Yeah it’s not just the surveillance marketing. No parent wants their kid addicted to brain rot content YT pushes on children.

100% agree and can confirm (from working in an industry overrun by gen AI) that the vast majority of content is now AI generated with the sole purpose of being cited in AI search, and that quantity and newness are both factors in being cited.

The remediation techniques I’ve found are to refer to “trusted” sources of information like Wikipedia or to ask a question here on Lemmy. Both are unfortunately still prone to AI generated content, but better than what typically comes up in a Google or DDG search.

I (unfortunately) work in an industry where companies used to live or die by the amount of website traffics they received. 5 years ago the goal was to write the best content for your users, abiding by the EEAT principle - Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Basically good advice given by proven experts. Since the rise of LLMs it’s like we don’t even consider human users anymore. All content is geared towards having your brand show up in AI search. The content itself is all AI generated drivel, but no one cares about that as long as ChatGPT mentions your name when asked about a related topic.

Edit: to answer your question more directly, websites exist for users. Your website only gets users if it appears in search. It used to be that higher quality content was the way to do that, but now that search is largely driven by gen AI, the quality of the content is less important than the specific structure and “freshness” (i.e. how recently it was published) that AI platforms prefer.