I’ve found wading through SEO spam is one of the best use cases for AI.

Perplexity, Google, Brave, and DDG have really good AI search results.

Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.

I remember asking, “Can I park overnight on the street in ${county} without getting a ticket?” And instead of having to fish through government websites, AI just spit out the right answer and the links it used. Similar for “what temp should I cook chicken to?”

It’s only a matter of time until everyone figures out how to SEO spam AI, but until then, I’m a big fan.

You're not wrong, but sometimes a local <seller of thing> will do SEO by actually putting up valuable articles. (e.g. the Yale Appliance blog)

And for a kinda counter-example for the car dealership one, Ford dealerships sell extended warranties that are backed by Ford and usable at any Ford dealership. If you're in the market for one of those, you absolutely want to go with whichever dealership offers you the lowest price in North America, and not whatever your local dealership is charging.

I had this experience when I searched for Jerusalem bugs. The page mentioned flu-like symptoms when bitten.

Then I realized it was a pest-control website. If you now Google "jerusalem bug fever" the AI talks about flu-like symptoms. Its source? That pest control website...

In the case of 1, the usual mantra "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer" surely applies?

There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.

While I don't know much about cleaning windows, providing more specific context for example 2 will likely do wonders to the quality of result returned too.

  > I stopped using Google search years ago as it became nothing but useless results that led to garbage I wasn't looking for.

Always remember that if you're looking for a deal, the people who pay for expensive advertising probably can't provide it. Those ad campaigns have to get paid for somehow.

I wonder if that's just a quirk of Las Vegas lawyers, because they're super competitive and advertise aggressively here. Personal injury lawyers in particular. If you drive on the 15 or 215, you'll see dozens of billboards, often for the same few guys/firms... plus the ones who put their face on buses... and the ads that run on TV... and the geo-targeted ads on streaming services...

Probably because the bidder is an aggregator sending the referral to many law firms, not just one. Individual law firms thus get outbid for an exclusive referral click, but can still pay the aggregator for a non-exclusive referral.

Depends entirely on what you're selling, the margins, the conversion rate of their landing page, and conversion rate of their sales funnel. Some companies are on auto pilot and are over paying, but the math and techniques are simple for SEM ROI when done with a little attention.

If what you're selling is mortgages or franchise businesses the cost you are willing to pay for a click just to get a chance to convert to a lead, just to get a chance to convert to revenue, is surprisingly high.

Does this not make you want to search those keywords and click the link?

I guess the average person doesn’t really have much of a reference to comparison shop lawyers so if they’re googling a lawyer, don’t really check out alternatives?

Or in person ads that are so ridiculous you can't _not_ remember them.

I'm talking to _you_, "Yo, Pain Law, Yo" subway guy.

haha, fwiw this is (surprisingly) still very effective. I imagine we will also start seeing ads on robotaxis soon once they figure out they have "unexplolited" eyeballs

Or google maps search or back to YP or Yelp.

And also they seem to continue using FM broadcast stations to carry their messages.

The idea for all this content marketing spam is that writing those articles (eg. "how can I dispute a speeding ticket?") is cheaper than buying ads for "speeding ticket lawyers" or whatever. If people don't click on those articles, the whole strategy falls apart.

It might work out for some of them, but they lost the chance to make any sort of pitch to those people.

I think that's a safe assumption. Even if I google instead of use ChatGPT, I'm often still taking the info AI surfaces above page links and running with that (assuming it's a low-risk thing the AI is likely to get right).

AdNauseam's fake clicks are so detectable that it's hard to imagine any ad networks are fooled by it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46188039

The monetisation in AI summaries is probably on its way. Like an auction to be mentioned depending on the type of question eg “would you like me to put you in touch with a firm that can do this for you?”

While I think this is true now, SEO will adapt. I hope AI companies are keeping their scraped pre AI data sources in their databases as a sort of low-background steel source to use when this happens, although I suppose they are the ones selling shovels.