It’s been said that Google is on “code red” due to the threat of LLMs.

The issue isn’t just that people won’t be clicking through as many links and ads anymore, although that’s certainly a problem. 

It’s that LLMs reduce the importance of search ranking, Google’s secret sauce. 

Today’s search process involves people clicking through a list of results, sorted roughly by decreasing relevance. 

Since people are lazy and impatient, they’ll only click through a few. The top 5 (or 10) results are key, and Google wins because it returns great results there.

Since LLMs are automated, they can “read” through search results at a much faster rate than human readers. 

Let’s say that instead of 10 results like humans, an LLM can quickly read through 100. 

We can then create an LLM search product that:

• Runs the user’s search query (e.g. via API) and feeds the top 100 results to the LLM

• Uses the LLM to generate an answer for the user, by summarizing relevant results

• Returns source citations for humans t