Readit NewsThe AI is given a proxy goal- 'maximize engagement'- which it achieves perfectly.
The user's goal - 'foster genuine connection' - is completely secondary.
The AI isn't malicious, it's just ruthlessly effective at optimizing for the wrong thing.
Reminds of something that Paul Graham once wrote: one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in. Now I realize this is just a big constraint you place on yourself: location.
Other big constraints are: marriage, religion, and choosing to go the VC vs. bootstrapped route in a SaaS business. Going the VC route constrains your version of success to extremely high growth (a very successful bootstrapped business would be a VC failure), while going the bootstrapped route constrains your growth rate potential (you might make millions but not billions).
I especially love this heading from the article: Goals are for Games. Constraints are for Worlds. I would add: successful people navigate worlds. Children play games. Many people are still stuck in a game-playing mindset even into their 40s, rather than navigating their world, they are still stuck in a goal-oriented game, such as a "career". Right out of university they look for their next well-defined game. At some point the complexity of the world collapses all your games. Then you hit your mid-life crisis.
From a purely strategic perspective, as in military doctrine or game theory, expanding your set of viable options is almost always advantageous.
The goal is to maximize your own optionality while reducing your opponent's.
The failure mode you're describing isn't having options, but the paralysis of refusing to commit to one for execution.
A better model might be a cycle:
Strategy Phase: Actively broaden your options. Explore potential cities, business models, partners. This is reconnaissance.
Execution Phase: Choose the most promising option and commit fully. This is where your point about the power of constraints shines. You go all-in.
The Backlog: The other options aren't discarded; they're put in a strategic backlog. You don't burn the bridges.
You re-evaluate only when you hit a major "strategic bifurcation point" - a market shift, a major life event, a completed project. Then you might pull an option from the backlog.
This way, you get the power of constraints without the fragility of having never considered alternatives.
I am genuinely curious about the business strategy behind the move bc that would be a market worth exploring - having something that the AI industry would pay for bc they are willing to spend a lot right now.
But I worked for a Japanese company, and they take meetings very seriously.
One of my employees suggested daily standups. I tried to support my employees, when they suggested new stuff, so I said “let’s give it a try.”
The Japanese Liaison really liked the idea, but it needed just a little tweak…
In a short time, we were having hour-long meetings every Friday at lunchtime.
The article is about Google (and other traditional search engines) snatching away clicks from web site owners. What you describe is AI tools (for lack of a better word[1]) snatching away traffic from the ruling gatekeepers of the web.
I think the latter is a much bigger shift and might well be the end of Google.
By extension it will be the end of SEO as we know it. A lot of discussion currently (especially on HN) is about how to keep the bad crawlers out and in general hide from the oh so bad AI guys. That is not unlike the early days of search engines.
I predict we will soon see a phase where this switches by 180° and everyone will see a fight to be the first one to be accessed to get an opportunity to gaslight the agent into their view of the world. A new three letter acronym will be coined, like AIO or something and we will see a shift from textual content to assets the AI tools can only link to.
Maybe this has already happened to some degree.
[1] Where would I put the boundary? Is Kagi the former or the latter? I'd say if a tool does a non-predetermined number of independent activities (like searches) on its own and only stops if some criteria are fulfilled it is clearly in the latter category.
The term you're looking for is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), though your "AIO" is also used. It's the new frontier.
And you've nailed the 180° turn: the game is no longer about blocking crawlers but about a race to become their primary source. The goal is to be the one to "gaslight the agent" into adopting your view of the world. This is achieved not through old SEO tricks, but by creating highly structured, authoritative content that is easy for an LLM to cite.
Your point about shifting to "assets the AI tools can only link to" is the other key piece. As AI summarization becomes the norm, the value is in creating things that can't be summarized away: proprietary data, interactive tools, and unique video content. The goal is to become the necessary destination that the AI must point to.
The end of SEO as we know it is here. The fight for visibility has just moved up a layer of abstraction.