> But what Perplexity is doing when they crawl my content in response to a user question is that they are decreasing the probability that this user would come to by content (via Google, for example).
Perplexity has source references. I find myself visiting the source references. Especially to validate the LLM output. And to learn more about the subject. Perplexity uses a Google search API to generate the reference links. I think a better strategy is to treat this as a new channel to receive visitors.
The browsing experience should be improved. Mozilla had a pilot called Context Graph. Perhaps Context Graph should be revisited?
> In a world where users ask Perplexity these Help questions about my SaaS, Perplexity may answer them and I would lose all the insights because I never get any traffic.
This seems like a missing feature for analytics products & the LLMs/RAGs. I don't think searching via an LLM/RAG is going away. It's too effective for the end user. We have to learn to work with it the best we can.
>> In a world where users ask Perplexity these Help questions about my SaaS, Perplexity may answer them and I would lose all the insights because I never get any traffic.
Alternative take: Perplexity is protecting users' privacy by not exposing them to be turned into "insights" by the SaaS.
My general impression is that the subset of complaints discussed in this thread and in the article, boils down to a simple conflict of interest: information supplier wants to exploit the visitor through advertising, upsells, and other time/sanity-wasting things; for that, they need to have the visitor on their site. Meanwhile, the visitors want just the information without the surveillance, advertising and other attention economy dark/abuse patterns.
The content is the bait, and ad-blockers, Google's instant results, and Perplexity, are pulling that bait off the hook for the fish to eat. No surprise fishermen are unhappy. But, as a fish, I find it hard to sympathize.
Perplexity has source references. I find myself visiting the source references. Especially to validate the LLM output. And to learn more about the subject. Perplexity uses a Google search API to generate the reference links. I think a better strategy is to treat this as a new channel to receive visitors.
The browsing experience should be improved. Mozilla had a pilot called Context Graph. Perhaps Context Graph should be revisited?
> In a world where users ask Perplexity these Help questions about my SaaS, Perplexity may answer them and I would lose all the insights because I never get any traffic.
This seems like a missing feature for analytics products & the LLMs/RAGs. I don't think searching via an LLM/RAG is going away. It's too effective for the end user. We have to learn to work with it the best we can.