ChatGPT will flood the internet with articles like how SEO was used to hack search. It might not replace search engine, but search results will becomes even more irrelevant.
There are many ways companies might try to get some ad money in a ChatGPT setting: obvious and non-obvious product placement in the answer.
Q. Find me the best italian restaurant in New York.
A. It's likely subjective - let's just sell it to the highest bidder.
Q. How to improve mental health?
A. Give a reasonably good answer and probably mention: some say a solar lamp is good in winter months, there's a good one:
I somehow feel like people can be easily baited into buying something when you mix good, useful information with ads. Kind of like how reputed youtubers/niche influencers do product placement and make referral money.
All of this kind of makes SEO obsolete as ChatGPT ads might end up having more conversions than regular Google ads.
I can imagine AI replacing search engines in a somewhat far future, but in the meantime, it'll mostly be used to flood the internet with many low quality articles. Consequence will be as you said, but I also wonder if it won't lower the quality of new AI trainings as well.
There's "precedents", tho. MidJourney, the art AI, trained Stable Diffusion over favorites generations of their community, making it a "fine tuned Mid-Stable Diffusion" that was quite amazing (that was the --beta and --betap flags a couple of months ago there).
But on the search side, it'll also get rid of the need for the kind of SEO/blogspam stuff you're describing.
We already see it with recipes - there are all the god-awful sites that have 1000 words of fluff before you get to the recipe, because that's what you need for SEO purposes. GPT is really good at creating that kind of useless fluff, but it also obfuscates the need for it, because it'll just give you the recipe you want without the need to go to a website at all.
in the short term yes. in the long term I think SEO will disappear. my buddy who works in the content creation space for indeed is telling me that they are already starting to use gpt to replace content creation, but know that it's a matter of time before that won't work.
Not necessary. The google search function still works fine, its just the content becomes worst. If the content is generated from ChatGPT, I don't see how it will cut out the middle-person. I believe a more likely scenario is people appending site:reddit.com for all of their search. It will be domain specific.
