👩🏽‍💻Content Is Not King

Google has begun testing out AI-organized search results, starting with recipe pages. On the surface, this may seem like just another update.

But in reality, it’s a seismic shift that’s setting off alarm bells across the creator economy.

It has sparked deep concern among content creators, journalists, and independent publishers.

Google has long been the gatekeeper of online information, driving traffic to blogs and websites, allowing creators to monetize their work.

But this latest shift feels different.

It’s making us ask the question: Are traditional search engine result pages (SERPs) on their way out, and with them, the foundation of the creator economy?

💻SERPs: On Their Last Legs?

Google’s search results have come a long way from the days of plain blue links. Now we’re in AI-summary territory, where Google’s AI gives users the answers right there on the search results page.

Sounds great for the user, right?

But if you’re the creator behind that source, it’s a problem

These creators volunteered to participate in the trial.

Three questions popped up immediately in the SEO community:

• Were these creators compensated for the lost traffic?

• Will future ones be?

• Will all future creators have that option, short of no-indexing their content?

To put it bluntly, fewer people are clicking through to creators’ websites.

Fewer clicks mean less traffic, and less traffic means less revenue.

This is a big deal for recipe bloggers who rely on ad revenue, affiliate links, or subscriptions to keep their sites running.

But this issue goes far beyond just recipe bloggers.

When Google starts offering detailed AI summaries for more content types, niche blogs and smaller websites could find themselves struggling to survive.

😳Creators Are Getting Squeezed

The internet used to be a space for exploring deep, varied content.

Now it’s becoming a place where entire websites could be reduced to fragmented pieces inside an AI dataset.

As creators, we’ve poured our time, money, and resources into building quality content. But now, Google’s algorithm no longer rewards genuine, in-depth knowledge. Google is incentivizing SEO strategies that take advantage of their algorithms.

Instead of rewarding genuinely helpful content by genuine hobbyists with real experience. It’s tilting the playing field toward those who can game the system and pump out SEO-driven, AI-optimized content.

The result? A slow, painful erosion of the creator economy.

If a user doesn’t need to visit a website for the full recipe or article because Google’s AI has already summarized it for them, the incentive to visit the original source disappears.

The content resources you might have once turned to, to explore information on a deeper level, will no longer exist, except perhaps as fragmented remnants in the datasets of an unreliable Large Language Model.

🤖AI: A Gatekeeper in Disguise?

Google is positioning itself as the gatekeeper of information, determining not just what information is relevant but also how that information is presented and consumed.

We’ve seen the beginnings of this already.

With the AI-generated result often becoming the end of the search journey.

It’s not just about traffic loss. It’s about how AI is incentivizing a race to the bottom, where only the biggest, most SEO-savvy players can survive.

At first glance, AI-organized search results seem like a convenience win for users. But there’s a darker reality at play.

🧐Think about it. Every time Google’s AI summarizes a search result, it’s pulling from a specific dataset. When AI further expands its reach into answering open-ended questions, we risk the flattening of diverse perspectives. The AI will offer a synthesized answer.

It’s deciding what information is most relevant and worthy of being shared. This means that over time, fewer and fewer voices will be heard, and the diversity of content will shrink.

📰For topics like journalism, subjective content, or in-depth guides, this raises an important question:

Can an algorithm truly capture the richness and complexity of human experience?

Or are we headed for a future where only the most SEO-friendly, AI-optimized content survives?

While the voices of independent creators—those motivated by passion rather than profit—are drowned out.

AI rewards content that’s created to game algorithms, not to enrich readers. It’s not about offering value—it’s about feeding the machine.

💭Data Contamination: A Growing Problem

AI relies on data the way humans rely on blood, and a growing issue is the contamination of that data. As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, it’s beginning to feed back into the models driving search engines. This creates a serious risk: AI is being trained on its own output, which can degrade the quality of search results and amplify biases, inaccuracies, and subpar information. We're already witnessing the early stages of this problem.

Take Wikipedia as an example. It’s often used in training datasets, but its collaborative nature means it’s full of biases, inaccuracies, and disputes. As AI leans more heavily on these kinds of sources, the chances of perpetuating low-quality content skyrocket.

Even with human oversight, ensuring a clean dataset for AI models is almost impossible at the scale needed. It’s not just about accuracy, either. We’re talking about maintaining inclusivity, balance, and context, which are notoriously difficult to standardize across massive datasets.

📚The Books3 Controversy

The Books3 controversy shines a light on the larger issue of consent in data training. Books3 is a collection of pirated ebooks used to train AI without the authors’ consent. This incident highlights the urgent need for rules around intellectual property in the age of AI.

While AI developers seek vast amounts of data to train increasingly sophisticated models. The use of copyrighted works without permission or compensation raises serious ethical and legal concerns.

This raises a critical ethical issue: Who gets to decide what data is fair game for training AI?

Creators whose work was included in this dataset without their knowledge or approval. Face the potential erosion of their intellectual property rights in an age where AI systems can replicate, summarize, or generate content based on their work.

💡What Can Be Done?

So, what’s the way forward?

Is there hope for creators to coexist with AI, or are we witnessing the slow death of independent content?

First, content creators—especially the small, niche ones—need protection. Google’s AI-driven search can’t come at the cost of the creators who built the web. Compensation models need to be in place for those whose work is summarized by AI. If AI is using a creator’s expertise to generate answers, it’s only fair they get paid for that.

Second, users need to be aware of what’s at stake. Just like people have learned to support local businesses over giant corporations, we need that same awareness in digital content. Click through to the original source, support the creators who fuel the internet, and advocate for transparency in how AI results are displayed.

🌎Conclusion: We Need Responsible AI

AI’s influence over search is already reshaping the web—and not necessarily for the better. If we want to keep the internet as a place for depth, diversity, and discovery, we need to act now.

Let’s push for responsible AI development that protects creators, values human expertise, and maintains the richness of content online. If we don’t, we’ll be left with a web where algorithms call the shots and the voices of genuine creators are lost in the noise.

🧠Incorporating AI: It's a Mindset

• By raising your AI awareness, you can demystify the technology and see it for what it is—a powerful tool for innovation.

The real question is, will you keep up, or will you be left behind?

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📚Reference

Google Quick View: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-quick-view-button-on-recipes-38222.html

Google Search Interview://brandonsaltalamacchia.com/a-brief-meeting-with-google-after-the-apocalypse/

Google Search Lens: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-lens-october-2024-updates/

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?: https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-bender-parrots.pdf

The Atlantic://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/books3-ai-meta-llama-pirated-books/675063/