Just a thought I had this afternoon: with publishers and websites rapidly loosing the traffic that search engines once brought to their pages, and end users turning more and more to AI for answers and news, is it possible RSS will see a big comeback?
I think a lot of publishers removed support for feeds thinking it was a freeloading that took visitors away from their home pages that otherwise would have been visited by bookmark in the browser directly or via Google searches. But now fewer people are searching on Google and if they do, they get AI answers anyway and never click through. So the appeal of SEO wil likely be reduced over time.
RSS, and possibly e-mail newsletters, might be the only way publishers can get their content seen in a more direct way that might encourage click-through. I doubt many users are clicking through when AI cites them as a reference.
Might also be the case that some content would want to optimize for AI scraping just because that might soon be the only way content is consumed. They may want a programatic way to at least get their pages "read" by AI scrapers and RSS or some similar type of distribution could be something they come up with for agents to have a pipeline without the overhead issues of direct scraping.
Just spitting here. Any thoughts about this? Open to being pointed out for being wrong too.
submitted by /u/chickenandliver