Is AI killing the internet?

What happens when Google does the Googling for you? Some experts believe it’s the beginning of the end of the internet as we know it.

The web is built on “a simple bargain”, said BBC Future: websites allow search engines like Google to “slurp up their content, free of charge”, and Google Search “sends people to websites in exchange, where they buy things and look at adverts”.

Now AI is breaking that bargain. “The nature of the internet has completely changed,” Prashanth Chandrasekar, chief executive of Stack Overflow, told The Economist. “AI is basically choking off traffic to most content sites.”

‘Fundamentally redefine the internet’

This week, the AI search start-up Perplexity officially launched Comet, “a web browser designed to feel more like a conversation than a scroll”, said Gizmodo.

The idea is that “instead of navigating through endless tabs and chasing hyperlinks”, Comet promises to run on context. Similarly Open AI should soon be launching Operator, its own AI agent, “designed to ‘look’ at web pages like a human, clicking, typing, and scrolling”.

In an effort to catch-up, Google announced AI Mode for its search engine, where it replaces traditional search results with a chatbot that effectively creates a small article to answer your question.

If successful, these moves will “fundamentally redefine how the entire internet works”, said Gizmodo. Publishers, advertisers and online retailers may find themselves and their websites completely bypassed by these AI agents. “It’s like asking a librarian for a book, but they just tell you about the book instead,” Gisele Navarro, managing editor of HouseFresh, told the BBC. “This feeling of the web being a big library for all of us, I think that is gone.”

But “the internet isn’t going anywhere,” said the BBC. “It’s the ‘open web’ that some fear is at risk.” This new internet “would be a world with the answers always conveniently on tap”, but “it could also bring an end to some of those things that have made the open web so popular in the first place”. We may lose “the opportunity to fall down online rabbit holes, to chance upon something delightful or to find something new”.

‘Everyone is talking about it’

Of course, not everyone thinks the web is in decline. It is in “an incredibly expansionary moment”, Robby Stein of Google told The Economist. Google reports that the web has expanded by 45% in the past two years, mainly due to the proliferation of AI.

Let’s be clear also that this is a problem for further down the line, given the tiny amount of people currently using AI for search, said The Washington Post. A report from web analysis firm Datos and software company SparkToro, “shows a huge increase in the amount of web visits to chatbot sites in the past year, but we’re still using search websites many times more”.

“When everyone else is talking about it and the media’s writing about it, a new technology can feel far bigger than it is,” SparkToro CEO Rand Fishkin told the paper.

It’s also true that the “death of the web has been predicted before – at the hands of social networks, then smartphone apps – and not come to pass”, said The Economist. “But AI may pose the biggest threat to it yet.”