I agree. Chat-as-search is very promising but I think it will cause big issues because people will not check the veracity of its statements. Right now, you actually have to go to a page to find the info and make up your mind on whether you trust this source. (Say, I generally trust CDC.) Chat simply linking to sources will not solve this problem because we are lazy. But, since we are lazy, I think it will take over the current model.
Disagreed. If you've ever watched how non-technical people use google, you'll find that chatGPT already does a much better job. You're not seeing as much SEO blogspam as non-technical people do because you unconsciously avoid using words that are commonly found in spam.
1) how resilient chat-to-search will be SEO spam in the future,
2) whether people will be less likely to publish content if chat is supposed to spit out its summaries and, potentially, reduce traffic to their sites.
What does it matter about SEO spam if it’s not linking to any sources and is seemingly generating original content? There’s no benefit to trying to optimize content for a generalized AI because there’s no way to know how it will be leveraged and the provenance of the data won’t be tied to the content creator anyway.
Surely if this style of search becomes very popular there will be people dedicating tons of effort to gaming the system to ensure the chat bot is primed to answer questions like “what’s the best kind of mattress for a side sleeper?” in a way that helps them sell more mattresses, regardless of whether the bot actually links anywhere.
I'm disagreeing with the idea that this will cause big issues. It's a known problem and it's hard to imagine SEO spam getting any worse than it already is.
> whether people will be less likely to publish content if chat is supposed to spit out its summaries and, potentially, reduce traffic to their sites.
Good. Today, kind humans summarize long winded articles in the comment section and often save me a click. Sometimes I'm that human.
It would be great if when clicking through the link, the relevant text could be highlighted in the webpage, similar to the featured snippets in Google search. E.g. when searching "What were the causes of the swiss civil war?" Google returns:
