I have been holding out on what my thoughts are on the effect of AI on websites and on humanity, overall, and I have finally arrived at the conclusion after months of waiting and observing. More than anything, in this post I’ll be specifying how websites, webmasters, authors, content creators, developers, and designers are being affected by AI features like Google AI Overview and other AI engines, like ChatGPT. First off, I want to say that this is not a blow against AI in any manner, shape, or form. This article is simply a well put together list of observations that I have been deriving from using the Google Search Engine since the beginning of their AI summaries release feature, or AI overview, and ChatGPT for the last year or so. What’s even more relieving to you as a reader is that I have added a list of solutions at the end of this essay. It’s not just a rant.
I have noticed many applications that AI is useful in and many of them where it should stay out of. One of these applications where it should stay out of is from carelessly delivering derived knowledge from authors’ original content. This has become an ethics problem at this point and it’s a problem with the potential of severely impacting an entire society. On a small scale, and for the sake of this post, we’ll just focus on how these AI features like Google AI Overview and ChatGPT responses are affecting SEO and in turn, and most importantly, the wonderful people that are behind creating and delivering content. After months of observation, it is evident to me that these features have been released in a rush and without the consideration of the damage it’s causing.
Let me point out how nice, useful, and impactful AI is. There are things for which AI can be incredible for, these include robots and aiding in repetitive and mundane tasks at work, both at the hands of a human supervisor. Another useful application for AI is in aiding learning on matters that we as humans, cannot understand or have a hard time grasping yet. By assorting materials for that topic in ways which we as humans can relate to and understand easier, we can explore topics which are harder to understand… like dark matter… or wormholes, for example. And no… I’m not talking about aiding your first grade kid how to do math; that to me is cruel, cold, and dehumanizing. We’ve been teaching math for centuries… Why would you want to deprive your kid of a human teacher? To be careful when I mention robots, I mean robots that would not jeopardize humanity. I’m not going to go deeper into these topics today, because this thread is about the impact AI features have on SEO and the authors, content-creators, designers, developers, and companies behind meaningful websites.
Here is the problem with AI and authorship. I’m sitting here Googling and making ChatGPT queries and all of them are returning correct answers, yes. However, this is not done in an ethical manner. You see, all these answers lack any mention of their sources in their text. The problem is that these text responses themselves are not directly involving authors and content creators. In Google AI responses you get a small little link button that toggles a sidebar with some links, and that is all. The AI response’s text does not mention the author of the content. Moreover, that tiny button is so small that people just skip over it and keep reading the next part of the summary. I know this because this is exactly how I used it when it was released. Later on, I was made aware of this by an Instagram account plus some more previous thought I had put into the issue. If users get the ability to simply read a summary from pages, they have less incentive to click on anything. Especially since we know AI is great at giving text responses.
Deliberately, I have trained myself to not look at the AI responses without clicking on their links anymore. Heck, most of the time I skip the AI summaries altogether. Let me tell you why I do this. First off, these AI summaries from Google evidently have less people clicking on them than traditional SERP results. Authors, content creators, web developers, web designers, graphic designers, and companies themselves are all being shelved into a drawer. Let me tell you, it does not feel good to have your content shelved into a drawer. Author names are forgotten with these Google AI search result summaries, not to mention the ChatGPT responses which don’t even link to sources at all. Less and less people are clicking and being exposed to authoritative content, as you can see by these case studies plus my own personal case study here:
Case Study #1: How will generative AI impact website rankings and traffic?
Case Study #2: Google Users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
You see the downfall on clicks? It’s no joke. People online keep saying to adapt to new strategies that focus on “brand authority”, well I have news for you if you had not already noticed, SEO is based on brand authority. The only reason why our pages come first in SERPs is because of their authority in a topic. Without that authority, domains would get pushed to the back of the SERPs. With readers not clicking on the links, they are basically shelving all the hard work and thought that authors, content creators, designers, and developers put into developing these websites. Authors’ and brand authority are all being violated through these AI summaries. It is unethical to not incentivize traffic to their original sources without a major effort as Google AI summaries and ChatGPT responses are currently doing. Google AI summaries and ChatGPT responses are a danger to an author’s integrity and society. As you see below, this feature outright summarizes words from different pages and displays them to the user doing the work that a reader/researcher should be doing (coming up with their own conclusions).
Where is the logical sense in this? If readers are now summarizing summaries instead of well thought of and composed authored content, then where are we going as a society? This is ravishing authorship. Don’t even get me started on ChatGPT… this tool straight-out does not even bother linking to sources at all… this is an outright scandal by all means.
Lack of Originality in Google AI Summaries and ChatGPT responses
These summaries and responses being received by online readers are simply that; summaries. While I cannot argue that these responses are incorrect, it does not take away the fact that they are still being derived from original content. And this is where the originality of the content being derived is lost in translation. Someone who writes, a writer, takes joy and passion while composing and authoring content. Although their work might be derived from other authors’ work at times, it is still carefully pieced together and composed. It is still original, it is human, and it is ethical. In contrast, if you have a human who is summarizing or reading what an algorithm was taught to summarize by observing other humans summarize, then words lose their disposition. Disposition is what a human and only a human is able to do. Disposition, as defined by Oxford Languages; “A person’s inherent qualities of mind and character.”
With Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT response readers outright summarizing auto generated summaries, instead of words from other authors’ text and point of view, the disposition of a text is nullified. Is that really what we want in terms of originality for our kids? I sure as heck would not. Instead, I would rather have an environment where kids learn through the experiences and viewpoints of people. All these AI responses and summaries are incoherent to human function. You might counter argue with, “Wait, aren’t all of these AI responses derived from human text anyway?” The answer is yes, however, if you make a bowl of pasta, you’d expect all the pasta to be the same type; I don’t mix my spaghetti with farfalle, for example. All of these words that are derived from Language Models are just mixes of people’s words throughout history and they don’t stem from an original disposition, instead from an analysis of previous methods, unoriginal. If that is the world where you would like your kids to grow up in, then they will have a harder time experiencing a person’s passion the way that only a person’s original disposition can present it.
Lack of Delivery in Google AI summaries and ChatGPT responses
On to the next point, what is the internet? By definition the internet is “a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.” Notice here that I have marked the word variety in bold. This is where the delivery aspect of this problem arises. Do Google AI overviews and ChatGPT responses provide variety? Sure they do. They both provide content derived from a variety of sources. What about variety in text delivery and visual presentation? The answer is no. First, let’s touch up on the fact that if you are using words stemming from groups of pre-analyzed text, then you are not delivering text with the same variety as the thoughts a human being ever could. Sure, the tools are delivering variety in its text by copying and mixing the styles of different authors. Are they really delivering the variety in its text that a single human could? No. A single human being is capable of processing information and changing their perspective and delivery from sentence to sentence, from word to word. When you read an AI summary or response, sentence after sentence has already been pre-computed… because it all stems from pre-analyzed text. Regardless… even if you argue that different word combinations are used in different responses, phrases are still glued together by pre-analyzing how humans write. This lacks variety in its delivery, because the word combinations do not stem from the plethora of original thoughts a human’s brain is capable of inducing every second.
Now let me tell you how else Google AI summaries and ChatGPT responses lack in delivery. This has to do with how the content is visually presented. You cannot judge a book by its cover… However, we all know that most books go out of their way to present content in a specific manner. So… why, as authors, content creators, designers, developers, and companies, allow for our content to be delivered incorrectly? Content is being summarized without exact quotes. Then, the original delivery of the content is being skipped altogether. When websites and pages are created, they are created with visual presentation in mind. This visual presentation is meant to captivate the visitor and deliver the essence of the team that put it together. How then, would a team be able to express its passion, dedication, and conviction to a topic, if their true essence is being skipped altogether? The features employed by Google AI summaries and ChatGPT responses do a terrible job at funneling organic traffic to their sources. It’s not secret, people are skipping the click buttons altogether, and reading the summaries. Companies and their people are suffering due to less organic clicks. The people who take the time to develop, design, author, and create such beautiful content, are being shelved into drawers. AI will never be able to replace the human mind, spirit, passion, delivery, and disposition. That is just a fact that many individuals don’t want to face because of inflated profits.
Some Solutions
Of course I was not going to write all of this without providing something constructive. To begin with, I did not say the technology is useless. I’m merely pointing to the fact that it’s inflicting quite a lot of damage. It’s damaging authors, designers, developers, content creators, and all the people who work endlessly to create and deliver content. Instead of pointing out only the mistakes, let me put forth some constructive ideas as to what could be done in order to mitigate the damage being done to the hardworking folks who possess this great passion for their craft.
Revamp Google AI overviews for more organic traffic
First, here is my proposed solution for Google AI Search Result Summaries: find a way to funnel more traffic into authors’ websites. Simpler said than done, but as of right now you have a minuscule link button that I have to search for with a magnifying glass.
This button is literally almost the color as the page background and merges right in. What’s worse is that the link button does not even take you into a website…. It just toggles links on the side. The AI overview feature is summarizing from three different sites into one sentence and can’t pinpoint you exactly where it gets the content from.
Who would want to click when they’re reading a summary, unless they knew they’d be missing out on something? And that little tiny link button… a little smaller and I’d be driven to think it’s the end period for each sentence. Now take a look at the link buttons for the summaries, they’re all toggling links but you don’t get taken to the site where the content is derived from. This makes me not want to click twice to get to an article… why would anybody, if you’re just getting the summary of the results from the websites in just one sentence.
The link buttons don’t take you anywhere! The link icon is widely adopted for buttons that take you to a page… you know… a link…, it’s not a toggle icon after all.
Here is my suggestion for this first problem I just mentioned. I have also drafted the solution as a UI.
1. Don’t use that link button as a toggle… as a matter of fact don’t use it at all. Instead of having a link button, use the same concept you had for search results, a box that if you click on takes you to the source. Nice, easy, and familiar. Doesn’t take away from the functionality we have down below after the AI overview. I know this alone would re-vamp a lot of unnecessary traffic loss. Here’s sort of what I mean:
2. Takes me to this next point, don’t summarize three different pages into one summary/sentence. Keep the traditional one excerpt per source schema. Keep the original text from the source of the excerpt, and add a little AI magic incentivizing the user to click on that box instead… and you could even use AI to get creative and incentivize users to click on that link even further. For example, you could use AI to look for the most convincing selling point or fact on that website and display it as a direct quotation in the summary box. Below, you can see hypothetically how AI could be trying to educate me through the MadeUpOnlineEggStore domain on purchasing organic eggs online from their farms because their eggs are “sourced from happy, healthy hens that have proudly called Stiebrs Farms home since they were chicks. They enjoy a cage free lifestyle with access to the outdoors where they can run, preen, and socialize outdoors. The hens are also fed the finest organic feed that meets Non-GMO Project standards.” (this text about organic eggs was actually taken from Smith Brothers Farms, I just needed some text to relate to organic eggs.) What is nice about this is that there are direct quotations and the summary links me to only one website. Therefore, the company and the people responsible for this summary get full credit for their hard work.
3. Get rid of the sidebar with links. These don’t tell anything except get us confused about what to click on. I don’t even know where the text from the summary is stemming from.. There’s so many Reddit results now as well that are really odd. Why does a Reddit thread come up before other exceptionally authoritative sources that dedicate themselves to a specific topic? Look at this search below: “where do you get organic eggs”… why in the world would I be getting Target, Walmart, Reddit, and Trader Joe’s before a link that actually has an authoritative say in the matter… Last time I checked, Walmart, Target, Reddit, and Trader Joe’s all do sell organic eggs, yes, but they’re NOT the utmost authoritative source for organic eggs… and never will be. If anything, I should be getting results from the authoritative sources on these matters giving advice to go purchase organic eggs at Walmart, Target, and Trader Joe’s locations instead. Additionally, these results don’t answer the question directly… Instead, I’d rather get a response from an authoritative Organic Eggs source like the “MadeUp Egg Farm” (which ofc, I made up.) telling me that I should indeed purchase organic eggs from those Major Retailer sources.
You should be able to see the value in this article if you have ever authored or created content. You should value your content enough to say; “Hey I want that organic click, and please present my content on this index exactly as I’ve delivered it…” because at the end of the day, Google Search Engine is a search engine… and ChatGPT does not have the right unless otherwise indicated to scrape your content and summarize it as it pleases WITHOUT giving people behind the hard work the credit. Look at this ChatGPT response…. ZERO credit given to any Egg specialist in the profession. It’s an ABSOLUTE DISGRACE.
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