> Guy asked a chatbot and bought a mirrorless camera.
From the moment ChatGPT become a public thing, it has been obvious to me some marketer somewhere is uncontrollably salivating at the thought of introducing “native advertising” into LLMs and that it’s only a matter of time until it happens. That is, if it’s not happening already. I would be very much surprised if there weren’t already tons of people trying SEO and prompt injection techniques to do exactly that.
But what really disappoints me and leaves me feeling hopeless for the future is how people like the author are either completely oblivious (or worse, don’t care) about the possibility and probability of such blatant manipulation.
That's a rather naive narrative. ChatGPT (in particular o3/o3-pro) is great at product research. I've found great deals on products that beats what I would find using a regular search engine.
Google research are largely SEO bloat these days. LLMs are pretty good at looking past that. Yes, sometimes it get it wrong, but more often than not it gets it right. In my research I did manually spot check things and found it to be on track.
Could I have found a better camera (and possibly a better price) if I poured hours of my time into research? Possibly. Is it worth my time? No. Just the same reason as I go to Amazon for my purchases rather than spending hours navigating shitty e-commerce sites (which btw ChatGPT will do for me).
All things considered, the agentic web will indeed change the landscape, but I for the better.
