How AI search results kill competition - Gemini wants you to buy ancient point tracking garbage...

For a while now, we've been keeping an eye on the new type of 'ai enhanced' search results provided by google in the head tracking world, and unsurprisingly, its bad news for small business and competition in the head tracking space...

Luke and Linus of the Linus Tech Tips youtube channel headlined their weekly wan show with a short breakdown of the problem last week, and we highly reccomend giving it a watch.

But for a quick run-down, the 'AI summary' results have been terrible news for small businesses who have been trying to bring new life to their markets, instead either referring to legacy old-school tracking products, or pushing cheap copies that cling to the coat-tails by selling the same ancient product, with even cheaper hardware from no-name far east brands that cloned TrackIR's hardware years ago.

"is this the lowest point in the history of the internet for trying to research and purchase products?" - Linus Sebastian

"... looking at the modern internet, I think yes, it probably is. - Luke LaFreniere

As a result, TrackHat, and other small companies that are bringing innovation to the head tracking world with novel concepts and creative solutions, are forced out in favour of established monopolies and their cheap clones...

Sadly, that's the way that AI search results have currently been employed, and there's no end in sight. All we can do is add our voice to the growing number of firms that are becoming increasingly aware of how damaging this is to competition and innovation around the world, and hope that consumers becomes ware of how bad the situation is.

Remember when researching purchase; always check out well-known publications for positive mentions of the best products available. We're really proud of the industry awards we've earned from some of the most respected names in the flight simulation market. But sadly we can see that the opinions of well-respected publications are falling by the wayside in favour of AI garbage scraped from questionable blogs and amazon pages.

In future, we hope that industry pros can re-take their positions as the true arbitrators what products deserve your attention!

• James @ TrackHat