[mvip]

> But what really disappoints me and leaves me feeling hopeless for the future is how people like the author are either completely oblivious (or worse, don’t care) about the possibility and probability of such blatant manipulation.

That's a rather naive narrative. ChatGPT (in particular o3/o3-pro) is great at product research. I've found great deals on products that beats what I would find using a regular search engine.

Google research are largely SEO bloat these days. LLMs are pretty good at looking past that. Yes, sometimes it get it wrong, but more often than not it gets it right. In my research I did manually spot check things and found it to be on track.

Could I have found a better camera (and possibly a better price) if I poured hours of my time into research? Possibly. Is it worth my time? No. Just the same reason as I go to Amazon for my purchases rather than spending hours navigating shitty e-commerce sites (which btw ChatGPT will do for me).

All things considered, the agentic web will indeed change the landscape, but I for the better.

[latexr]

You completely missed the point. There is a reason I said “possibility and probability”. I don’t think the scenario I described is widespread or effective yet, but it is incredibly naive to believe it won’t happen and that “the agentic web” will be an unambiguous change for the better. You are in the honeymoon period, where bad actors already have bad intentions but aren’t making them blatantly obvious so they can attract more people and make them dependent. If you think they’ll continue the same route without at one point stopping to suck you dry, you haven’t been paying attention to, well, every major tech company ever.

[mvip]

Sure, it's possible. But how is this different than the SEO landscape of the last 15 years? If anything, the bar is higher to succeed here as you need to trick multiple LLM/algos rather than just gamify your Google SEO game.