Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile:

* Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent

* If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking

* There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. Upon pressing the tiny X in the corner it takes 1-2 seconds to close or multiple presses as I am either missing the x or because there is a network roundtrip

* I scroll down a screen and get a popup overlay asking me to signup for their service or newsleter, again messing with the x to close

* video or other flashy adds in the content keep bugging me

This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often it is not).

If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.

Yes, this is the experience on virtually every content website that used to be tolerable or even good.

But this is because there is no viable monetization model for non-editorial written word content anymore and hasn’t been for a decade. Google killed the ecosystem they helped create.

Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results. Search ads is now the most profitable monopoly business of all time.

YouTube is still young, but give it time. Google will eventually kill the golden goose there as well, by trying to harvest too many eggs for themselves.

The same will happen with AI results as well. Companies will be happy to lose money on it for a decade while they fight for dominance. But eventually the call for profits will come and the AI results will require scrolling through mountains of ads to see an answer.

This is the shape of this market. Search driven content in any form is and will always be a yellow pages business. Doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or some future AGI.

For those who want to experience it: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/

The only inaccurate thing of that meme page is that you only need to uncheck 5 cookie "partners", when in reality there should be at least a few hundred.

You forgot the part about when you actually get to the content, there's usually about 5 paragraphs of SEO filler text before it actually gets onto answering the topic of the post.

AI is following the drug dealer model. “The first dose is free!” Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be coming for sure.

I made this game inspired by all the dark patterns from darkpatterns.org - every pop up is based on a real dark pattern

https://www.termsandconditions.game/

>* If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only".*

I never use those. I suspect that in many cases if there are "legitimate interest" options¹ those will remain opted-in.

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[1] which I read as "we see your preference not to be stalked online, but fuck you and your silly little preferences we want to anyway"

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You forgot the popup requesting access to send you background notifications.

> This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me

And to find that out you have to hit Page Down about twenty times, scanning as you, because the content is padded out to increase ad coverage.

That's because AI is still in the honeymoon phase, unless it's a paying service, at some point the summary will start to have context relevant ads.

Also, I felt like in long term that's going to kill off the good faith of all those smaller sites that are actually good, while the bigger ones still produce subpar contents.

> "This is btw. usually all before I even established if the content is what I was looking for, or is at any way useful to me (often it is not)."

This is the huge one for me. If you search for something in natural language, the results you get on any search engine completely suck - yet ironically the AI overview is generally spot on. Search engines have been stuck in ~2003 for decades. Now the next 'breakthrough' is to use their LLMs to actually link to relevant content instead of using pagerank+ or whatever dysfunctional SEO'd algorithm they're still using.

> Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent

It was with the best of intentions but cookie banners have done more to hurt web browsing than anything else in the last decade

also gotta have every click on the page to highlight text navigate to a shopping cart subscription page and then break the back button.

Clicking on a video to mute it also needs to navigate to a sponsor’s page and break the back button. And then the page reloads which doubles the page view count. Genius web dev decision. I bet they said “there’s literally no downsides to doing this!”

Also, the ads need to autoplay on full volume, often bypassing my system volume somehow so they can play even though the rest of the audio is on mute and none of the mute functionality works. Surely the user simply forgot they had mute on so we should just go ahead and fix that.

They also need to play on 4K ultra HD to use my entire monthly cell plan if I don’t stop it in the first 3 seconds, which I can’t do because the video has to fully load before I’m able to interact with it to click stop. Or clicking stop pauses it and then automatically restarts playing the video.

These webdev chrome devs need to stop adding new random features and start fixing the basic functionality. I don’t want fading rotating banners that save 3 lines of CSS. I want the “DO NOT AUTOPLAY. EVER.” Button to actually work.

What you describe is subtly different from what is in the article.

The article is about Google (and other traditional search engines) snatching away clicks from web site owners. What you describe is AI tools (for lack of a better word[1]) snatching away traffic from the ruling gatekeepers of the web.

I think the latter is a much bigger shift and might well be the end of Google.

By extension it will be the end of SEO as we know it. A lot of discussion currently (especially on HN) is about how to keep the bad crawlers out and in general hide from the oh so bad AI guys. That is not unlike the early days of search engines.

I predict we will soon see a phase where this switches by 180° and everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world. A new three letter acronym will be coined, like AIO or something and we will see a shift from textual content to assets the AI tools can only link to.

Maybe this has already happened to some degree.

[1] Where would I put the boundary? Is Kagi the former or the latter? I'd say if a tool does a non-predetermined number of independent activities (like searches) on its own and only stops if some criteria are fulfilled it is clearly in the latter category.

I use Firefox with standard security options and the uBlock Origin Add-On on my Android phone and I virtually never see what you describe, bar the tracking consent nag screen ofc. Maybe we visit vastly different web content?

I guess if my experience was as much degraded as yours I wouldn't bother with the web anymore, so yay for AI summarizers, at least for the time being. And don't get me wrong, a summarizer is a workaround, not a solution.

I make the point of leaving right away, I hope some metric somewhere is showing them or that it screws with their SEO...

I might come back later though.

That's why I don't use mobile for browsing. Only Firefox with JS disabled unless it's needed and I need that page.

On desktop I have one of those one-click JS toggle extensions, so the moment I see any attempts to interfere with me reading the goddamn article, that website gets its privilege of client-side interactivity revoked due to abuse.

Some annoyed me so much I even disabled JS for them on my phone. I do that more rarely because of how unnecessarily convoluted that setting is in Chromium browsers on Android. You have to navigate 4 levels deep in the settings and enter the domain you want to block into a text field!

For example, I have JS disabled on everything Substack (and it really annoys me when I end up on Substack hosted on a custom domain).

Ugh this just makes me wonder how long it will be before we start seeing responses to AI chat like "please watch this 30s ad / drink a verification can to get your answer". I have to believe that ads are coming.

Literally this other link from a first page of HN: https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...

I have been leaning more and more on Marginalia Search to avoid the type of webpages you are describing. The filters centered on page technologies seem to weed out much that is wrong with the modern style-over-substance web, IMHO.

I’ve actually been working on a tool that uses jina.ai’s “reader” api to let you see a rendered markdown view of a pages contents. Check it out at https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb or try it out with https://leidnedya.github.io/markweb#example.com

> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.

Now. Nothing stopping them from injecting ads in their summary. And chances are that they will eventually

I know it won't fix the core issue, but you can try (at least on android) Firefox with uBlock Origin (with filter lists for cookies and annoyances enabled). It makes the web usable on mobile for me.

On a smaller phone I often can't even see the button and it won't let me zoom out/scroll to get to it

On iOS Safari, ”Hide distracting items” allows you to bypass the consent dialogs about 95% of the time without consenting to anything.

Pretty accurate, the web is generally unpleasant at the moment especially using a search engine as your entry point. The first page of results are irrelevant paid ads.

My web experience has been reduced to a handful of bookmarks, X, and chatgpt or grok. Occasionally I’ll go looking for government sites to validate something I read on X. Everything else is noise

There were solutions like Google Web Lite, AMP HTML or Facebook Instant Articles, but sadly they are mostly gone. There is still reader mode in some web browsers (e.g. Speedreader in Brave) which helps a lot. And of course uBlock Origin (Lite) is a must.

If nobody writes "content" any more, there will be nothing to summarize. Google is stealing the clicks from real websites that try to make a living.

This is naturally not addressed in the US "AI" Action Plan, same as copyright theft.

My big hope is that somehow magically we avoid bringing this experience back to AI summaries and chats. Realistically, though, I will be on the lookout for the next generation of uBlock, NextDNS and the like.

For now. Some LLM responses will contain advertising eventually too. Google’s search revenue is plummeting. They have to make it up somewhere.

Also people are just lazy and will choose the path of least resistance. I'll bet that Wikipedia and other websites are affected and don't fit in that list of legitimate grievances.

NoScript removes almost all of that, at the insignificant cost of sometimes having to add some (usually temporary) exceptions to run scripts from a few domains.

> you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.

for now! and we should enjoy it while it lasts. Ad-driven AIs are coming, it is inevitable.

> If you use AI or Kagi summarizr, you get ad-free, well-formatted content without any annoyance.

ad-free? For now. That's just a matter of time.

Don't forget the drop in device performance/battery from the ridiculously spammy analytics scripts they force on you.

All because "content" isn't free to produce.

AI stole all the content from those websites, starving them from ad revenue.

The Google overview is made by the same company that puts those ads in those websites in first place.

What is coming next is that there will be ads in the overview and you will have no choice but to read it because all its cited links will be rotten.

Set up your browser to open all websites in reader view and all these problems are solved.

Oh, don't worry, they'll be monetizing this as soon as you're hooked. Google will show you the AI content... after you've seen this ad.

Those data centers don't pay for themselves, you know.

And don’t try to exit or you’ll get another pop up “why are you leaving? Please don’t go”

I mean you're not wrong try searching for any recipe or just a search result where you want a simple answer. This problem you're outlining isn't just the search engines/ai/results fault. Simple questions should have answers in paragraphs of dialogue and anymore than 1 ad.

You forgot that after you've run the gauntlet of popups, you have a 50% chance of getting a hard paywall.

I send the link to another browser, one with JavaScript disabled

My "favorite" Google dark-pattern, for which the dreamy kid in me hopes they get fucking sued to oblivion for how offensive it is[1]:

1. Open safari

2. Type something so that it goes search google

3. A web results page appears

4. Immediately a popup appears with two buttons:

- They have the same size

- One is highlighted in blue and it says CONTINUE

- The other is faint and reads "Stay in browser" (but in my native language the distinction is even less clear)

5. Clicking CONTINUE means "CONTINUE in the app", so it takes me to the Google App (or, actually, to the app store, because I don't have this app), but this does not end there!

6. If I go back to the browser to try to fucking use google on my fucking browser, as I fucking wanted to, I realize that doing "Back" now constantly moves me to the app (or app store). So, in effect, I can never get the search results once I have clicked continue. The back button has been highjacked (long pressing does not help). My only option is to NEVER click continue

7. Bonus: All of this happens regardless of my iPhone having the google app installed or not

So: Big button that says "CONTINUE" does not "CONTINUE" this action (it, of course, "CONTINUES" outside).

I just want to FUCKING BROWSE THE WEB. If I use the google app, then clicking a link presumably either keeps me in its specific view of the web (outside of my browser), or it takes me out of the app. This is not the experience I want. I have a BROWSER for a reason (e.g. shared groups/tabs...)

Oh! And since this happens even if I don't have the app, it takes me to the app store. If I install the app via the app store, it then DOES NOT have any mechanism to actually "Continue". It's a fresh install. And, of course, if I go back to the browser and hit "back", I can't.

So for users who DO NOT HAVE THE APP, this will NEVER LET THEM CONTINUE. It will PREVENT THEM FROM USING GOOGLE. And it will force them to do their query AGAIN.

Did the people who work on this feature simply give up? What. The. Fuck?

This behavior seems to happen on-and-off, as if google is gaslighting me. Sometimes it happens every time I open Safari. Some other times it goes for days without appearing. Sometimes in anonymous tabs, sometimes not. Logged in or not, I've seen both scenarios.

I can't be sure, but I genuinely believe that the order of the buttons has been swapped, messing with my muscle memory.

Basically it's this image: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m76elp/how_do_i_st...

Except a still image cannot describe the excruciating process of dealing with it — especially realizing "oh, wait, I clicked the wrong button, oh wait, no no no, get out of the app store, oh oh oh what did I type again? Damn I lost it all!..."

[1]I would quit before implementing this feature. It disgusts me, and we're talking about google, not some run-of-the-mill company whom you have to work for to barely survive. This is absolutely shameful.