Yeah. And liable to get worse. Costs will inevitably be passed on to consumers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest. 'Plus' certainly won't be $20 a month forever. (Or the limitations put on it will render it useless.)

In other words, time/cost to build has come way down but it's not zero. Which means there's always going to be room for people to build and charge for tools.

Moats also matter. Ahrefs/SEMRush are likely not at risk any time soon just because of the sheer data they've compiled & continue to compile.

There's also how much someone wants to spend maintaining a tool like what I built. Because it's a scraper, it's liable to need repair at some point and I've got to still troubleshoot that process with GPT or whichever LLM I've chosen to work with.

Is this the end of SaaS as we know it? My (amateur) opinion is I don't think so; mostly because the limiting factor is still knowing and understanding the "specs" of what you want built and why.

(Of course Google won't let anyone confirm or deny that assertion because no AIO data is being made available to site owners through GSC)

Of course what these elements do is keep people on the SERP. The sources *are* cited but there's so much accompanying information, I'd imagine not a lot of people are clicking through to the publishers.

Notice the flyout menus under each of these different points of comparison with long lists of specs. In this case, I'm not sure they add much additional value upon clicking. The fact that it's so spec-heavy makes me think of landing on an over-optimized product page.

From a company perspective: after-action reports or debriefs? Feels like that's the closest equivalent in terms of documenting what went right, wrong etc. for next time.

More: www.buzzstream.com/blog/state-o...

More often though, in my experience, the 47 bosses, bosses' bosses and bosses' bosses' bosses needed to sign off on *one thing* lead to a stagnation within the system and all of the people involved (rightly or wrongly) giving up out of fatigue.

Everyone knows about the graveyard of completed-but-not-executed-on audits at the enterprise level, and sure, in some cases, the quality of the recommendations is sometimes just bad/clearly spit out of a tool......

Google rep: Now that it's been a little over 18 months since we buried UA forever, how do you feel about GA4?

Me:

Not going to say it's *all* vanity traffic they lost/much ado about nothing (since eyeballing their CRM terms, it does seem like they've had some losses there).

But I'm also not going to make this into something it's not just to spin a narrative and send everyone into a panic.

If you saw even the slightest lift in CTA clicks, sales, leads, MQLs, SQLs or whatever other conversion metrics are important to your business from your already existing traffic, wouldn't that be worth it at the end of the day?