Companies doing SEO for lead generation have been ruining search results for years now. I've searched for basic car questions so many times and gotten low effort articles from some random dealership in Kentucky or Ohio [1]. No, Toyota of Louisville, I am not a lead and I don't want your opinion any more than I want the opinion of any of the other 9000 local car dealerships in the country. And this pattern applies to home maintenance[2], legal questions, etc. Screw those guys.
We don't click because those guys have made it so there's nothing worth clicking on.
(this particular search has a few high quality results ranked at the top, but it illustrates what random dealerships from who knows where are doing to ruin the results.)
I’ve found wading through SEO spam is one of the best use cases for AI.
Perplexity, Google, Brave, and DDG have really good AI search results.
Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.
I remember asking, “Can I park overnight on the street in ${county} without getting a ticket?” And instead of having to fish through government websites, AI just spit out the right answer and the links it used. Similar for “what temp should I cook chicken to?”
It’s only a matter of time until everyone figures out how to SEO spam AI, but until then, I’m a big fan.
> Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.
Search operators had already solved this problem before Google decided to start ignoring them. When I genuinely came up with nothing it was usually because I didn’t have the vocabulary to make the search in the first place; this is where LLMs really shine. I often resolve technical issues by just asking the LLM what to do and responding “Didn’t work,” until I get something more helpful. It feels like smacking the top of a TV to get better reception, and it doesn’t always work, but it works often enough that I find myself using my LLM of choice quite a bit more, and Google quite a bit less.
AI browsers are great for defeating dark patterns too. I can go into ChatGPT Atlas and tell it to cancel my Adobe subscription and it'll eventually figure it out despite all their attempts to make it difficult. Love that.
ChatGPT/Perplexity don't make an AI browser for Linux :'( so I'm stuck with BrowserOS for now. I'll have to spend more time with it to get to know what it can do.
You're not wrong, but sometimes a local <seller of thing> will do SEO by actually putting up valuable articles. (e.g. the Yale Appliance blog)
And for a kinda counter-example for the car dealership one, Ford dealerships sell extended warranties that are backed by Ford and usable at any Ford dealership. If you're in the market for one of those, you absolutely want to go with whichever dealership offers you the lowest price in North America, and not whatever your local dealership is charging.
I had this experience when I searched for Jerusalem bugs. The page mentioned flu-like symptoms when bitten.
Then I realized it was a pest-control website. If you now Google "jerusalem bug fever" the AI talks about flu-like symptoms. Its source? That pest control website...
In the case of 1, the usual mantra "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer" surely applies?
There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.
While I don't know much about cleaning windows, providing more specific context for example 2 will likely do wonders to the quality of result returned too.
It's not a worthless question at all. The answer is "read the manual" and maybe also "your usage might meet the severe maintenance schedule and you'll need to read the footnotes."
Yes, it's not a question that has a literal numerical answer in the exact form that's being asked for, but if you ask an actual human they can 100% answer it for you.
I can’t say I’m in the business of asking 10 or more friends to confirm this, but any number they provide without knowing the car is a guess at best, and likely erroring on side of caution. A Google search with the car model in the query virtually always returns the correct figure ranges for said car.
Ah but see the most important piece of information is not what the manufacturer specifies. Most mechanic friends would tell you manufacturers are over-extending the interval to make their cars look good to purchasers and because they only care about getting to the warranty end not total life of the car. While 3k miles old wisdom is out dated, if you do your own oil changes you can see a massive change in what comes out after 5k miles.
By over specifying the question you will miss out on the more important context.
Much of what you say is true, but again your mechanic friend can only provide a meaningful answer if they know the model of car. It’s the first question any half way competent mechanic will ask!
The cars sitting outside my home vary in oil service interval by over 10k miles, as just one simple example, and I don’t drive anything particularly exotic.
By under-specifying the question, you rob it of the context to be answered accurately.
>There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.
Doesn't seem too hard to generate a bunch of content marketing articles for "how often to change oil for {2012,2013,...2026} corolla", similar to how there's content marketing spam for every windows error message imaginable, which end up being some variant of "have you tried sfc /scannow?".
AI has made it significantly easier to find exactly the answers I was looking for without all the BS designed to trick me into clicking something I never wanted/is completely useless, but I will still jump to DuckDuckGo to look for more as the "AI" is really great at making things up that do not exist. The AI summaries can be just as bad. Soon it will just be search results of AI hallucinations, so not really sure where this is all going
I stopped using Google search years ago as it became nothing but useless results that led to garbage I wasn't looking for. I at least still get good results from DuckDuckGo somehow
> I stopped using Google search years ago as it became nothing but useless results that led to garbage I wasn't looking for.
it really is kind of shocking; anecdote: i was doing a search for an obscure error message and the links i got on duck duck go was matching that exact message whereas in google i got literally zero results...
I have an opposite experience. I use predominantly DDG (mainly for UI reasons), but often the search results are much less relevant than from Google, or i got exact zero results, where Google finds plenty of instances of searched phrase.
I find Google is still really good at finding things for maps/navigation (and I contribute greatly to maps with pictures/reviews), but even that has become a problem with results of places that do not exist (and reviews from owners that say a place never existed where maps is saying)
depends on what you are searching for, but the constant attempts to trick me into useless garbage ads has destroyed reliability/my trust in their general search
I had no idea a click could cost this much and be sustainable (guess it might not):
"Personal injury lawyers are paying 568% more per click than they did in 2021. The keyword 'Las Vegas personal injury attorneys' costs $500 per click. Some legal keywords have crossed $1,000."
Always remember that if you're looking for a deal, the people who pay for expensive advertising probably can't provide it. Those ad campaigns have to get paid for somehow.
Personal injury lawyers are free. Literally anyone could be their client so relatively untargeted mass advertisements like freeway billboards pay off. Omnipresence of advertising signals that the firm is good at extracting money for their clients.
I wonder if that's just a quirk of Las Vegas lawyers, because they're super competitive and advertise aggressively here. Personal injury lawyers in particular. If you drive on the 15 or 215, you'll see dozens of billboards, often for the same few guys/firms... plus the ones who put their face on buses... and the ads that run on TV... and the geo-targeted ads on streaming services...
Probably because the bidder is an aggregator sending the referral to many law firms, not just one. Individual law firms thus get outbid for an exclusive referral click, but can still pay the aggregator for a non-exclusive referral.
How does that work? The user is expecting to click a link and go to a page, not multiple pages. Or does the aggregator have an interstitial page? It sounds like a generally good idea but I don't understand how it works from the user's perspective.
Roughly: An individual lawyer creates a "national brand" law firm and advertises it widely to find new clients. Of course, an individual lawyer can only take so many clients a year, so advertising nationally doesn't make sense since they'd quickly have more clients than they could ever manage. Additionally, a lawyer advertising nationally would need to be licensed in many jurisdictions and possibly also be able to handle many different legal specialties. This is essentially impossible for one person to do themselves.
Instead, the lawyer sends clients to their "associates" in the client's jurisdiction with the specialty that the client needs. For this referral, the lawyer gets a fee, agreed to beforehand.
Depends entirely on what you're selling, the margins, the conversion rate of their landing page, and conversion rate of their sales funnel. Some companies are on auto pilot and are over paying, but the math and techniques are simple for SEM ROI when done with a little attention.
If what you're selling is mortgages or franchise businesses the cost you are willing to pay for a click just to get a chance to convert to a lead, just to get a chance to convert to revenue, is surprisingly high.
I guess the average person doesn’t really have much of a reference to comparison shop lawyers so if they’re googling a lawyer, don’t really check out alternatives?
How is this a bad thing for them? Now they don't have to pay for clicks from people who aren't interested in their services. People who want to hire a lawyer will still click.
The idea for all this content marketing spam is that writing those articles (eg. "how can I dispute a speeding ticket?") is cheaper than buying ads for "speeding ticket lawyers" or whatever. If people don't click on those articles, the whole strategy falls apart.
haha, fwiw this is (surprisingly) still very effective. I imagine we will also start seeing ads on robotaxis soon once they figure out they have "unexplolited" eyeballs
You mean on the outside of the taxi, or the inside? If you meant outside, semitrucks often advertise for companies that don’t actually own them. If you meant inside, some airlines already do this with ads that play on the entertainment system before the flight, a lot like how old movie theaters used to.
Augmented reality adblockers can’t get here soon enough.
> If you meant inside, some airlines already do this with ads that play on the entertainment system before the flight, a lot like how old movie theaters used to.
Air Canada did this once to me years ago with the audio piped over the plane PA system - I doubt I can personally take credit for them ceasing the practice, but I sent complaints to both Air Canada and each of the advertisers, and haven't seen that again since.
One of my ideas 20 years ago was AdSense for cars. Random people get paid to put magnetic ads on their cars and earn based on how much and where they drive.
This was a good idea 20 years ago! There have been many of these since, including healthy revenues or minor acquisitions. You could have been part of it!
It existed for Laptops 20 years ago (or a little less). You got sent stickers to put on your Laptop and had to send weekly pictures with you Laptop and people in it, then you got paid.
The article itself is an AI summary, of course. I clicked through the sources, it's unclear how many of them are also AI summaries. Maybe digging another level deep would find some actual sources, I don't know.
I think that's a safe assumption. Even if I google instead of use ChatGPT, I'm often still taking the info AI surfaces above page links and running with that (assuming it's a low-risk thing the AI is likely to get right).
The monetisation in AI summaries is probably on its way. Like an auction to be mentioned depending on the type of question eg “would you like me to put you in touch with a firm that can do this for you?”
Looks like you don't want your AI vendor to also be an advertiser. The divide between AI companies on different sides of the line is about to be stark in terms of experience.
The same can be said for your search vendor I suppose. And now an advertising free search company exists we can finally see how true this is.
While I think this is true now, SEO will adapt. I hope AI companies are keeping their scraped pre AI data sources in their databases as a sort of low-background steel source to use when this happens, although I suppose they are the ones selling shovels.
So many google queries I have are pretty simple and the AI overview is good enough to answer them, that is honestly one of the best outcomes of the AI bubble for the masses.
Companies doing SEO for lead generation have been ruining search results for years now. I've searched for basic car questions so many times and gotten low effort articles from some random dealership in Kentucky or Ohio [1]. No, Toyota of Louisville, I am not a lead and I don't want your opinion any more than I want the opinion of any of the other 9000 local car dealerships in the country. And this pattern applies to home maintenance[2], legal questions, etc. Screw those guys.
We don't click because those guys have made it so there's nothing worth clicking on.
1. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+often+to+do+oil+change
(this particular search has a few high quality results ranked at the top, but it illustrates what random dealerships from who knows where are doing to ruin the results.)
2. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+wash+upstairs+windows
I’ve found wading through SEO spam is one of the best use cases for AI.
Perplexity, Google, Brave, and DDG have really good AI search results.
Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.
I remember asking, “Can I park overnight on the street in ${county} without getting a ticket?” And instead of having to fish through government websites, AI just spit out the right answer and the links it used. Similar for “what temp should I cook chicken to?”
It’s only a matter of time until everyone figures out how to SEO spam AI, but until then, I’m a big fan.
> Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.
Search operators had already solved this problem before Google decided to start ignoring them. When I genuinely came up with nothing it was usually because I didn’t have the vocabulary to make the search in the first place; this is where LLMs really shine. I often resolve technical issues by just asking the LLM what to do and responding “Didn’t work,” until I get something more helpful. It feels like smacking the top of a TV to get better reception, and it doesn’t always work, but it works often enough that I find myself using my LLM of choice quite a bit more, and Google quite a bit less.
> smacking the top of a TV to get better reception
Ha! this is such a funny analogy.
AI browsers are great for defeating dark patterns too. I can go into ChatGPT Atlas and tell it to cancel my Adobe subscription and it'll eventually figure it out despite all their attempts to make it difficult. Love that.
ChatGPT/Perplexity don't make an AI browser for Linux :'( so I'm stuck with BrowserOS for now. I'll have to spend more time with it to get to know what it can do.
I wonder if we should make littering a offense in the internet instead.
Nah seriously, how much longer can we afford to waste the energy of the planet and of humanity on such bullshit?
You're not wrong, but sometimes a local <seller of thing> will do SEO by actually putting up valuable articles. (e.g. the Yale Appliance blog)
And for a kinda counter-example for the car dealership one, Ford dealerships sell extended warranties that are backed by Ford and usable at any Ford dealership. If you're in the market for one of those, you absolutely want to go with whichever dealership offers you the lowest price in North America, and not whatever your local dealership is charging.
I had this experience when I searched for Jerusalem bugs. The page mentioned flu-like symptoms when bitten.
Then I realized it was a pest-control website. If you now Google "jerusalem bug fever" the AI talks about flu-like symptoms. Its source? That pest control website...
In the case of 1, the usual mantra "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer" surely applies?
There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.
While I don't know much about cleaning windows, providing more specific context for example 2 will likely do wonders to the quality of result returned too.
It's not a worthless question at all. The answer is "read the manual" and maybe also "your usage might meet the severe maintenance schedule and you'll need to read the footnotes."
Yes, it's not a question that has a literal numerical answer in the exact form that's being asked for, but if you ask an actual human they can 100% answer it for you.
Ask a mechanic friend how often to do an oil change and they will 9 times out of 10 give you an answer without asking what model of car.
I can’t say I’m in the business of asking 10 or more friends to confirm this, but any number they provide without knowing the car is a guess at best, and likely erroring on side of caution. A Google search with the car model in the query virtually always returns the correct figure ranges for said car.
Ah but see the most important piece of information is not what the manufacturer specifies. Most mechanic friends would tell you manufacturers are over-extending the interval to make their cars look good to purchasers and because they only care about getting to the warranty end not total life of the car. While 3k miles old wisdom is out dated, if you do your own oil changes you can see a massive change in what comes out after 5k miles.
By over specifying the question you will miss out on the more important context.
Much of what you say is true, but again your mechanic friend can only provide a meaningful answer if they know the model of car. It’s the first question any half way competent mechanic will ask!
The cars sitting outside my home vary in oil service interval by over 10k miles, as just one simple example, and I don’t drive anything particularly exotic.
By under-specifying the question, you rob it of the context to be answered accurately.
>There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.
Doesn't seem too hard to generate a bunch of content marketing articles for "how often to change oil for {2012,2013,...2026} corolla", similar to how there's content marketing spam for every windows error message imaginable, which end up being some variant of "have you tried sfc /scannow?".
AI has made it significantly easier to find exactly the answers I was looking for without all the BS designed to trick me into clicking something I never wanted/is completely useless, but I will still jump to DuckDuckGo to look for more as the "AI" is really great at making things up that do not exist. The AI summaries can be just as bad. Soon it will just be search results of AI hallucinations, so not really sure where this is all going
I stopped using Google search years ago as it became nothing but useless results that led to garbage I wasn't looking for. I at least still get good results from DuckDuckGo somehow
I have an opposite experience. I use predominantly DDG (mainly for UI reasons), but often the search results are much less relevant than from Google, or i got exact zero results, where Google finds plenty of instances of searched phrase.
I find Google is still really good at finding things for maps/navigation (and I contribute greatly to maps with pictures/reviews), but even that has become a problem with results of places that do not exist (and reviews from owners that say a place never existed where maps is saying)
depends on what you are searching for, but the constant attempts to trick me into useless garbage ads has destroyed reliability/my trust in their general search
some things google is still better at for sure, but the gap is closing imo
Google has de-indexed most of the web and stopped indexing anything that doesn’t get significant traction.
I had no idea a click could cost this much and be sustainable (guess it might not):
"Personal injury lawyers are paying 568% more per click than they did in 2021. The keyword 'Las Vegas personal injury attorneys' costs $500 per click. Some legal keywords have crossed $1,000."
Always remember that if you're looking for a deal, the people who pay for expensive advertising probably can't provide it. Those ad campaigns have to get paid for somehow.
Personal injury lawyers are free. Literally anyone could be their client so relatively untargeted mass advertisements like freeway billboards pay off. Omnipresence of advertising signals that the firm is good at extracting money for their clients.
I wonder if that's just a quirk of Las Vegas lawyers, because they're super competitive and advertise aggressively here. Personal injury lawyers in particular. If you drive on the 15 or 215, you'll see dozens of billboards, often for the same few guys/firms... plus the ones who put their face on buses... and the ads that run on TV... and the geo-targeted ads on streaming services...
The article links through to a list of the most expensive: https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/legal-marketing/why-law-fi...
Baton Rouge truck accident lawyer at $1000
Probably because the bidder is an aggregator sending the referral to many law firms, not just one. Individual law firms thus get outbid for an exclusive referral click, but can still pay the aggregator for a non-exclusive referral.
How does that work? The user is expecting to click a link and go to a page, not multiple pages. Or does the aggregator have an interstitial page? It sounds like a generally good idea but I don't understand how it works from the user's perspective.
It's a bit more complex and nothing new.
Roughly: An individual lawyer creates a "national brand" law firm and advertises it widely to find new clients. Of course, an individual lawyer can only take so many clients a year, so advertising nationally doesn't make sense since they'd quickly have more clients than they could ever manage. Additionally, a lawyer advertising nationally would need to be licensed in many jurisdictions and possibly also be able to handle many different legal specialties. This is essentially impossible for one person to do themselves.
Instead, the lawyer sends clients to their "associates" in the client's jurisdiction with the specialty that the client needs. For this referral, the lawyer gets a fee, agreed to beforehand.
Does this not make you want to search those keywords and click the link?
Depends entirely on what you're selling, the margins, the conversion rate of their landing page, and conversion rate of their sales funnel. Some companies are on auto pilot and are over paying, but the math and techniques are simple for SEM ROI when done with a little attention.
If what you're selling is mortgages or franchise businesses the cost you are willing to pay for a click just to get a chance to convert to a lead, just to get a chance to convert to revenue, is surprisingly high.
I guess the average person doesn’t really have much of a reference to comparison shop lawyers so if they’re googling a lawyer, don’t really check out alternatives?
Maybe they should search for "What are my legal options if a big company steals my business?"
How is this a bad thing for them? Now they don't have to pay for clicks from people who aren't interested in their services. People who want to hire a lawyer will still click.
The idea for all this content marketing spam is that writing those articles (eg. "how can I dispute a speeding ticket?") is cheaper than buying ads for "speeding ticket lawyers" or whatever. If people don't click on those articles, the whole strategy falls apart.
It might work out for some of them, but they lost the chance to make any sort of pitch to those people.
>>>> For law firms that built their entire client acquisition strategy on Google, this is an existential shift.
Oops. I guess it's back to billboards along the freeways.
Or in person ads that are so ridiculous you can't _not_ remember them.
I'm talking to _you_, "Yo, Pain Law, Yo" subway guy.
haha, fwiw this is (surprisingly) still very effective. I imagine we will also start seeing ads on robotaxis soon once they figure out they have "unexplolited" eyeballs
You mean on the outside of the taxi, or the inside? If you meant outside, semitrucks often advertise for companies that don’t actually own them. If you meant inside, some airlines already do this with ads that play on the entertainment system before the flight, a lot like how old movie theaters used to.
Augmented reality adblockers can’t get here soon enough.
> If you meant inside, some airlines already do this with ads that play on the entertainment system before the flight, a lot like how old movie theaters used to.
Air Canada did this once to me years ago with the audio piped over the plane PA system - I doubt I can personally take credit for them ceasing the practice, but I sent complaints to both Air Canada and each of the advertisers, and haven't seen that again since.
Maybe they'll adjust routes to optimize driving by certain sponsored locations.
NY cabs have had ads in the backseat on a monitor for years
One of my ideas 20 years ago was AdSense for cars. Random people get paid to put magnetic ads on their cars and earn based on how much and where they drive.
This was a good idea 20 years ago! There have been many of these since, including healthy revenues or minor acquisitions. You could have been part of it!
It existed for Laptops 20 years ago (or a little less). You got sent stickers to put on your Laptop and had to send weekly pictures with you Laptop and people in it, then you got paid.
Or google maps search or back to YP or Yelp.
And also they seem to continue using FM broadcast stations to carry their messages.
The article itself is an AI summary, of course. I clicked through the sources, it's unclear how many of them are also AI summaries. Maybe digging another level deep would find some actual sources, I don't know.
I'm assuming that this applies everywhere, but this is a law-centered site, so that's their focus.
I confess to "not clicking," myself. Also, I often use ChatGPT to answer questions I used to put to Teh Google.
I think that's a safe assumption. Even if I google instead of use ChatGPT, I'm often still taking the info AI surfaces above page links and running with that (assuming it's a low-risk thing the AI is likely to get right).
Maybe people should install AdNauseam to make up for the lost clicks?
https://adnauseam.io/
AdNauseam's fake clicks are so detectable that it's hard to imagine any ad networks are fooled by it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46188039
is it detected though?
The irony of a clearly AI-written article bemoaning the effects of AI on content marketers is strong.
AI summaries eating SEO is a good thing imo. Way too many grifters.
The monetisation in AI summaries is probably on its way. Like an auction to be mentioned depending on the type of question eg “would you like me to put you in touch with a firm that can do this for you?”
Looks like you don't want your AI vendor to also be an advertiser. The divide between AI companies on different sides of the line is about to be stark in terms of experience.
The same can be said for your search vendor I suppose. And now an advertising free search company exists we can finally see how true this is.
While I think this is true now, SEO will adapt. I hope AI companies are keeping their scraped pre AI data sources in their databases as a sort of low-background steel source to use when this happens, although I suppose they are the ones selling shovels.
Is Yellow Pages and businesses starting in A back on the table?
So many google queries I have are pretty simple and the AI overview is good enough to answer them, that is honestly one of the best outcomes of the AI bubble for the masses.