Fundamentally the problem here is that in many (maybe about half of) search cases people are not ultimately interested in visiting a website, they are interested in a piece of information on the website. The website is essentially a paywall for that information. The website is a middleman, and middlemen can be easily disrupted by a better one.
So what we really need here is a new approach to funding the availability of information. Unfortunately, ads are fairly lucrative because advertisers are willing to pay a lot more than users are. You could I guess do something where SearchGPT pays a couple of cents out of a monthly fee to each information source it used. Much harder with LLMs, since the source of information is potentially very diffuse and difficult to track. And even if you tracked it each publisher would get such a tiny fraction of what they are making now.
But the difficult part for web publishers is that AI powered information retrieval is a significantly better user experience, which means it's very likely to win no matter what.
So what we really need here is a new approach to funding the availability of information. Unfortunately, ads are fairly lucrative because advertisers are willing to pay a lot more than users are. You could I guess do something where SearchGPT pays a couple of cents out of a monthly fee to each information source it used. Much harder with LLMs, since the source of information is potentially very diffuse and difficult to track. And even if you tracked it each publisher would get such a tiny fraction of what they are making now.
But the difficult part for web publishers is that AI powered information retrieval is a significantly better user experience, which means it's very likely to win no matter what.