When you dominate your field, growing your business becomes more difficult. This is the problem that currently faces Google, according to a fascinating article by Justin Pot in the Atlantic.

For years the demands of Google and other search engines have shaped the way people have written blogs, articles and product pages. Each algorithm change has subtly shaped the Internet as publishers try to keep in the search results.

With AI generative search, Google, Bing and Duck Duck Go seem to be trying to bypass sending users to any actual web pages at all. As Pots points out, eventually this model will ‘eat itself’: the AI needs web pages to trawl for content, but if the search engines stop sending the traffic to them then people will move to other platforms and stop publishing the content. The first to move on will be the hobbyists – but businesses will be affected too. Not only will their websites be more difficult to find, the returns on thier online advertising spend will plummet.

As Cory Doctorow says:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Pluralistic.net

This is what he terms ‘enshittification’.

In a previous post, I also half-jokingly, suggested that the Internet will soon become filled with AI-generated content, which is mostly trawled by bots. (I wrote it shortly before Chat GPT was released.)

The Internet changed the way businesses could reach customers and promote products. In the 90’s magazines and ‘bingo cards’ in trade publications were standard. This was mostly replaced by PPC and directory listings from the mid-noughties on, and the magazines had to adapt or die.

It looks like we could be looking at the start of a new paradigm: it will be interesting to see where it takes us. There is certainly a backlash against the intrusiveness of advertising online.

In magazines, ads are static and many will show real creativity as they vie for readers’ attention. Online ads don’t need to be creative to be noticed: they can literally jump up and demand attention. If you accept tracking cookies, ads can also follow you around the web and even into apps.

Whereas in the 20th century people lauded the creativity of the advertising ‘greats’ such as David Oglivy and William Bernbach, the heros of online advertising aren’t the creatives, they are the programmers and developers working behind the scenes on the platforms to optimise the delivery of the ads.

All this leads to a ‘poor user experience’, as the SEO guys would say, and, eventually, people will start to find ad-free alternatives. What these platforms will be, and how they will shape marketing, remains to be seen.