On "Quoting Nilay Patel"

The cost-benefit math on AI search features is genuinely broken right now, and that's not some fringe complaint—it's the actual user proposition. If you're selling people energy costs, infrastructure noise, and actively degraded search results in exchange for hallucinations wrapped in corporate polish, you're not selling a feature, you're selling a tax on being online. This matters because it means the entire justification for why search engines need to transform into AI answer machines collapses the moment you actually say it out loud to a user. The next wave of SEO and search strategy has to account for the fact that the emperor has no clothes here, and Google's forced integration of Overviews is running on cultural momentum, not actual user demand.