Literary Hypertext, AI, and Google’s New Web: An Aesthetics Discussion

At the end of 2024, Google released a significant update to the guidelines for their quality ranking. Positioning is now based on "content appropriateness" defined by four main user intents: informational, transactional, navigation, localisation. The language of these guidelines at times feels like a nostalgic call to a utopian web not realised: in its repudiation of SEO tactics, its emphasis on information and knowledge creation, its focus on expertise and original content. We offer a speculative exploration of what a future web might look like, with an eye to particular forms of hypertext. This study afforded the opportunity to explore Google’s AI <i>Gemini</i>. Used as a proxy for the new AI engines implementing these ranking guidelines, we evaluate its ability to understand hypertext narrative. The paper provides two fully developed case studies, as well as a novel methodology to evaluate the AI’s understanding of a more creative future web.