The internet has brought with it the opportunity to be equally visible to everyone. However, the internet, which has been constantly evolving since the day it first emerged, is now much more than simple websites, forums and blogs where posts and comments are written, or even video streaming services where people spend hours in front of it.
Not long after the invention of the internet, the topics discussed towards the second two decades of the 2000s evolved from the internet to “what’s happening on the internet“. While the COVID19 pandemic in 2019 and 2020s changed and evolved our habits related to life on the one hand, we started to meet new concepts: NFT, Metaverse, algorithm and artificial intelligence.
Ask yourself this question: what are your priorities? What was more important to you before the pandemic?
I’m at the topic again; this common promise that everyone should be equally visible on the internet has begun to be withdrawn due to the change in commercial priorities of companies developing products and services in the field of information technology.
Today, if you are a small business, an independent professional, or simply a content producer of some kind, to be visible in the digital world, you have to do it according to the rules set by the system, fulfill the requests of these providers, and pay the provider extra money while doing all this.
When you try to play by your own rules, refuse to comply with the rules and conditions set by the service provider, or cannot allocate a budget to be visible, you will face digital invisibility”.
Welcome to the age where you have to pay to be visible online.
Blocking organic traffic: AI Overview
In order to be visible, we had to ensure that search engines (SE) could find the content we uploaded to our websites by observing SEO criteria, and thus present content associated with keywords to people searching for those keywords.
However, Google, the boss in the search engine business, suddenly changed its mind and included artificial intelligence in the work, positioned a summary paragraph created with artificial intelligence on the SERP, on clickable links, and defined it as AI Overview.
The information in this paragraph provides the targeted information about the subject searched for, while ensuring that the visitor leaves the website directly without visiting this information.
This will definitely cause a serious decrease in the income of websites that derive the majority of their income from traffic. It’s not just about money, either; it seems problematic in terms of method and ethics that especially the content prepared by people who regularly write blogs and produce written content and portals that present quality content, are presented directly by the search engine without providing any profit to the real owner of the work. The search engine produces content on its own by compiling data from the data it indexes, and presents it, but your name is never mentioned in this presentation.
I find it important that the citation generation system, which I first encountered at Perplexity.Ai and which later became widespread in all chatbots that produce text-based content, is adopted by Google as quickly as possible and integrated into AI Overview.
As a type of content producer, I am not happy with turning into a persona that provides free content to technology companies. This is not about accepting to use a service for free and offering what I have or can produce in return. Not long ago, I was producing content on topics I was interested in and publishing it in a way that search engines could easily find and index; now, among the things I need to think about is how search engines use this content and how they bypass me. It is really exhausting.
Meta Verified and silent accounts that are left out
Instagram, which understands the photo sharing behavior that has entered our lives with the widespread use of digital cameras and has been a rising trend with mobile phones that can take photos, has transformed considerably after entering under the roof of Meta, the company also owns Facebook, and has become a place quite different from the day it first emerged.
After Twitter, which was purchased by Elon Musk and renamed X, started selling the blue tick that distinguishes verified users from others, Instagram also adopted this and with the Verified program, Meta promises Instagram users a blue tick similar to X, a support line and more visibility.
The most important thing here and the one I want to draw attention to is more visibility. This means that if you do not have a blue tick on your account, you will be suppressed by the algorithm and you will not be visible to the people who follow you as much and as often as you used to.
Let me explain it more realistically. Have a business account that you don’t have a blue tick on, your followers won’t see the content you share on their feeds just because you don’t have a blue tick. Because the algorithm has now classified you as unverified and therefore worthless.
This will have a big impact on small-scale, local businesses that are trying to turn themselves around with limited budgets.
You have acquired, adopted, loved and have no intention of giving up digital social behaviors such as taking photos / creating content with your phone that looks good, takes very good photos, looks technologically cool and gives you some kind of status, sharing it, liking someone and writing comments under photos. Therefore, you are at the stage where you have to pay a certain amount of money to be visible even to people you live in the same place with for most of the day, welcome.
The rising obstacle to digital equality of opportunity: Systematic invisibility
Google’s AI Overview and Meta’s Verified program are creating new concerns for those trying to exist here.
In order to exist in the digital world, having creative ideas, showing technical competence and the ability to produce, as well as completely submitting to the strict rules determined by the platforms and that users must follow in order to exist there; in other words, there is no part of the text that you can partially reject if you click the “I approve” box without reading it. If you say I comply, it’s okay, if you say I don’t comply, it’s okay, start writing your own rules.
When you open X, Instagram or Google’s search page, even though what you see seems like a simple interface, there are many parameters, queries and algorithms that concern the software side in the background, and I think this is what technology developers love to deal with the most these days.
Algorithms, which can simply be defined as a way designed to achieve a targeted result, silently work within the software we use and make decisions about which users will be more visible and which will be less visible, while the basis for and how these decisions are made remain behind closed doors; the only thing that is felt is the results of the algorithms’ behavior.
No matter how you think about it, there are consequences to such a restriction or support.
- There is a danger of suppressing / overshadowing the freedom of expression of different views, thoughts, ideas, orientations and properties.
- Distributing information from a single center using methods such as summarization and preview makes it difficult to access the original source of information.
- Increasing visibility depending on the budget destroys digital equality of opportunity and manipulates users. People experience the complexity of whether the information they encounter is quality or whether it is brought to them for money; while quality information is lost in digital noise, mediocre ones become more visible.
To remain visible, you need to understand the invisible
Giant companies like Google and Meta are writing the new rules of the digital world with their algorithms and newly developed artificial intelligence tools. Therefore, it is no longer enough to just produce content to be visible in the digital world; it is also necessary to understand where, by whom and how that content will find a place.
A small business, an independent professional, a content producer or anyone trying to stand on their own feet; is pushed into invisibility when you do not play by the rules set by the game creators – and frequently changed. Therefore, it is necessary to think about digital invisibility and cope with it; and even learn ways to fight against it.
In order to remain visible, it is important to exist on every possible channel instead of sticking to a single platform. I know it seems laborious, but prepare different formats of your content and upload them to Youtube, Tiktok, Substack, Spotify. Connect all of these together and make people subscribe to you from different channels.
Whether it is your friends or a group of people you have determined as your target audience; or even your customers; create channels, groups and communities at Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal where you can communicate with them directly, have their phone numbers and personal e-mail adress. Having your own database is more important than anything else today.
Images are from Simon Lee.
