The internet has changed forever

This video essay starts from a recipe site. Someone writes up an omelette, readers visit, the ads on the page pay the writer. Now Google’s AI reads the recipe, sums it up in its own answer and puts its own ad beside it. The reader gets the omelette and nobody visits the site.

The video then turns to Google itself. Search brings in nearly half of Alphabet’s revenue, and its executives have admitted that AI answers earn less than the old list of links, so it is trying two fixes: ads inside the answer, and better features for paying subscribers. Meanwhile the clicks are going. Pew found people clicked a link in about half as many searches when an AI summary appeared, and publishers’ Google traffic has fallen hard. Four cases show the range: the Daily Mail taking its click-through numbers to the UK regulator; Wikipedia warning that fewer visits mean fewer volunteers and donors; Reddit, still growing, testing a login wall because casual search visitors are where its loyal users come from; and Chegg, which lost much of its subscriber base and nearly half its staff.

The pushback is limited. Cloudflare lets sites charge AI crawlers, but a crawler with no billing deal simply stays out, and blocking Google’s crawler risks vanishing from search too. Wikipedia sells clean, bulk access to AI companies instead. And blocking now protects only what a site writes next, because what the model already learned stays learned. Sites with fresh or first-hand information keep some leverage, since the AI has to come and get it; evergreen explainers have the least. The closing question is who pays for the new writing the AI still needs.