Bloggers are Bleeding To Death; AI and Search Engines are Chopping the Branches They are Sitting On!
Bloggers put in painstaking efforts to create content. Hobby bloggers, news bloggers and niche bloggers, all are facing the onslaught that is giving them fatal blows they cannot survive for long.
Till now, content was king and those who created content that added value were rewarded by way of traffic, monetization and recognition.
All this has now changed.
Most search engines have access to the latest content created by writers, bloggers and authors. Their crawlers read the content and then represent the information in the form of AI overviews when searched. All this is happening without the consent of the content creators, whose content is being scraped to train and enrich AI models. These AI models then reword and rephrase the same content in a more user-friendly tone and present to readers, thus pushing the original content creators into oblivion.
This deprives content creators the genuine human traffic on their platforms, bringing revenue along with it. AI traffic, though reads the content, but does not provide any revenue. Content creators face competition from their own content being rerouted to the readers through LLMs and search engines.
This unethical practice is a death knell for content creators.
What search engines and AI models are not realizing is that by preying on content creators, they may be staying ahead of them but once all the content creators have hung their boots, defeated, what will happen to search engines and AI models. They cannot create content themselves, just repurpose it!
They are preying on content creators while starving them and stripping them bare of their livelihood. How long can you survive if you try to chop the branch you are sitting on!
Looks like the whole predatory chain is going to collapse. When content creators at the base of the pyramid collapse, the AI models will starved on fresh content and when AI models cannot find fresh content, the search engines, that depend on LLMs for AI overviews, will collapse too!
The entire content creation-absorption ecosystem will go down, thanks to the myopic approach of LLMs and search engines that are feasting on the prey without letting them flourish. Just like overfishing can deprive an entire ocean of fish!
Vineet Gupta is the Founder and Managing Editor of PuneNow, where he oversees local news delivery and explores mindful living, parenting, and personal growth. An alumnus of the University of Wales, Vineet has travelled extensively and worked across hospitality, finance, and academia. Now based in Pune, his diverse global background informs his hyper-local perspective, helping the community find meaning, balance, and connection in everyday life.
