Interesting writeup, thank you! What I am really wondering about is, what is going to happen once more and more people use chatbot AIs like ChatGPT to get answers to a question directly, thus circumventing any SERP.

Like, if I ask "Can you provide me a list of the 5 best selling books in Germany of 2022?" ChatGPT will scrounge up the information somewhere, do some behind-the-scence-ranking-for-relevancy and then provide me with a short list of books.

Had I entered the question into Google I'd probably have gotten a whole page full of personal book blogs, some professional critics pages and what not. All of them having a chance I click on them to check them out.

I can't imagine that is what Google wants the future to be, basically losing all of us trying to compete for page 1 results (or paying google ads to improve the ranking). A whole business model is being threatened. For Google, and for bloggers, affiliate marketers, etc.

Weird times.