I personally found this somewhat exciting. While small publishers getting screwed isn’t great, I think it’s fascinating that these tools are challenging the traditional SEO landscape. There was a lot of hype around this with “Web 3”.
If I ask ChatGPT for a recipe, I’m not going to have to read a story about someone’s grandparent first.
> If I ask ChatGPT for a recipe, I’m not going to have to read a story about someone’s grandparent first.
You are walking into a trap. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Google and the downstream content farm and affiliate industry is mature and near optimally enshittified to extract value out of every interaction.
Chat bots are ad free because they are in the expansion phase. You have no idea what they will pull, and probably they don’t know either. But the value must be extracted. And the more the operational cost, and the more dependent their users are, the worse they will push the experience to make bank.
The fundamental business model hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s become even more cynical in every iteration.
> Chat bots are ad free because they are in the expansion phase.
It is remarkable how many people do not understand this. We just had this conversation re: Netflix. 10 years ago, everyone was happy to spit on the grave of cable TV for daring to bundle channels together without an a la carte option AND throw in ads on top. That's what every streaming service is now doing, because there's not enough money to be made in "giving consumers what they want".
Personally YouTube completely replaced written recipes for me, way easier to understand how a thing should look and the process and they rarely have the "story" thing and the preamble is easily skipped if there is.
The story part is exactly what I appreciate though. The recipe, on most modern sites, is kinda separated, usually at the bottom, and often printable, anyway.
The bullshit recipe stories are actually not due to "SEO" which I consider to be micro-optimization level tweaking as much as Google's outright stupid change years ago that basically mandated more content than "just a recipe".
If I ask ChatGPT for a recipe, I’m not going to have to read a story about someone’s grandparent first.