Theme 1 – Google search is widely seen as degraded by ads, SEO spam, and manipulative ranking
- “Yes if you search anything in Google, you typically get sites that have a cookie panel, ask to allow notifications, show 'Login With Google' popover taking the keyboard focus, and lot of ads before you can even read the content.” – codedokode
- “Google's algorithms routinely promote spam because this is most profitable for Google.” – Gareth321
Theme 2 – Many users now prefer LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Kagi Assistant) as a direct‑answer replacement for Google
- “Never mind kids, I’ve largely started asking Claude any nontrivial questions that I used to Google. It’s night and day the difference.” – ls612
- “AI is my default for just about any search now… All of them give a decent answer, with the ability to ask follow ups.” – lordnacho
Theme 3 – Concerns about AI reliability, hallucinations, and the erosion of critical thinking (plus fear of AI‑SEO/ad manipulation)
- “I've spent way too many hours of my life learning to spot SEO and moving on. I'm not defending LLMs, I'm condemning search. It's shit and has been for a decade or so.” – JKCalhoun
- “If you follow these a good portion do not contain the claims that the AI output links to.” – nutjob2
- “Watermarking, contextually biasing llms to output specific tokens, can be rather easily usurped for ads.” – Phemist