So this week Google's new AI Overviews thing told someone that geologists recommend eating one small rock a day, and told someone else that adding a bit of non-toxic glue to pizza sauce will help the cheese stick better. Both of those answers came from a satire site and an eleven-year-old troll comment on Reddit, respectively, and both got scraped up, summarized with total confidence, and served at the top of a Google results page like gospel. The screenshots have been all over my feeds for about the last five days and I can't stop looking at them.
It's funny, obviously. It's also exactly what a lot of us predicted the second Google announced it was putting an AI summary above the actual search results at I/O a couple weeks back. You can't build a system that treats every indexed page as equally trustworthy and then act surprised when it confidently repeats a joke as fact. That's not a bug in the traditional sense, it's just what happens when you optimize for "sounds authoritative" instead of "is correct."
But here's the part that actually matters to me, sitting here running a blog that's been going since 2011: I pulled up Search Console this morning out of habit, the way I do most Tuesdays, and my impressions are basically flat month over month but my clicks are down a little. Not a cliff, nothing dramatic, just a small persistent nibble. I've got no way to prove the AI Overview box is the reason, correlation isn't causation and all that, but it's hard not to notice that more and more of my search traffic is arriving as "people saw the answer and didn't need to click through." Which, if you've ever written a post that took actual research and actual time, is a little demoralizing to think about. You're not competing with other blogs anymore, you're competing with a box that ate your blog and is now paraphrasing it back to the user without sending them your way.
I don't think this is some blogging-is-dead moment, people have been calling that since about 2013 and I'm still here typing this into a text box at midnight. But it does feel like a real shift, not a hypothetical one. Back when I started this thing, ranking well in Google search meant somebody clicked your link, read your actual words, maybe left a comment, maybe came back next week. Now there's a whole extra layer sitting between the search box and your site whose entire job is to make sure the user never has to leave the results page. Great for Google's engagement numbers I guess. Less great if your whole reason for writing is that people actually read the thing.
Separately, and much less dramatically: xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, closed a $6 billion Series B this week, with money from folks like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia and a pile of Gulf sovereign wealth funds. Six billion dollars for a company that's maybe a year old, building a chatbot that mostly seems to exist to be the "based" alternative to ChatGPT. I don't have a ton to say about it honestly except that the sheer size of these rounds has stopped registering as a real number to me. Six billion, sixty billion, whatever, it's all just "an amount of money large enough that regular arithmetic stops applying." What I do find mildly interesting is that this is happening in the exact same week Google is getting dragged for telling people to eat rocks. The money keeps flowing into the space regardless of whether the actual product works right that particular Tuesday.
Anyway. I don't have a tidy fix for the search traffic thing, and I don't think anyone does yet, not even Google, going by how fast they've apparently been walking some of these Overview answers back behind the scenes without saying much about it publicly. I'll keep writing posts the old fashioned way and keep checking Search Console out of habit, and if the numbers keep drifting down I'll probably complain about it again in a few months. For now I'm mostly just enjoying the rock-eating screenshots. Feels like the internet at its best, honestly: a company spends billions building something impressive and the first thing the public does with it is get it to recommend a diet of gravel.