AI isn’t innovating—it is cannibalizing. By stealing traffic, starving creators, and choking the open web, chatbots are turning the internet into a soulless graveyard. Fight back, or watch democracy wither.
AI is killing the web—and no, that isn’t a metaphor. What was once a thriving marketplace of ideas is now being chewed up by machines that answer your questions before you ever click a link. The open internet used to be a deal: humans created content, search engines delivered traffic, and publishers earned money from ads or subscriptions. That fragile bargain is now broken, and the culprit is none other than ChatGPT and its growing list of rivals. The so-called future of technology has become the undertaker of the web.
It started with a warning. Around early last year,
Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince got calls from media bosses who told him a new
menace was sucking the life out of their sites. He expected them to say hackers
or rogue states. Instead, they said AI. At first it sounded absurd, but today
it’s obvious. Millions no longer bother with the wandering path of search
engines. They ask a chatbot, get an instant answer, and move on. No links, no
clicks, no traffic. For news sites, forums, and even Wikipedia, that means fewer
readers, fewer contributors, and a bleeding of the very lifeblood that kept
them alive.
The numbers are brutal. Global search traffic fell by
about five percent in just one year. Health sites saw their share of
search-driven visitors drop by ten percent. For companies that once lived off
the Google fountain, the tap is drying up. Dotdash Meredith, the publisher
behind People and Food & Wine, saw its Google referrals plunge from over
sixty percent of traffic to the mid-thirties. Its chief executive put it
bluntly: Google broke the deal. With the launch of AI overviews that spit out
answers on top of search pages, the percentage of news-related searches
resulting in zero clicks soared from fifty-six percent to nearly seventy. In
plain English, seven out of ten people now stop at Google’s own AI summary
instead of visiting the site that produced the content in the first place. That
isn’t disruption—it’s daylight robbery disguised as innovation.
Stack Overflow, the famous forum for coders, says it’s
suffocating under AI’s grip. Questions aren’t being asked because users no
longer need to post; the bots regurgitate past answers. Wikipedia warns that AI
digests its articles, coughs up summaries, and cuts off the pathways for new
contributors. When even the web’s communal encyclopedias are gasping for
oxygen, you know something fundamental has shifted.
The response has been ugly but inevitable: wooing and
suing. Big publishers are cutting licensing deals with AI firms, or dragging
them to court. News Corp shook hands with OpenAI even as its subsidiaries sue
Perplexity. The New York Times cut deals while filing lawsuits against the same
players. But judges are siding with the tech giants. In California, Meta and
Anthropic won copyright cases by waving the flag of “fair use.” Even Washington
is tilting Silicon Valley’s way. Donald Trump fired the head of the Copyright
Office after she dared to argue that training AI on copyrighted material might
be illegal. The message is clear: build faster than China, and let the web pick
up the scraps.
Some innovators are trying new models to fight back.
Cloudflare is experimenting with a “pay-as-you-crawl” system, where bots have
to pay entry fees to scrape content. Tollbit has built a “paywall for bots,”
charging higher rates for new stories and less for archives. In just one
quarter it processed fifteen million micro-transactions across thousands of
sites. ProRata, another upstart, wants AI answers to share advertising revenue
with the very sites that fed them. Their own answer engine, Gist.ai, splits revenue
with more than five hundred partners. It’s an attempt to rewrite the bargain,
but for now it’s still David versus Goliath.
Meanwhile, smaller sites are stuck in a catch-22. They
are too small to negotiate deals and too powerless to sue. Blocking AI crawlers
would also erase them from search visibility. Antitrust laws prevent them from
bargaining collectively. Alone, they are disposable. Together, they are
essential—but the rules forbid them from acting as one. It’s like watching a
school of fish picked off by sharks while being told it’s illegal to swim
together.
And yet, not everyone agrees the web is dying. Google
insists we’re in an “expansionary moment.” According to them, AI is letting
people ask more creative questions, and more pages than ever are being “read,”
even if only by bots. But that’s a hollow boast. What good is being “read” if
no human eyes ever see your work, no ads ever load, and no clicks ever flow?
That’s like saying a library is thriving because robots flip the pages, even
while the lights are off and the doors are locked to readers.
History has cried wolf before. Social media was supposed
to kill the web. Apps were supposed to kill websites. Those threats were real
but partial. This one is different. AI doesn’t just divert attention—it
replaces it. It’s not a middleman; it’s the entire transaction. It eats content
whole and spits out answers, leaving the original source starving.
The open web thrived on a messy, democratic chaos of
voices. You never knew what you might stumble on after a click. But if AI
continues unchecked, that chaos is sterilized into pre-packaged capsules. The
proverb says the river that forgets its source will soon dry up. AI is
that river, and the open web is its forgotten spring. Unless these machines
start paying for the water they drink, the spring will vanish, and we will be
left with a desert of machine-made answers and no living streams of human
creativity.
So let me be provocative: AI will not save the web. It
will own it. The only way out is to demand that AI companies share revenue with
creators, or make bots pay for what they consume. Without that, the internet
becomes a zombie—alive in form, dead in spirit. The choice is clear: either we
fight for the messy, unpredictable, human-driven web, or we surrender it to
algorithms that promise convenience while burying the very creators who gave
the internet its soul. The time to choose is now, before AI doesn’t just kill
the web but replaces it with a soulless machine graveyard.
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