Is this a threat to the recipe sites?
Here is what’s happening?
On 24th Jan I noticed that TikTok in their search results is showing video citations linked to the AI generated answer. Whenever is a search is done on TikTok app it shows “Search Highlights” at the top of results which is an answer generated using AI and now specific paragraphs in that answer have citation videos.
Here is a recording of that which I posted on X last month.
Here is a screenshot of how this looks
What specific to recipes that I’m noticing?
TikTok is now adding a lot of ‘recipe’ queries specific search features – showing ingredients in the answer, large recipe selector at top of results, in the videos adding specific cooking steps.
My thoughts about this
- Its more helpful than usual recipe pages (saying this as a Gen Z 😌 myself)
- All this is just first hand experience of people cooking stuff and sharing with others how they are doing, this is the usual kind of content most people that I know prefer.
- There are no ads (or sometimes TikTok just show one video ad) this is completely different from usual recipe sites which in most of cases have a lot of ads.
Conclusion
People have always been complaining about fluff content that most of recipe sites add on their pages (a long story before getting to the actual point – ingredients and steps to cook) and as TikTok usage is growing as well (specifically amongst growing Gen Z) I think that it will be problematic for the recipe sites – getting lesser users and therefore less revenue. Probably its a good idea for recipe sites to also have some presence on TikTok.
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