People are not interested in visiting websites about a topic; they, by and large, just want answers to their questions. Google has been strip-mining the web for years, leveraging its unique position as the world’s most popular website and its de facto directory to replace what made it great with what allows it to retain its dominance.

Artificial intelligence — or some simulation of it — really does make things better for searchers, and I bet it could reduce some tired search optimization tactics. But it comes at the cost of making us all into uncompensated producers for the benefit of trillion-dollar companies like Google and Microsoft.

Search optimization experts have spent years in an adversarial relationship with Google in an attempt to get their clients’ pages to the coveted first page of results, often through means which make results worse for searchers. Artificial intelligence is, it seems, a way out of this mess — but the compromise is that search engines get to take from everyone while giving nothing back. Google has been taking steps in this direction for years: its results page has been increasingly filled with ways of discouraging people from leaving its confines.