alt Hacker NewsOne of the interesting things about LLM training is that high quality documentation can get your product effectively promoted by them.
I imagine the kind of advertising you're talking about is obtained by providing that documentation and a curated training dataset to the providers.
Maybe even funding some training time.
The net result would be product placement, probably without having to declare an advert.
Kind of like when drug manufacturers provide subsidized workshops to clinicians.
Replies
Loctite already inadvertently does this. If you ask LLMs about threadlocker, or otherwise keeping screws in place, it will respond like a Loctite brochure to you, and usually never even mention competitors. They were ahead of the game!
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
I'm reminded of the mountains of blogspam not intended for human consumption but rather to influence the google page rank algorithm.
This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
So there is hope for the Tailwind developers?
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)