Have you noticed more and more frequently asked questions on websites? Do you see massive blocks of text about the history, importance and main aspects of something before you get to the who, what and how? This explosion of information in bite-sized chunks could be due to AI being a major way of people finding information. AI summaries are increasingly being used rather than people actually visiting the websites from which the information is generated. These are called zero click searchers. Here is an interesting article with more background to this trend. While it focuses on commercial websites, this is a trend to watch.
For those of you who are teaching, maybe this could sometimes be your students!
What is actually happening?
WordPress adviser, Syed Balkhi, proposes making a site more AI accessible by large language model (LLM) seeding. LLM seeding means publishing content in the formats and places that LLMs are most likely to scrape, summarize, and cite.
How is this happening?
The main suggestion to gain the attention of AI was to “streamline content creation by using AI” to develop short points, and as usual Syed Balkhi recommended some software to do this. This software develops:
FAQ blocks with schema markup
Key points for better readability
Optimized SEO titles and meta descriptions
Tailored social media posts for multiple platforms.
Why does this matter?
Perhaps this is pointing to a new way our thinking is being shaped. If we find more information in everyday life being generated to respond to how AI scrapes the web, this seems that we will increasingly face a normalisation of this style of presentation, where details don’t matter as much as a far reaching scope. What are the implications of this?
During my first university degree, every lecturer and every article contextualised research mentioned with the where, the how and the sampling. By the mid 1990s, the information explosion due to the internet changed this. These details were becoming abandoned in the race for extended scope. The reasoning was that people could find the details more quickly because of the internet. Also, more metastudies were being published as it was becoming easier to do this.
AI can bring tremendous breadth to its research scope, but perhaps not as much depth as we would hope for.