TL;DR AI is killing the click. Death of the click kills the incentive for links. This leaves Google and others with no signal to rank sites that is more reliable than links. Every thumbs up or preferred sources is work you are doing that Google was paying contractors for. You are now an unpaid search quality rater.

For over two decades, links have played a key role in ranking your website on search engines. Links were the unit of trust in how sites were assessed. Links are harder to game and scale is the official line of the SEO industry and Google. Yet, an industry of guest posting and PBN (Private blog networks) flourished ever since 2006 each few years bringing in more sophistication.

Static site generators and free hosting like Github pages/Cloudflare pages/Vercel and other platforms took this spam to the next level because deploying and maintaining these became much easier. AI has taken this spam to a level never seen before and one of the highest level in my 28 years of professional internet marketing career.

PBN loosely operate like a pyramid. You have your money site at the top of the pyramid (your brand or your clients) , followed by safe middle layer sites which don't cross link to each other but only link to the top layer. You could stack more layers at the bottom and as many layers as you like which may interlink or crosslink but they all link to the second layer only. The second layer is the only layer which, having built trust from bottom-layer links, to the top layer.

In 2014, we discovered a PBN of about 3400 sites which was not penalized by Google or any other search engines and continued to exist well into late 2019 the last time I looked. Search quality has obviously been the biggest problem for Google and ever increasing sophistication keeps Google playing the whack-a-mole game with the SEO industry.

The irony is that for 20 years+ SEO industry proved that links, a unit of trust chosen by Google, could be gamed and manufactured at scale. A very good example of this was how 16 companies are/were dominating search results. Now AI removes the one thing that kept links being created at all: the click. In a zero-click world, why would anyone publish, earn or build links at all ? If no traffic flows back, where is the incentive ?

What's happening now is basically Google approaching a place where it wants to kill SEO. No singular study exists that conclusively proves clicks are dead but many studies cite numbers between 60-80% range where the search results in zero clicks. Our experience as an agency is similar and the world is about to enter zero clicks.

This brings us to the question - how would Google or platforms like ChatGPT or perplexity surface the right type of content in the AI overviews. Incentives for links and publishing online will wane with advent of AI content generation and zero click world. With the lack of links - it is likely that Google and other platforms begin to become and echo chamber of misinformation - regurgitating the same information again and again. This regurgitation might look like concensus but is actually just exhaustion.

So Google and others now have what I like to believe a supply problem. Its entire algorithm powered by links is about to be made redundant and now it needs to find new signals fast. This signal is review rater on a federated level.

Look under an AI overview the next time you search something. The thumbs up and thumbs down is a ballot. The overviews ask you to rate the answer and the rating is the final product. On top of this sits the preferred sources. This is from the press release.

Our Preferred Sources feature makes it easy to see more from your favorite websites. And starting today, it’s coming to AI Overviews and AI Mode, so you’ll be able to easily spot links in AI responses from the sources you’ve already selected. Just like in Top Stories, your Preferred Sources will be clearly labeled to stand out.

Preferred sources is basically the deliberate, labelled AI training to serve the federated version of thing that more people trust.

Google spent 20+ years fighint an industry that learned to manufacture trust with links. it lost many rounds in a fight that it will never admit. The link was a vote the websmaster cast once. The rating on AI is what anyone cast now as an end user. Google just made you a search quality rater and you won't get paid.