Can we admit that AI search engines are just a bad idea?

If you want to live in today’s AI age, you’ll have to accept certain realities. One reality is that several industries will never be the same. We’re forced to accept that countless companies and entire industries will go the way of the dinosaur. One AI innovation leading to this mass extinction is the AI search engine. While helpful, AI search engines can cause more harm than good.

As a quick refresher, AI search engines are more like chatbots with a search engine attached rather than a search engine powered by AI. First and foremost, when you type in a search query, you’ll see an AI-generated rundown of what you searched. If you type “Why is the sky blue?”, you’ll see the chatbot answer the question for you in a paragraph. Along with that, it will show you the sources it got this information from.

Surfacing the results is what makes these actual search engines and not just bloated chatbots. At the time of writing this, we have three main AI-powered search engines on the market. Perplexity built its business around its AI search engine. Next, OpenAI has ChatGPT Search, which still remains a ChatGPT Plus perk for the time being. Lastly, while Google itself isn’t and AI search engine, the company has its AI Overviews. These perform the same thing as the examples listed above, so it also makes the list. We expect more companies to follow suit and craft their own engines as time goes on.

So, these tools give you answers to your questions quickly and easily and they surface sources. What could make AI search engines a bad thing? There are a couple of reasons, and they have to do with the companies that have relied on the Internet for years.

The companies

Over the years, search engines have been the driving force behind thousands, if not millions, of companies. They supply much-needed ad revenue to businesses, large and small. While companies that sell physical products and services don’t rely as much on ad revenue, there are those that live or die by ads. These include news sites and blogs.

Ad revenue fuels these businesses, and shifts in the ad landscape can have a major effect on their futures. News sites depend on getting proper exposure, and this also goes for non-news sites that provide other types of information. The beauty of search engines is that they give them that exposure. They show a list of hundreds of sites providing relevant information, and they give all of those sites a chance to gain traffic. It’s been that way for years, and Google has held the title as the biggest search engine.

AI search engines put a massive wrench in the gears, however. Before, if you’d searched “why is the sky blue?”, you’d see a list of sites that explain it. You’d go to that website to read the answer, contribute to that site’s ad revenue, and help support it in a small way. Nowadays, however, you’re given the answer on the front page.

We can all see why this could devastate thousands of sites that have built their businesses on ad revenue. When people do searches for common questions, rather than sites having a chance to gain ad revenue, they’re overshadowed by tools that just give people the information. Why walk into a supermarket if someone’s just handing you bags of groceries outside?

Laziness for the win

Companies developing AI search engines have a “solution” to this problem. They show source links on their search results, but they can’t be serious. If Google had to go to dictionary.com to get its answer, it’ll post a link to that website so that the user can click on it and visit the site.

When AI companies talk about this, they typically talk as though it’s a big help to the websites that they’re sourcing. However, the CEOs of these AI companies and developers are smart enough to know about basic laziness.

Sure, a small section of users will prefer to go to the websites, and they’ll take the extra time to scroll past the AI-generated answer. However, we all know that the mass majority of the community won’t do that. Firstly, not everyone knows what these AI search engines do to the countless websites on the internet. To them, these AI search engines are just another cool and exciting tool to make their lives easier. Also, we have to account for the people who just don’t care. These are people who are just concerned with saving time and nothing else.

The majority of the population won’t click on the surface links for the sake of saving time. To be fair, there are times when it’s better to just get a quick rundown of an answer. AI search engines can help during those times, but are they really worth destroying websites over?

One of the things that AI does is shine a harsh light on people’s tendency to be lazy. Companies are coming out with models that can order people’s coffee for them, for goodness sake! It doesn’t matter if AI search engines surface links, the majority of people will always take the easy way out and blaze past them.

Perplexity tries to counter this by putting the links before the AI-generated rundown, which is more than we can say for Google. However, we need to face the fact that the rundown will always trump the sources.

Let’s talk about the number of sources

Again, the companies behind these AI search engines talk about how they surface links, but they fail to talk about the pitiful number of links they actually show. A classic Google search would put thousands of websites at your fingertips. This would give you the opportunity to discover different websites if the top results aren’t doing it for you.

Since AI search engines surface links, it should be no different, right? Not even close! When asking Perplexity why the sky is blue, you get eight sources. That’s it. Google’s AI Overviews are a bit of a weird story because you still have access to the traditional search results under the overviews. The overviews themselves also surface links, however. When asking Google why the sky is blue, it gave five results. Obviously, you can expect the number of sources to vary depending on the search. Be that as it may, surfacing less than 10 links is still not even close to what you would get with a traditional search engine.

These search engines not only allow users to skip visiting websites altogether, but they do a lousy job of surfacing these websites. Again, Google does still show traditional search results, but it shows the AI Overviews first and foremost, so we can’t ignore that.

What about the little guy?

One of the best things about traditional search engines is that they give most sites a chance to be noticed. Obviously, larger companies have a better chance of popping up in search results, but smaller brands also have a shot of being featured. Users can always discover new websites because so many of them appear.

Well, with AI search engines only surfacing a handful of the most popular pages, there’s not much room for other sites to be discovered. This is assuming that people actually take the time to look at the sources.

In all fairness, there was always the risk of finding malicious websites, and we can’t overlook that. However, there are security protocols and tools to help mitigate that risk. Chances are that the next new website you find is perfectly fine.

Perplexity’s plan

Perplexity is probably the most problematic when it comes to screwing over the little guy. It has a revenue-sharing program. When you do a search, you see a list of follow-up questions. These follow-up questions will generate more answers to help give you additional context on what you’re researching. So, if you ask why the sky is blue, you could see a suggested question like “How does pollution affect the color of the sky?”

Well, as per the program, companies will pay to have their own follow-up questions. For example, an educational website could pay Perplexity to surface a follow-up question relevant to why the sky is blue. When you click on the follow-up question, you’ll see search results with a focus on that company’s content. This brings more eyes on that company and makes it more likely that people will go to the company’s site.

This seems like a good idea, but there’s a pretty big issue. In order to make this work, Perplexity needed to partner with the companies involved. It’s already made partnerships with a shortlist of larger businesses. The list will grow in the future, but we can’t expect Perplexity to partner with EVERY company out there.

This method, while it shows good intentions, leaves smaller companies in the dust. It favors a handful of big brands and that’s a big issue with AI search engines. Rather than letting the user discover new sources, the AI searches through the websites it deems worthy and surfaces information from them.

New and smaller websites don’t have a chance if the world is moving towards AI search engines. Traditional search engines aren’t exactly an even playing field, but smaller websites still have a chance with them, as they have a chance of being discovered. Now, AI search engines extract information from a handful of sites, give you your information, and only promote those sites.

This might be the future

The future of AI is still pretty uncertain. The technology has taken the tech industry, and others, by storm. We’re seeing companies adopt AI by the boatload, and it doesn’t look like this trend will end soon. In all honesty, we can’t say for certain that AI will stick around in the long run. What we can say is that, if the AI-powered search engine does hit the mainstream, then it’ll cause a massive ripple effect.

Companies that rely on ad revenue will disappear because users will have all the information they need handed to them. Only a select collection of large companies will have a chance of being noticed at all. So, what’s the point of even starting a website?

At this point, no one can tell how this whole situation will end. All we know is that it’s only going to get worse.