GoKawiilis features writer with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Let’s pretend you work in IT and you’re looking for a new digital service desk platform to help your employees reset passwords or onboard new hires. You use Google’s AI Mode to search for suggestions, which quickly spits out a detailed answer listing companies to explore, their pricing, and what each option is best for. It helpfully cites more than a dozen websites, which AI Mode used to craft a response. The first source link is from Zendesk, a company that offers the exact service you’re looking for — but when you click through, something is entirely off.
A blog post attributed to the director of product marketing says Zendesk put together a “comprehensive breakdown” of the best service desk platforms. The list compares 15 different product offerings from different companies, complete with a list of features of each, and pros and cons. Zendesk’s number one pick? Zendesk.
AI Mode also links back to a “10 best IT help desk software: overview, uses, and comparison” page from another service desk company, Freshworks (Zendesk ranked Freshworks seventh on its list). The Freshworks page similarly lists features available across different options, pricing details, and a rating out of five. Freshworks recommends Freshservice, its own service desk system, as the best option. (Out of the 10 systems evaluated, Freshservice, conveniently, is the only one with just one drawback in the “cons” section, compared to the two or three for everyone else.)
After extensive testing, Eesel’s number one AI customer service platform was Eesel AI, at odds with Hiver’s choice of Hiver. A company called Watermelon preferred Watermelon. Help Scout believes the best option is Help Scout. I’ll let you guess what SuperOps’ recommendation is. These self-dealing “best of” lists are everywhere: They exist for social media management platforms, activewear, dropshipping companies, and more.
Google’s search algorithm seems to value these pages, perhaps because they’re formatted and structured so clearly. In an emailed statement, Google spokesperson Jennifer Kutz said the company applies robust protections against common forms of manipulation in search and Gemini; Kutz noted the company is aware of the low-quality listicle content and that it works to combat that kind of abuse. The company’s guidance to website operators is consistent. Kutz said: Make sure search engines can “understand” your content, which should be made for people.
Marketers have long used what are essentially filler webpages to try to get the attention of search engine algorithms — but as the web has changed, so too have the efforts to try to manipulate it.
AI-powered search has put the search engine optimization (SEO) industry through the wringer. Google has added more and more AI-generated content to search results, effectively summarizing the web instead of its tradition of linking and ranking sites. In the AI era, the content that gets surfaced the most isn’t necessarily from big websites, but rather a grab bag of blogs, news articles, and highly specific Reddit threads. Some users are searching elsewhere, using chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to find things they had used traditional search for. For some publishers and brands, Google traffic has been on such a steady decline that it has become an existential threat. Google constantly tweaks its algorithms and introduces updates to how its systems assess content online, keeping the SEO industry on its toes, but AI represents a new era ripe for disruption — or growth and profit.
SEO firms are entering the space promising clients they’ll get chatbots to mention their brand. New tactics, like the self-serving listicles, are becoming trends (AI SEO firms are, unsurprisingly, also publishing lists ranking themselves as the best option). The SEO industry has always operated amid ambiguity, testing hypotheses, chasing down hints, and arguing over what works and what doesn’t. But AI has created a whole new set of questions, and new openings for spammers, snake oil salesmen, and well-meaning but misinformed practitioners.
... continue reading