Mastodawn

I do zero analytics on any of my web traffic, so this is just a guess, but I should be surprised if many people come to my sites via Google.

I am just a bloke with a Raspberry Pi running a website and two blogs.

I suspect that, of whatever traffic I get, most comes from links I (and others) post here, and from RSS subscribers.

Similarly, I don't think that I found any of the blogs or sites that I read regularly via a search engine.

Word of mouth (webrings, people posting about stuff they've enjoyed / their own work etc.) ftw.

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Drew Mochak 5d ago

@neil If google is no longer a search engine people will use another search engine. Every wrong answer drives traffic away. I can't imagine anyone will want to use this.

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Neil Brown 5d ago

@prism

> If google is no longer a search engine people will use another search engine.

I suspect that this could be true for people who actively want a search engine.

I don't know how many people just want an answer.

I agree though that, if the proffered answer is wrong too often, that it will drive (some) people away.

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Drew Mochak

@neil If they just wanted "the answer" they would get it from the summary of the site without clicking onto the article anyway. Not great for you but I don't see how it makes the situation worse. The AI is just removing the pesky source of knowledge outside of the googlesphere. Since google does not own all knowledge, there's no way that the result they'll get will be more reliable than searching the web. Even the AI bros will use perplexity.