Artificial Intelligence is eroding two key pillars of the internet: monetization through clicks (Pay-per-Click, Pay-per-Minute, etc.) and trust in the information we find. As a result, it is undermining the ecosystem that made the web economically and socially viable. The economic consequences can be massive. The temple is crumbling. But it does not stop there.
Zero-Click Economy
Human traffic to websites is significantly dropping. The reasons are obvious and so are the consequences:
- "Zero-Click" Search: AI-powered search features – like Google’s "AI Overviews" and chatbots – provide direct, synthesized answers to user queries, reducing or eliminating the need to click through to the original source websites.
- Traffic and Revenue Loss: The resulting drop in human traffic is massively harming content creators, publishers, and news portals who rely on advertising revenue, driven by clicks and page views, to fund their operations.
- Content Creation Incentive Fails: If websites don’t get traffic and revenue, the incentive to create high-quality, original content – the very information AI models scrape and summarize – diminishes, threatening to degrade the overall quality and depth of the open web.
In short, AI is consuming the web’s content for its answers without returning the traffic that sustains the content creators. I can see the huge number of lawsuits Google and others are facing for copyright infringements and antitrust issues. However, compared to the fundamental, structural shift occurring, these legal battles might prove to be merely a historical footnote.
No country for old (middle)men
The initial promise of eCommerce platforms was the radical act of cutting out the middlemen. This value proposition, in turn, severely disrupted traditional brick-and-mortar retail shops, small and large ones. The profound irony is that we now see the same fate looming for the very platforms that benefited from this original upheaval. Why is that?
Once users can order products directly from search results or AI chatbots, the middlemen — marketplaces, affiliate sites, and comparison portals — all lose their role.
Search engines are evolving into transactional agents, not just information brokers. The Agentic Economy shifts power from those who provide content to those who own the interface. The search engines own the customers, not the eCommerce providers.
On a smaller scale, we have seen this happening before. The travel and accommodation sector, for instance, underwent this process, giving rise to pioneering platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com. The customer, once owned by travel agents or hotels, is now in the hands of these gatekeepers. Today, AI accelerates it to every online transaction, no matter in which industry.
The liar's dividend
The internet is rapidly becoming a volatile mix of truth and falsehood. With tools like OpenAI’s Sora, anyone can generate video scenes that are nearly indistinguishable from authentic footage. As The Washington Post concluded, ‚Everything is fake on Silicon Valley’s hottest new social network.‘
Consequently, misinformation spreads faster and authentic information becomes easier to deny. When lies are repeated often enough, they start feeling like truth. When the distinction between true and false vanishes, all content on the Web becomes suspicious, and trust erodes completely. This environment- where everything could be fake and truth loses its power – is one of the key tactics Russia continues to use to spread uncertainty in the Western World.
Winners and loosers
Tech giants and governments around the world are now racing to control this new technological infrastructure. Artificial Intelligence is rapidly moving the world of independent creators toward a platform-mediated "AI middle layer," where the control over monetization, visibility, and information itself is effectively monopolized by a few gatekeepers, usually harbored by the two major world powers, China and the United States. If these Tech gatekeepers choose not to feature your content – whether for economic or political reasons – in an "AI Overview," your visibility and traffic will face severe consequences.
We are currently observing how Tech giants either follow political mandates because they align with their business interests, or involuntarily submit to political pressure. While this has long been the case in China, it is quickly becoming the new normal in the U.S.
Tim Berners-Lee once made his invention of the World Wide Web available to the world royalty-free, openly accessible and usable by everyone. The commercialization that quickly followed has largely destroyed this original approach. The complex result of this development cannot be framed in simple positive or negative terms; such reductionism would be insufficient and I believe that commercialization is at the root of many good things the web has created. A clear downside, however, is the fact that the Internet, once conceived as decentralized, has become an increasingly centralized system owned by a few. If these ‚few‘ fall under the sway of political powers, as is currently occurring, the temple’s remaining pillars, such as free speech, will also fall.
