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Friday, March 06, 2026
Winner takes it all advertising
If you were to enter the search term "MMORPG blog" into Google or another search engine, there is at least a chance for you to see a link to my blog on the first few pages. That is of course completely irrelevant, nobody searches for MMORPGs or blogs anymore, my blog isn't a MMORPG anymore, and I don't get any income from people seeing my content. But I still get spam comments hoping to profit from my Google page rank, and I still get mails offering me SEO (search engine optimization) services to improve that page rank.
This is all based on the fact that most search engines for most of the time of the existence of search engines gave out results in the form of long lists of possible results. Of course the top results got the most clicks, but being on the bottom of the first page or somewhere on page two was still a lot better than not being listed at all. For people who derived income from people visiting their website, paying for search engine optimization or paying Google directly to be high on a search result page made sense.
Today was the first time I saw the term AEO (answer engine optimization). Because search on the internet is changing. Even on Google, the list of links is now pushed further below, with the top of the page being more and more often totally dominated by an answer given by artificial intelligence. If you "search" by directly putting a prompt into a chatbot like ChatGPT, you don't get a list of links at all, only the AI answer. If I ask Google AI what the best smartphone is, it answers "In 2026, the Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max and Google Pixel 10 Pro XL are widely considered the best smartphones overall for their top-tier performance, cameras, and software experiences.". This answer is obviously rather valuable for both Apple and Google, as many people with this question won't search much further than this. Being given a definitive sounding answer suits most people. But if you think about it, we don't know whether that definitive answer is true, how it was produced, and how it was possibly manipulated. Maybe another AI, not made by Google, would recommend a Samsung phone over a Google phone.
This is not just bad news for people offering SEO services, which are becoming increasingly irrelevant. It also changes the interest of being on page two of the search results. If the AI answer pushes the other links further down, or only the AI answer is displayed at all with no link list at all, then you need to be either in that AI answer, or you don't get any clicks at all. There is no such thing anymore as a good but not top Google page rank, you are either at the top or not there at all. Winner takes it all. Like for Super Bowl ads, the advertising cost for being displayed at the top rises astronomically, while the second tier advertising business loses customers.
Funnily enough, if I ask Google AI "What is the best MMORPG blog?" the answer is "The top-rated MMORPG blogs and news sites are MMORPG.com, Massively Overpowered, and MMOBomb.com, offering consistent news, reviews, and community discussions. Other highly regarded, specialized, or opinion-driven sites include MMOs.com, Tobold's Blog, and MMO Culture.". That result is probably a combination of the AI operating on outdated information, there not being much new information on the outdated topic, and nobody paying to push his MMORPG blog to the top of the queue. It is also very possible that different people asking the same question to different AIs will get different answers. For me that doesn't really make a difference. But not being in the first answer to a question to an AI chatbot could potentially make a huge difference to anybody trying to make a living with internet content.
The internet is currently full of content that isn't the best or top in its category, but still gets clicked on enough to create a revenue stream that allows the content creator to continue. The more people will rely on AI answers instead of scrolling through lists of search results, the less viable that second tier becomes. You will either be a rockstar among content creators, or not be visible at all. And unless, like me, somebody is creating content without a monetary incentive, those content creators will disappear.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:38 AM Permanent Link
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As I'm sure everyone else reading your post has just done, I immediately entered "MMORPG Blog" into Google to see what would happen. I went through the first ten pages of results and most of the results are professional websites not personal blogs. Of the handful of hobby bloggers, almost all are represented by posts with the word "MMO" or "MMORPG" in the title, suggesting that's what being picked up rather than any more general impression of the content. Your blog is one of the very few that seems to be listed as a blog about MMORPGs but you also get a second entry for a post you did that had the words "MMO" and "blog" in the title.
As for the AI summary at the top of the results - there isn't one. At least, there isn't when I run the search on Firefox. If I run it on Chrome there is an AI summary but it's not at the top of the page. Links to MassivelyOP and MMORPG.com appear above the AI panel.
Also, in my experience, if you go through the AI results for a search, they tend to include links to the same sites that are included in the results, so there may not be as much difference between listed in the bulk of the answer and the summary as you might imagine.
As for the AI summary at the top of the results - there isn't one. At least, there isn't when I run the search on Firefox. If I run it on Chrome there is an AI summary but it's not at the top of the page. Links to MassivelyOP and MMORPG.com appear above the AI panel.
Also, in my experience, if you go through the AI results for a search, they tend to include links to the same sites that are included in the results, so there may not be as much difference between listed in the bulk of the answer and the summary as you might imagine.
In my experience, asking a question in a full phrase with a question mark at the end massively increases the chance that Google responds with an AI summary.
Bing has been doing that for a good while too, though lately it doesn't really tell you (it says 'Copilot Search' above what looks like what one might have called default search.) Could be they have some sort of caching, or the AI has some control over whether it searches itself or just devolves to standard.
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