Written by Brook Schaaf

It was 20 years ago that Industry Standard founder (if your memory goes back that far) John Battelle wrote The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. (Well, Google, anyway.) Alexa for shopping wouldn’t give me any quotes, but Amazon-owned Goodreads pulled up the one I was looking for right away: “Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous, and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the Database of Intentions.”

Well, he was certainly directionally correct on its significance, though “ponderous” was overwrought, and, I suppose, nothing lasts forever. As TechCrunch declared after Google’s annual developer conference last week, “The era of the ‘ten blue links’ is officially over.”

Forbes’ headline read, “Google Search AI Overhaul Leaves Publishers Bracing For ‘Google Zero’.” Quoted therein, a Washington Post editor dramatically stated: “Google is about to kill everyone’s website, basically.” Less dramatically, the owner of the information site All About Berlin wrote: “In the end, I think Google broke the economics of putting out free information.” As you already know, most search queries don’t result in clicks outside of Google. 

These data points and sentiments aren’t new, but the impact continues to worsen. Of course, the key battle here actually isn’t traffic so much as monetization. No eyeballs means no dollars. Heretofore, tens and hundreds of thousands and millions of publisher sites got by for decades, harvesting a fraction of the value that Google hauled in by linking out to them. That implicit and sometimes explicit bargain has been smashed and smashed and smashed again, so much that, per the representative quotes above, many now fear for the future of the open web itself. Affiliate marketing sits awkwardly in the middle of this transition: dependent on the open web economically, yet increasingly tied to the walled gardens where creator content now lives and scales. 

The content outside walled gardens, especially shopping content and flows (e.g., coupons, reviews, cashback), has been, is now, and shall remain valuable, but we need to make sure attribution is fair. This is a much longer topic, but the important points to take home today are that, while the value is still there, it is being starved of attribution because of the recognized pathways. Correcting this will take time, money, and effort from all of us.

It’s not going to be a fight. It already is a fight. Though it received much less press coverage, Google also just filed an appeal in an antitrust case it lost last year, even though most observers felt the verdict and remedy were about as mild as could be. While it’s making these changes for its own business reasons, it’s not fair to extract the value of everyone else’s business in the process. 

In this new paradigm, we can paraphrase Battelle’s quote two decades on: “Link by link, click by click, AI search is destroying possibly the most impermanent, elegant, and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the open web.”

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