With hundreds of millions of monthly users heading to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for answers, this cohort is slowly emerging as another key traffic source.
I have increasingly started noticing a new traffic source in my traffic acquisition analytics—Perplexity and ChatGPT. This is indicative of a shift.
ChatGPT and Gemini are a bit stingy here, and I personally am not a big fan of how some of these big boys operate—it feels like a smash and grab from the little creator! Was there an explicit permission to crawl, scrape, and infer from all of these content creators?
From the mix, Perplexity appears to have a more respectable approach, by at least sharing some credit by citing its sources to the actual creators and also including a direct link for users to click through.
See below (image 1) how Perplexity AI cites the sources while displaying the answers. It gives you are primary source, followed by a bunch of other secondary sources too.
Clicking through the ‘sources’ section gives you a list of all the sources Perplexity used to arrive at this conclusion. It offers additional referral traffic and exposure potential to the contributors. That’s a start, although nowhere near ideal.
There is a massive gap in the industry, that someone will eventually need to address in order to appropriately compensate the actual content creators (these websites). It could be a licensing engine that remunerates the creators when their content is used to deliver an answer. This licensing engines could be like a marketplace for content creators or website owners who can permit the answer engines to use their content but in exchange provide metrics on usage and attach a monitory unit value to that usage block.
If this is not addressed, independent websites and blogs will perish under capitalism’s well-oiled machine of creative destruction, and thats not good for the free internet.
Remember what Google Adsense pioneered for content creators with contextual advertisements decades ago? We need a repeat of that in this context. That innovative idea encouraged creation of millions of new websites with useful content.
below – how Perplexity allows a deep dive into the sources used (good start).
We also need better transparency from these answer engines—hopefully, they can open up a bit about their rationale behind arriving at the answers. How else can we validate and build trust?
Most big players, like ChatGPT or Gemini, don’t share many details about the sources behind their answers. How are we supposed to know if they’re just random hallucinations?
Claude and Perplexity are better off in this space. It’s also worth mentioning how Perplexity’s pro search does a decent job with transparency—just look at how it breaks down the rationale behind the answers.
What Next?
What happens to the traffic that Google search used to send to independent websites?
Will all new content created on the internet drift to the Reddits, Substacks, Quoras of the world?
Would Brand social media pages end up replacing store front pages?
Would Google shopping and Amazon replace independent stores?
What’s the incentive for new content on the internet?
Thanks for reading, much to ponder here…
keen to know your thoughts.
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