Most of AI usage could be easily (with a little bit of effort) replaced by just searching for the info you need, but those days search results are so poor that asking AI gets so advantageous for the average user (that don’t care / don’t know about privacy and other costs and risks that come with it)
Do you think they did it on purpose?
It’s the other way around. First thing that enshittified search was how all people moved to walled off platforms, so whatever they wrote was missing from the search engines. Before that, they’d used to write a public blog post on whether that wifi card was working in their Thinkpad Txy.
Nowadays we’re in a war between AI scrapers and the rest of the world. Everyone has Cloudflare, Anubis and 5 other means of protection in front of their website. Of course that generally also locks out the Google and Bing crawler. So search becomes useless. But it’s not like it’s deliberately done in order to steer people towards AI… It’s that AI scrapers have unleashed some war that made people lock out crawlers, which in turn ruined web search.
And a few companies like Reddit are trying to make a profit out of this. They’ll lock down and also sell access to crawlers. Not sure if they grant access to Google or if Google has some deal with them.
Ai is the DRM for scraping data. Now that these giant ai companies have consumed and scrapped all the data on the internet they need to assure no one else can.
And they have influence to buy exclusive rights to these api calls.
Thats why we can’t have third party apps on reddit anymore.