Here’s a pretty damning read about LLMs’ impact on the web. Just how SEO produced an extremely lucrative-yet-icky industry, optimizing web content for AI models seems inevitable.
SEO will morph into LLMO: large-language-model optimization, the incipient industry of manipulating AI-generated material to serve clients’ interests. Companies will want generative-AI tools such as chatbots to prominently feature their brands (but only in favorable contexts); politicians will want the presentation of their agendas to be tailor-made for different audiences’ concerns and biases. Just as companies hire SEO consultants today, they will hire large-language-model optimizers to ensure that LLMs incorporate these preferences in their answers.
For a number of reasons, it’s not hard to imagine AI leading to a downward spiral of quality content on the web. Freaking bummer.