{"id":8064,"date":"2023-02-07T21:49:38","date_gmt":"2023-02-07T21:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/07\/missing-links-where-are-sources-in-googles-ai-search-results\/"},"modified":"2023-02-07T21:49:38","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T21:49:38","slug":"missing-links-where-are-sources-in-googles-ai-search-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/07\/missing-links-where-are-sources-in-googles-ai-search-results\/","title":{"rendered":"Missing links: Where are sources in Google\u2019s AI search results?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google\u2019s introduction of Bard<\/a> yesterday was huge news. <\/p>\n

But perhaps the bigger news for SEOs was the preview of Google\u2019s generative AI search results, which featured a grand total of zero<\/strong> links.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right. Google \u2013 a search engine \u2013 no longer links to its sources. <\/p>\n

You know, websites.<\/p>\n

What do you call a search engine that copies mass amounts of content from others to create its own content, without providing any credit (links)?<\/p>\n

I believe we still call that a scraper site. <\/p>\n

A popular 2014 tweet about Google being a scraper site<\/a> remains maybe even more relevant today:<\/p>\n

\n

.@mattcutts<\/a> I think I have spotted one, Matt. Note the similarities in the content text: pic.twitter.com\/uHux3rK57f<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 dan barker (@danbarker) February 27, 2014<\/a>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

As I\u2019ve been digesting all the AI in search results news, the Harvey Dent quote from \u201cThe Dark Knight\u201d popped into my mind: \u201cYou either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, this isn\u2019t going to be another rant about Google being evil.<\/p>\n

However, Google is playing a delicate game here. <\/p>\n

Glenn Gabe<\/a> called this an \u201cact of war against publishers\u201d on Twitter. And he\u2019s not wrong.<\/p>\n

For 24 years, Google has provided answers to queries in the form of a list of websites (or in carousels, or some other SERP format). <\/p>\n

And over that time, user behavior has changed. <\/p>\n

People want instant answers. We don\u2019t always want to wade through 2,500-word articles when a question can be answered in 2-3 sentences or paragraphs. We\u2019ve all complained about having to scroll past the epic backstories that precede nearly all recipe content<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Google has increasingly provided those answers in the form of search features outside of the organic results \u2013 knowledge panels, clocks, calculators, sports scores and many more. <\/p>\n

The Google backlash got louder with the rise of so-called zero-click searches<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But now we may have zero-link search results. Really?<\/p>\n

I remember when Google\u2019s featured snippets made a lot of SEOs mad because they would \u201csteal\u201d traffic from websites. Others were mad before that when Google started showing the current time.<\/p>\n

At the time, none of this concerned me. After all, you can\u2019t copyright the time. <\/p>\n

If your entire business model was to drive organic traffic from Google to your website just to tell people what time it was, you had a pretty flawed business model. <\/p>\n

But here, Google may be entering a dangerous game. <\/p>\n

Again, for two decades, websites have fed their content to Google, with the understanding they would get clicks (or at least visibility) out of the deal.<\/p>\n

If Google just essentially summarizes (or rewrites, or whatever you want to call it) answers, what separates Google from being a scraper site now? <\/p>\n

Or is it just straight up plagiarism? <\/p>\n

Ryan Jones has an interesting Twitter thread<\/a>, which basically says \u201cno\u201d to this idea. Of note: <\/p>\n

\u201cNone of them directly take text from any specific webpage \u2013 and the ideas they present in these examples aren\u2019t things anybody can \u2018own\u2019 or \u2018copyright.’\u201d<\/p>\n

But what happens if publishers and creators stop feeding content to the Google AI machine? What would happen to Google\u2019s multi-billion dollar advertising empire, the majority of which has been built by monetizing search results filled with links to websites?<\/p>\n

Today, Microsoft previewed its ChatGPT version of Bing search<\/a>. It includes plenty of links and citations to the websites where it generated its answers.<\/p>\n

Neeva, which in January incorporated generative AI<\/a> into its search results, has figured out how to link to its sources. So has You.com.<\/p>\n

Google needs to do the same. <\/p>\n

As Lily Ray put it on Twitter<\/a>, \u201cEvery other search engine figured out how to cite its sources except the one with 90% market share, got it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The post Missing links: Where are sources in Google\u2019s AI search results?<\/a> appeared first on Search Engine Land<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google\u2019s introduction of Bard yesterday was huge news. But perhaps the bigger news for SEOs was the preview of Google\u2019s generative AI search results, which featured a grand total of zero links. That\u2019s right. Google \u2013 a search engine \u2013 no longer links to its sources. You know, websites. What do you call a search engine that copies mass amounts of content from others to create its own content, without providing any credit (links)? I believe we still call that a scraper site. A popular 2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"h5ap_radio_sources":[],"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-seo-blogs"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":false,"author_link":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/author\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}