noellarkin t1_j187uxt wrote on December 22, 2022 at 11:32 AM

The thing with marketing is it's a red queen race against banner blindness. Take the popularity of VSLs, for example, a decade ago the black-text-on-white-background + narration VSL was a go-to marketing tactic for landing pages. It fell out of favour after Youtube became popular and made hosting videos online a one-click affair. People developed banner-blindness for VSLs because they just weren't that special anymore.

What tools like ChatGPT do in the marketing context is they make 'authority content' easy enough to produce at scale that it would inevitably get devalued, similar to what happened to VSLs ten years ago. ChatGPT will do it for textual content, and models like StableDiffusion (as well as their inevitable video derivates) will do the same for video and images. In a situation where people are confronted with an excess of media, they just 'tune it out' over time. So one possible answer is marketing tactics will become more aggressive, perhaps using more extreme variations of shock marketing, or more invasive methods like DM spamming etc.

IMO the other factor influencing the future of SEO is search engines will have to adapt ASAP - - hard to do, since over the past 10 years they've been putting a lot of effort at making relevant content an important SEO signal (as opposed to blindly ranking websites that have been blasted with automated links) - - now with ChatGPT, it seems relevant content will be just as poor an authority indicator as thousands of spammy links. How Search engines deal with this issue will determine what happens to SEOs - - they may go down the 'curation' route ie only promote websites that have been cited in authority publications like famous news sites, they may heavily promote sites that have social signals, they may choose to do nothing at all.

Having said that, I do feel that ChatGPT has it's limitations. It's very good at content creation on general topics, but if you try prompting it with niche-specific questions that require some amount of technical expertise, its often less than satisfactory. If you decide to do SEO/marketing only for a specific niche and become a domain expert in that niche, ChatGPT, or any other 'general purpose' AI that has been trained on a public dataset may not be as much of a threat.

genshiryoku t1_j18aj4q wrote on December 22, 2022 at 12:04 PM

I really like your comment.

The curated website list you describe is how things used to work with places like Jeeves.com before google took off. I work in the industry long enough to have worked with that.

I don't think we'll return to curated lists on search engines. Instead I think the Search Engine itself will be disrupted and slowly go away. Most junior software engineers working under me seem to be using ChatGPT as a google. Both asking for information, solutions and explanations to bugs in their code, highly preferring it over something like google+stackoverflow.

I think this is a sign towards where things are headed. Search Engines are probably going to get replaced with "AI-search" that probably will get a better name. Essentially like how elderly people already use google right now. Just ask the AI something in human language and the AI will give all relevant information. It's likely that visiting websites directly won't be done by humans at all and instead the AI is going to go and extract all relevant information, make screenshots and videos of whatever you want to find/read/consume.

This is probably going to be web 3.0. A human interfacing with the AI and themselves never actually using the internet and instead all internet traffic goes through this AI middleman. I could see this happening over the next 5-10 years time.

noellarkin t1_j18cib0 wrote on December 22, 2022 at 12:26 PM

It's interesting you say that devs have switched over to using ChatGPT instead of Google + StackOverflow - - one of the things I like about StackOverflow is it gives me multiple answers, as well as a conversation between users debating the merits/demerits of an approach. I tried implementing ChatGPT in my own coding workflow, but my own processes and libraries are already in place, so ChatGPT didn't have the necessary 'context' available to give me code that worked for me.

I'm also wondering about niche specific disruptions. For example, as ChatGPT improves, keywords and search phrases related to coding for beginners may shift over from Google Search to ChatGPT, since the output required for many of these queries is a code snippet with minimal context. That definitely eats into Google's ad revenue for ads related to "Learn Python" etc courses that may have been in the search results for those keywords and phrases.

Many searches related to academia/liberal arts may also shift from Google to ChatGPT, for example, any "wiki"esque informational search terms.

I don't see many transactional searches being done with ChatGPT, because searching for something to buy usually includes a step where alternatives are vetted and compared, reviews are consulted, their legitimacy assessed etc - - if I need a new coffee machine, I don't see myself asking ChatGPT for it, although I may ask ChatGPT for "what are some essential features in a good coffee maker" - - this means that the abundance of affiliate sites that used to mass-generate informational articles as a prelude to an affiliate CTA may have something to worry about.

You're right in that search engines may incorporate elements of the ChatGPT UI, and IMO they've already started doing this, with things like knowledge panels and Q&A snippets - - they may decide to refine things further and make the search results more 'conversational', different UI, same backend.

Of course, just like social media and search engines became intermediates over the past decade, becoming middlemen instead of people visiting websites directly, AI interfaces can add a second layer of intermediation of online information, that would be the worst possible outcome.

FilthyCommieAccount t1_j1atz8s wrote on December 22, 2022 at 10:56 PM

Imagine multiple versions of chatgpt finetuned for different things. You ask the bot for a product recommendation and invisibly behind the scenes your prompt is switched over from the general question answering bot to one specifically trained on product recommendation. It scours through mountains of product reviews and spits out a top 5 for you. Then you tell it those products don't have x feature that you are looking for and it uses that info to update your results.