) meet that situation? It's fascinating.
Interesting question, agree it’s fascinating! My best guess is that we’ll end up with fragmentation…instead of one big web, we’ll see a collection of walled gardens which may or may not share their content with LLMs. This may be starting now with platforms like LinkedIn basically killing reach for posts that contain links.