The Chat
Every week, I talk to one of MIT Technology Review’s journalists to go behind the scenes of a story they are working on. But this week, I turned the tables a bit and asked some of our editors to grill me about my recent story on the rise of generative search.
Charlotte Jee: What makes you feel so sure that AI search is going to take off?
Mat: I just don’t think there’s any going back. There are definitely problems with it—it can be wild with inaccuracies when it cobbles those answers together. But I think, for the most part it is, to refer to my old colleague Rob Capps’ phenomenal essay, good enough. And I think that’s what usually wins the day. Easy answers that are good enough. Maybe that’s a sad statement, but I think it’s true.
Will Douglas Heaven: For years I’ve been asked if I think AI will take away my job and I always scoffed at the idea. Now I’m not so sure. I still don’t think AI is about to do my job exactly. But I think it might destroy the business model that makes my job exist. And that’s entirely down to this reinvention of search. As a journalist—and editor of the magazine that pays my bills—how worried are you? What can you—we—do about it?
Mat: Is this a trap? This feels like a trap, Will. I’m going to give you two answers here. I think we, as in MIT Technology Review, are relatively insulated here. We’re a subscription business. We’re less reliant on traffic than most. We’re also technology wonks, who tend to go deeper than what you might find in most tech pubs, which I think plays to our benefit.
But I am worried about it and I do think it will be a problem for us, and for others. One thing Rand Fishkin, who has long studied zero-click searches at SparkToro, said to me that wound up getting cut from my story was that brands needed to think more and more about how to build brand awareness. You can do that, for example, by being oft-cited in these models, by being seen as a reliable source. Hopefully, when people ask a question and see us as the expert the model is leaning on, that helps us build our brand and reputation. And maybe they become a readers. That’s a lot more leaps than a link out, obviously. But as he also said to me, if your business model is built on search referrals—and for a lot of publishers that is definitely the case—you’re in trouble.
Will: Is “Google” going to survive as a verb? If not, what are we going to call this new activity?
Mat: I kinda feel like it is already dying. This is anecdotal, but my kids and all their friends almost exclusively use the phrase “search up.” As in “search up George Washington” or “search up a pizza dough recipe.” Often it’s followed by a platform, search up “Charli XCX on Spotify.” We live in California. What floored me was when I heard kids in New Hampshire and Georgia using the exact same phrase.
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