"Imagine you're looking for a chicken soup recipe using Google search: You click on the first result, and instead of a recipe, you get the backstory of a grandmother's secret recipe. You scroll past ad placements, autoplay videos, 2,000 words of meandering narrative, and 62 instances of the word "chicken" before you finally arrive at the recipe. This was the internet of browsing, and things were getting dire."
"For users, that translated into an internet experience that got steadily worse. Pages were stuffed with more ads, keyword-stuffed copy, annoying exit pop-ups, and manipulative design patterns-all in the service of keeping people on-site a little longer or nudging them toward a conversion (not to mention helping Google collect AdSense revenue along the way). It was a race to the bottom where browsing felt increasingly like wading through sludge just to get to the content you wanted."
Search results had become dominated by ad-packed, keyword-stuffed pages that traded free content for user attention and data. Rising advertising costs and privacy-driven attribution challenges eroded the performance of paid acquisition, prompting publishers and brands to maximize value from each visitor through intrusive ads and manipulative design. This degraded browsing experience, forcing users to navigate cluttered pages to reach desired content. The arrival of large language models enabled AI-driven answers and overviews that bypassed traditional click-driven pages. Brands must adapt their acquisition and content strategies to engage audiences as search shifts toward concise, AI-mediated experiences.
Read at Miami Herald
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