Man-o-man, get a load of this. Last week I tried to research “best CRM for small companies and freelancers” like a normal human, and I ended up in a recursive loop of AI hallucinations, three Reddit threads, and a LinkedIn post from 2021 that somehow ranked #1 for everything.
Google’s AI Overviews now serve up answers as you already know, and traffic to actual websites has dropped 40% since March 2025 according to Pew Pew Research. And then there’s AI slop. In 2024 57% of content was AI generated, and it is predicted that coming year that number will rise to 90% (Europol).
Oops.
So now The Economist came out with an article last week, and they’re telling us that AI is killing the web. They say it with a straight face, like it’s a tragedy of some sort. They think the grandpa of free content, indexed by search engines, and monetized by ads is a sacred cow.
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Well, personally I think “to hell with the Internet”. That model turned us all into the product, and if AI is killing it, then maybe it’s a mercy killing. The argument behind this statement is simple. AI gives us answers directly, so we don’t click anymore. AI’s like Perplexity don’t even give us incentives to click on something anymore. They have shops. The web used to be a trail of breadcrumbs, and now it’s a vending machine with one glowing button that says “trust me”.
Take Perplexity, the hero of our collective clicklessness (does that word even exist?). It does not even pretend to be a search engine. It is a concierge with an occasional amnesia and it carries an affiliate link. It answers, it cites, it summarizes, it feeds you your news, and then it starts selling you the same thing that it “found”.
How convenient!
They have built web shops right inside the answers, so you never have to leave the cage. You can read, believe, and buy, and all-o-that without remembering that once upon a time, the web had doors. No need to browse, no need to compare, no messy diversity of thought and instead we get one clean conversational interface that smiling at you.
Oh , the irony … The web started as a noble tangle of blue links that were hand-woven by Tim Berners-Lee – oops, sorry , Sir Tim – and if the man were six feet under, he’d give us the finger in his carbon-neutral coffin right now.
He’s not dead, by the way.
But he’s just spiritually exhausted from watching his utopia turn into a shopping mall run by chatbots with brand deals.
The AI is killing it by replacing linking with thinking, or at least something that sounds like it.
But the thing is that the more we automate curiosity, the less we actually wander.
Perplexity doesn’t want you curious. No, that would not lead to cash-in-the-till. It wants you converted. And that, my overly intelligent friends, that is not the internet. That’s a digital mall with better lighting and a lot of bad ethics. And now I am watching the web shed its hyperlinks like it is dead skin, and it is leaving behind something which is faster but absolutely soulless. The previous generation with the likes of Zucky, built the web to connect minds.
But this one? AI is rebuilding it to close the sale.
And that, my dear bandwidth-breathing relic, is the new evolution of “surfing”. You used to be online. Now you’re on a permanent checkout page.
For one, there are no more clicks. If AI just gives you the answer, then websites that lived on that traffic are going to starve. One marketer watched blog traffic drop from 2,400 to under 800 daily clicks with the same impression volume. Google Discover is already just throwing crumbs from the table, and those crumbs are getting smaller. SparkToro data shows zero-click searches account for 58.5% of searches in the U.S. as of 2025.
Pathetic but true.
And maybe worse, all the content is starting to sound the same. Every darn AI model is trained on the same stuff, so they spit out the same stuff. The models just reuse what they’ve already consumed, but they don’t create anything new. It is content inbreeding, and the offspring are getting dumber by the generation.
It is gross.
And the battle for dominance is well under way. The AI-Assistant who manages to bind you to carry out your daily tasks, they will win the quiet fight that is now being fought by the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and the rest. Because only a few big companies will control everything. If three or four companies own the big AI models and they offer enough value to the users, they will become the new gatekeepers of information. They will be the new AOL , but with less charm and more surveillance capitalism.
And that is why, say, OpenAI is investing in features like memory, tasks, browsing the web, generating you rather tame PPT decks or connecting to your applications through MCP.
The future of the web
Some people (like me) are talking about a new “agentic web” – Microsoft is even flaunting with it, and is calling it NLWeb.
A W3C report from 2025 that investigates how machine learning models are restructuring the web. A world where our little AI assistants talk to other AI assistants and negotiate for information. It’s a new version of the semantic web, and that is an idea that was supposed to make the web smarter but it never really took off because everyone was too busy making memes.
But maybe this time it will work. Or maybe it will just be another layer of complexity that we don’t need, like adding blockchain to – say – your fridge?
And then there’s the fact that AI might just eat itself. If the models are only trained on AI-generated content, they’ll eventually become inbred and useless. Forbes among many others, warns about this content inbreeding problem. They will need new human-generated content to survive. Pretty much the same as a vampire that has run out of necks, so to say.
So, we have got that going for us, which is nice, but what does the future of the web look like?
It will probably turn into a hybrid model. We will talk to our AI assistants, and they’ll talk to the web. Some websites will become premium services for AIs with their own APIs designed for agents and some others will start to invest in something called MX – the machine version of UX – Machine eXperience, while others will hide behind subscription models or fragmented communities.
But one thing is for sure. The open, democratic web that we all knew and loved will be gone. But it won’t be dead. It will just be… different.
In say 5 years, when someone tells you to visit their website, they will mean their agent is available on this or that platform. The real question is whether we can stop a few big companies from controlling everything and selling our own thoughts back to us at markup.
The thought alone is depressing. Because if you are worried about what Google, ByteDance and Meta already know about you and how they use that information to manipulate your every thought and predict your every move, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Have you ever wondered WHAT kind information you’re actually sharing with ChatGPT, and HOW private it really is?
Have you ever done any of this?
“Hey search Jesus, my groin’s hosting a rave and nobody’s dancing right. Every health site says it is ‘probably nothing’ and every forum says I’m dying. Am I the next CDC case study or just allergic to my own stupid MF decisions?”
Now you know what I mean.
And all of the sensitive stuff you divulged to OpenAI can and will be used against you in the court of commerce.
So what’s the takeaway for me personally?
I will not be writing for humans anymore. I will be writing for the machine that feeds the humans. Ever thought of that? Nearly 60% of searchers in the U.S. already get AI-generated answers at the top of results pages according to Pew Pew Pew Research Center data from 2025. Pages with structured data are 40% more likely to be pulled into AI Overviews.
That’s gonna become my new job. So I’d better get good at it, or I’ll end up as the next Foursquare page that the robots ignore.
No clicks, no ad revenue, no more free content for you baby! This is a problem if you make a living from banner ads and pop-ups.
But for the rest of you guys, it’s just a Tuesday.
Signing off,
Marco
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins and clean up the mess.
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Portfolio Marco van Hurne 
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