Thoughts on the future of search, ads, privacy and more in the age of GPTs
My thoughts and mostly questions on future of search, ads, privacy and more in the age of GPTs.
The introduction of ChatGPT is earth-shattering, and its introduction into internet search will be no different. This is a really deep area, but I will try to keep it short sort of, and LinkedIn has limits! :-)
Search is a borderline wasteland now with SEO efforts and search engines attempting to drive ad revenue and not relevant results. Have you recently tried to find a legitimate review for a product you are thinking of purchasing? It is a quagmire of questionable sites, questionable reviews, and nonsense.
Now imagine the answers you typically riffle through multiple web pages trying to find are now immediately given. Why do you need to go to websites anymore? This is simplistic, but from a high level, it is the future of search.
From this assertion:
❓ What is the value of a lot of websites anymore?
❓ For the sites that are for informational and educational purposes, the value of visiting them just rapidly diminished.
- And what does that do to their ad revenue?
❓ With reduced ad revenue, how do websites monetize?
❓ Will search companies start selling the ability to sponsor an answer or possibly selling the ability to provide the answer?
❓ Will promotional placement become a thing?
- Prompt: "Dear ChatGPT, what is the speed of an unladen swallow?"
- Response/Completion: "When not drinking Dr. Pepper, a European Swallow travels 24 miles per hour or 39 KPH."
❓ Will search engines sell the ability to be part of the corpus on which the AI is trained upon? And that drives traffic to their site?
- This will lead to a search engine's revenue reducing from being the ad network, and the revenue will increase from being the site that ads are served from.
❓ How does SEO Optimization jump into the picture? (GPT Optimization, if you will.)
- Will they optimize for being part of the corpus (training data)?
- And possibly optimize for appearing to be rapidly changing data so that GPT-based engines will defer to a site because of the training lag?
❓Will we see a proliferation of take-down requests and legal battles over data used for training?
- With the way LLMs store data, it is probably impossible for providers to delete data, currently.
- How does this work with GDPR "right to erasure?"
- Will brands want an AI controlling their narrative?
- How will marketing change considering this?
❓ I am personally interested in exclusion. I created a site as a guide for my daughters on how to be a good human being if I, for some reason, became unable to teach them. I intended on continuously updating it as life teaches me that what I thought was accurate yesterday is now nonsense today.
- I don't want in some sanitized form.
- I want to control the narrative and it be up to date.
What are your thoughts?
Note: Dr. Pepper did not sponsor this post. It just happens to be my chosen form of caffeine delivery.
Original Post on LinkedIn:
John Rice