Not just corporations, but yeah, the irritating thing for anybody with a website is that people are purely getting their answers from these summary overviews and closing the window, and that doesn’t count as actually visiting the website these “answers” are coming from.

I’ll admit they’ve been somewhat helpful a few times, and I’ve even been impressed when they’ve dug up a particularly deep detail that like one buried site mentioned, but on the flipside is the whole “idiot parrot” problem, where it’ll confidently tell you things that are completely wrong.

Companies are also seeding Reddit with “opinions” about their products so that Google’s LLMs pick up on it and start spitting that bias out to the users… because of course they are.

But yeah, essentially Google is killing traffic to the web, while monetizing everybody else’s hard work. (Without permission, to the surprise of nobody.)

The summary feature can be helpful, but I hate seeing all these tech giants siloing power and attention to their stupid megasites. The web is hardly “browsable” anymore, unless you’re really digging into sub-networks where the humans are hiding…