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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

As a Startup I absolutely want to get crawled. If people ask ChatGPT "Who is $CompanyName" I want it to give a good answer that reflects our main USPs and talking points.

A lot of classic SEO content also makes great AI fodder. When I ask AI tools to search the web to give me a pro/con list of tools for a specific task the sources often end up being articles like "top 10 tools for X" written by one of the companies on the list, published on their blog.

Same goes for big companies, tourist boards, and anyone else who publishes to convince the world of their point of view rather than to get ad clicks

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> A lot of classic SEO content also makes great AI fodder.

Huh? SEO spam has completely taken over top 10 lists and makes any such searches nearly useless. This has been the case for at least a decade. That entire market is 1000% about getting clicks. Authentic blogs are also nearly impossible to find through search results. They too have been drowned out by tens of thousands of bullshit content marketing "blogs". Before they were AI slop they were Fiverr slop.

If I search for "best mlops tool" (granted, generic and uninspired query) on google, in the first 5 results I get three blogs of course platforms, one reddit thread, one github "awesome list" and 5 "top X" lists made by mlops tools, usually with that exact tool as the number one recommendation.

Of those 10 results, only one is ad-financed (reddit). And at least the five mlops tools won't mind being crawled and regurgitated algorithmically. If an AI uses their biased list to form opinions and recommendations that's exactly what they want

Most people are not startup owners

I'm afraid google's search and AI bots are the same. Either get both or none. None means no visibility in web. Some will be fine with this, but most will agree on AI bots to get visibility. Soon AI providers will charge those who want to be included, if they don't do it yet. With this on request they'll return preferred products and services. Just another form of hidden advertising.

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