Nahh, even before LLMs became big, search results were becoming worse and worse because of all the SEO-spam.

Now you can generate coherent-sounding articles using LLMs, making the amount of trash even bigger.

Google making their search worse would be dumb, since all these LLMs also rely on it to some degree.

I don't think so man. They were just started to mass train on SEO in the ad industry 15 years ago. Now it's practically a household term.

Google had very different goals and ambitions early on. Things changed. Now they're like any other giant soulless corpo. Their goal is revenue, which as their platform has grown we've seen a metamorphosis from a focus on interesting things to a never ending professional jester troupe on every endpoint still making pennies on the dollar compared to what google earns from advertisers. They're the middle men and should be making next to nothing since they produce next to nothing of value, but advertising sells.

Google Search revenue was something like 175bn in 2024. A tiny fraction of that is paid out to websites from clicks. Someone with a proper LLM tuned for SEO can churn out hot garbage nonstop and fill up results in perpetuity with a guaranteed revenue stream far in excess of what is possible as a worker in something in the overwhelming majority of the world. There's just more garbage than everywhere... and people have found exactly the right formula to rise to the top despite human-useless content. Google doesn't think of it as a bad thing, 175bn in revenue from search! lol