I am concerned about the diminishing chances of success of the smaller websites caused by the latest developments. This article discusses that topic in light of the latest news on AI.
Content websites provide information; right? And the owners of these websites do their upmost to be ranked well by Google to ensure that the information they publish on the internet is read (hopefully by many). Otherwise, what’s the point? But new threats to the survival of the smaller websites are presenting challenges on a weekly basis with the emergence of new ways to use artificial intelligence (AI)
Firstly, the search engines encourage surfers looking for information to use their dedicated AI tool. And if they do use it, they circumvent the websites that they would have visited despite the fact that the AI response to queries is based on the information provided by those very websites. This alone will pull down visits to content websites.
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Google is making successful website ownership increasingly technical. They really are piling it on with the Google Core Vitals. Fair enough in many ways because it helps to create a good website but if you are an excellent writer with great knowledge in your chosen subject but not at all technically minded, you’ll struggle to meet Google’s demands and if you fail to do it, you’ll be ranked lower by Google in search results.
And now Microsoft has announced that they will be incorporating a new key in Windows 11 PCs called ‘Copilot’. They ‘ve also announced that this is the ‘year of the AI PC’.
This scares me as a website owner because by depressing the Copilot key the user will be taken to ‘more effective searches of the internet’ (The Times report) as well as help to improve computer operations such as organise files.
This hints at bypassing the small and medium-sized independent websites in searching for information. If I am right, it means another nail in the coffin of many of these websites.
It seems to me that AI is going to slim down the internet. Perhaps this is the intention of the search engines and big internet corporations. It’s called creating a monopoly! Dominating the marketplace.
There was a time when success for the small sites was an awful lot easier. That was about 15 years ago. Now it is exceedingly difficult to survive never mind succeed.
A competitor of mine, the Catster.com website, has taken desperate steps to survive by buying up a couple of cat websites and merging them with their own. That means two website owners have closed shop and the third, Catster.com, has invested a lot of money in purchasing these two sites to try and keep afloat. They closed their magazine some time ago.
I don’t think it will work for Catster.com. I expect the website to close eventually. It will take an awful lot of advertising revenue to recoup the purchase price of these websites and that’s got to happen before they can turn a profit from the transaction.
Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi said that the company was ‘ushering in a significant shift toward a more personal and intelligent computing future where AI will be seamlessly woven into Windows from the system, to the silicon, to the hardware’.
And I fear that the Copilot key will bypass many struggling smallish websites run by an independent owner (one person).
