ing links: Where can you find sources in Google’s AI search results for AI? //
Google’s Yesterday’s introduction of Bard was big news.
Perhaps the most important news for SEOs was the preview Google’s generative AI searches results. It featured a total of zero hyperlinks.
That’s right. Google, a search engine, no longer links back to its sources.
Websites are everywhere you look.
What is a search engine that doesn’t link to the content it creates called?
That is what I think we call a scraper website.
An viral 2014 tweet by Google about Google being a web scraper is still relevant today.
While I was digesting all the AI news in search results, Harvey Dent’s quote from “The Dark Knight”, came to mind. “You either die as a hero or live long enough so that you can see yourself becoming the villain.”
This is not going to be another Google rant.
Google is however playing a delicate card here.
Glenn Gabe referred to this as an “act against publishers” via Twitter. He’s right.
Google has been providing answers to questions for 24 years through a list of websites.
Over the years, user behavior has changed.
People need instant answers. People don’t want to read 2,500-word articles. A question can be answered in 2-3 sentences, or even paragraphs. We have all been frustrated by having to scroll through the lengthy backstories that accompany almost all recipes.
Google is increasingly providing these answers through search features, such as knowledge panels, clocks and calculators, scores, sports scores, and many other.
With the rise of zero-click searches, the Google backlash grew louder.
We may now have zero-link results.
I can recall when Google’s featured search snippets drove a lot SEOs crazy because they “steal” traffic from other websites. Before Google began showing the current time, others were just as mad.
None of this was a concern to me at the time. You can’t copyright all the time.
Your entire business model relied on driving organic traffic to your site from Google just to tell people when it was.
Google could be playing a dangerous card.
Websites have been feeding their content to Google for over two decades. They would receive clicks, or at the very least visibility, as a result.
What is the difference between Google and a scraper website if Google essentially summarises (or rewrites or whatever you want it to be called) answers?
Oder is it plagiarism in its purest form?
Ryan Jones has a very interesting Twitter thread that basically says “no.”
- “None of these take text directly from any particular webpage – and they don’t present ideas anybody can own’ or copyright.
What happens if creators and publishers stop submitting content to Google? What would happen to Google’s multi-billion-dollar advertising empire?
Microsoft today previewed the ChatGPT version for Bing search. It contains many links and citations to websites that generated its answers.
Neeva, which has integrated generative AI in its search results since January, has now figured out how it can link to its sources. You.com has also done the same.
Google should do the same.
Lily Ray stated it on Tweet: “Every other search engine except for the one with 90% marketshare figured out how cite its sources, got it.”