How generative AI could change internet search as we know it

Searching the internet could look much different for Gen X and Gen Alpha than it did for millennials in their awkward teenage years.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Reddit is in discussions with top generative AI companies like OpenAI about being paid for its data. If a deal can’t be reached, the site is considering blocking search crawlers from Google and Bing. This would prevent Reddit from being discovered in searches and reduce the number of visitors to the site, effectively ending the days of people adding “site:reddit.com” to every search query.

• Reddit isn’t alone in this strategy. More than 535 news organizations have already opted to block their content from being scraped by products like ChatGPT without payment.

🤖🔍 Zoom out: An SEO reckoning?... Ravi Sen, an associate professor at Texas A&M who studies the economics of e-commerce, believes that adding generative AI to search engines may destroy the $68 billion SEO industry that companies like Google helped create (b/c many users would rely on the AI’s summaries instead of visiting the sites themselves).

And this concern appears to have some merit. One month after OpenAI launched GPT-4 in March, traffic to the coding community Stack Overflow declined by 15% as programmers turned to AI for answers to their coding questions, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar told WaPo.