Artificial intelligence tools are transforming the way that
people find information on the Internet, and this change is
happening faster than publishers can adapt.
When users question chat bots rather than using search
engines, they're given answers rather than links to follow.
And this is changing the economics of the Internet, and
in particular, the economics of news providers who spend money
gathering information that they can no longer monetize.
Over the last few years, millions of users have switched
from search engines to AI chat tools for research,
recommendations and real time answers.
Tools like ChatGPT, Clawed, and Perplexity are now directly
answering questions that wouldn't send readers to primary
online sources that they felt they could trust.
As users drift from trusted news sources, they place growing
faith in AI systems trained to mimic authority tools that
scrape the web for answers but offer no accountability.
About a year ago, Google rolled out AI Overviews and then more
recently, AI Mode features that answer questions directly on the
Google search page, often without crediting the original
sources. For users, this feels seamless.
They don't have to constantly refine their search terms to
find the information they were looking for, and they don't have
to read 10 different articles to work out an answer to their
question. But for publishers, this has
been designed Asterisk, a report by Ender's analysis based on
Systrix data, was released a few weeks ago showing that news,
visibility and search results has collapsed.
The Mirrors presence on Google is down 80% since 2019.
The Mail has lost more than half.
Even the Financial Times, a specialist publication with a
loyal subscriber base, saw a 21% drop in traffic this spring.
The report attributes this decline primarily to changes in
Google systems, in particular the roll out of AI Overviews and
AI mode. Rather than publisher strategy.
This shift is structural. AI tools are intercepting the
audience before they reach the source of the information that
they're seeking. Google's AI Overviews is doing
this even for users who weren't looking for an AI answer.
Publishers can't opt out from this without disappearing from
search entirely, meaning that the economic model that
sustained journalism, clicks, subscriptions and advertising is
being rapidly eroded by systems that extract value from news
providers without returning any. This chart from The Economist
shows that news and media are by no means the most affected by
this change. Science and education sites and
reference sites like Wikipedia are doing even worse, with
health information being the most impacted.
Search engines were, and still are to a certain extent, the
gateway to the Internet, but that gate is rapidly closing.
The shift in user behaviour is already measurable.
In April, Apple reported the first ever decline in Safari
search volume, a change they attributed to users turning to
AI chat tools instead of traditional search engines.
A Tech Radar survey conducted in December found that 27% of US
users and 13% of UK users now use AI tools like ChatGPT
instead of search engines to begin their information
gathering. The reason cited includes speed,
specificity, and ease of use. Google referrals to news sites
have dropped from around 65% in 2019 to 30% today, but this
decline began long before AI overviews a few years ago.
People used to say that nothing ever disappears from the
Internet, usually as a warning against posting anything that
you might later be ashamed of. But we've since learned that
things can still disappear, even if they're never erased, because
they just become impossible to find.
Over the last few years, Google became less and less efficient
at finding the information you were searching for, both because
the web became saturated with SEO optimized content and
because Google started returning sponsored search results.
Users found that they had to sift through clutter to find
credible sources. AI tools turned up on the scene
right as Internet search was faltering, and according to The
Atlantic, AI chat bots have already replaced search for more
than 25% of Americans. Google's own AI features have
made this switch even more extreme, as they provide AI
answers to people who were planning on using traditional
search. The problem is that if things
continue in this direction, AI will eat itself.
If news organization and reporters can no longer earn a
living by doing the hard work of researching an important story,
that work just won't be done, and chat bots will just have to
resort to making up answers, relying on press releases or on
propaganda posted deliberately to mislead readers.
Content producers are obviously working to find a new structure
where AI companies pay them for valuable information.
But if that doesn't work, the open web may evolve into
something very different. So let's look at how AI is
accelerating the collapse of the webs information economy, what
it means for the future of journalism and online content,
and why the stakes are higher than most people realize.
The problem Google has with AI companies is not the AI
technology itself, but what that technology does to their
existing business model. Google is not really in the
business of giving you the best answer to your search questions.
It's in the business of giving you a good enough answer so that
you stick with Google search while encouraging you to click
on an ad. If you ask what's the best
webcam, Google has to ensure that you'll see ad placements
paid for by its customers at the top of the list.
Google is now pitching that their new AI driven approach to
search allows you to let Google do the Googling for you.
In theory, with the AI mode you can still see the links and use
your own judgement, but not many users are clicking on the links
anymore and because they're advertiser driven business model
needs to continue working. The answers you get might be
colored by the need to sell certain products.
If you ask for health advice, as it appears that many users are,
will you be served information from reputable sources or from
questionable supplement sellers who are paying for clicks?
I'm not sure how much you can trust this AI stuff.
Recently I've been getting all these adverts on YouTube from a
guy who says he's 68. He's also AI and he's been doing
Tai chi and is in great shape. And I figure that I'd like to be
AI and in great shape too. But when I click on the link, it
tries to get me to do those exercises that you see old
people doing at the park. And I don't want to do that as I
worry that they'll scramble my brain like they clearly did for
this guy. I mean, look at what he wrote on
the white board. I started Tai chi chi 50.
Now I'm now I'm 68. Doctors ask me for advice.
They're probably not ACA asking him for advice on how to write.
Anyhow, Good journalism is expensive to produce.
It requires reporters on the ground, editors with judgement,
and teams of fact checkers. Traditionally, this work was
funded through either subscriptions or advertising.
If users stop visiting websites, the incentive to produce
original content disappears entirely.
Why would anyone write a news report just for it to be scraped
by a dozen AI bots, scrambled up with other news, and delivered
to an audience who have no interest in how it was created?
The result would be fewer investigations, fewer foreign
correspondents, fewer deep dives into complex issues.
The web turns into a hall of mirrors, reflecting summaries of
summaries, AI hallucinations and press releases with no original
source insight. This effects publishers,
advertising advertisers, and AI companies alike.
AI tools depend on fresh, high quality content so that they can
function. They need journalists to gather
facts, analysts to interpret data, and reviewers to test
products. If those people can't earn a
living, the source material dries up.
The bots will still generate answers, but those answers will
be stitched together from outdated articles, press
releases, and propaganda. AI ends up eating itself.
Publishers are trying to fight back through licensing deals,
lawsuits, and technical blocks, but the economics are brutal.
If the ad money flows elsewhere and the traffic never arrives,
the open web may not survive. In its current form, AI won't
just disrupt journalism, it'll hollow out the information
ecosystem that it was trained on.
Journalism isn't the only thing under threat.
The entire ecosystem of online reviews, once a vital part of
consumer decision making, is breaking down, too.
Before the Internet, reviews were published in magazines, but
those weren't always trustworthy.
Big advertisers could influence editorial decisions, and readers
had limited ways to verify claims.
The Internet offered an alternative independent
reviewers who built trust through transparency and
consistency. Tech reviewers, car reviewers,
and niche experts earned loyal audiences by being honest and
monetize that trust through views and subscriptions.
Online reviews were one of the best things about the early
Internet. Platforms like Amazon offered a
new kind of transparency, real feedback from real users.
For shoppers, this was a breakthrough.
You didn't have to trust an advert or a sales pitch.
You could read what other consumers thought.
That trust didn't last. Sellers began gaming the system.
Some offered free gifts or discounts in exchange for five
star reviews. Others paid bot farms to flood
platforms with fake praise or to sabotage competitors.
Studies show that in categories like electronics and
supplements, the majority of reviews may be fake.
Now AI tools are summarizing reviews, but they don't
distinguish between honest feedback and manipulated
content. If trusted reviewers lose
traffic because their work is scraped and repackaged without
attribution or compensation, their incentive to produce high
quality, unbiased reviews disappears.
The review ecosystem isn't just about choosing the right
headphones or booking a good hotel.
It's part of how we evaluate truth.
If AI tools can't be trusted on this front because their source
material is compromised, they lose a key pillar of
credibility. As AI tools scrape and summarize
content, often without permission or compensation, some
creators are pushing back. The musician Ben Jordan, who was
one of the most interesting channels on YouTube, developed a
tool called Poisonify to protect artists from unauthorized AI
training. It's designed to prevent AI
companies from using music without the creator's
permission. His video on this project, along
with his most recent one on AI companies that are logging and
sharing your vehicle's location without your consent, are well
worth watching. I'll include links in the
description. Poisonify works by adding
imperceptible adversarial noise to a music track so that the
audio sounds unchanged to human listeners, but sounds entirely
different to AI scrapers. His software not only prevents a
IS from replicating an artist to music without permission, but it
may even punish them for taking the music without permission by
corrupting their training data. If scraped, the Poison tracks
can possibly degrade an AI model's performance, making it
harder for AI companies to profit from stolen content.
Publishers are deploying countermeasures, too.
Cloudfare and other infrastructure providers now
offer tools to block AI crawlers.
Some media groups are negotiating licensing deals with
AI firms, and others are suing. The New York Times, for example,
has filed lawsuits against Open AI and Microsoft, arguing that
their models were trained on copyrighted journalism without
permission. The most effective strategy may
be branding. In a world where AI can mimic
tone and summarize content, personality becomes a mode.
Publishers are promoting individual voices, columnists,
Youtubers, sub stack writers as a way to build loyalty and
retain traffic. The Wall Street Journal recently
advertised for a talent coach to help journalists build personal
brands. This is based on the idea that
readers follow people rather than platforms.
This shift mirrors the rise of the creator economy, where
independent journalists, analysts and reviewers build
direct relationships with their audiences through newsletters,
podcasts and paid subscriptions. But even these models depend on
visibility. If AI tools intercept the
audience before they reach the creator, the economics still
collapse. The irony is that this strategy,
building personality as a mode, only works if the personality is
real. AI generated influencers are
already gaining traction, synthetic voices, synthetic
faces, and synthetic opinions. If the last defensible asset is
authenticity, then the next arms race is over what it means to be
real. Some startups are trying to
build new models around AI access.
Toll bid, which describes itself as a paywall for bots, allows
content sites to charge AI crawlers variable rates,
charging more for news stories than old ones.
The firm argues that charging for access incentivizes
uniqueness, unlike traditional search, which rewards generic
content. Another approach comes from Pro
Rata, which proposes that ad revenue from AI generated
answers should be redistributed to the sites whose content
contributed to those answers. It's engine already shares
revenue with over 500 partner publications.
A growing concern with users turning to AI chat bots for
information is that the companies behind them have been
aggressively overselling their capabilities.
These systems are pitched as super intelligent beings,
smarter than any expert, unbiased by design and capable
of answering anything. That framing gives users a false
sense of confidence in the output.
Elon Musk has claimed that his chatbot Grog is more intelligent
than PhD holders in every discipline, that it can discover
new physics and outperform humans on humanity's last exam,
a benchmark designed to test reasoning across 100
disciplines. Of course, he has also been
claiming that his cars can drive themselves for nearly a decade
now, so we should probably take those claims with a pinch of
salt. Angela Collier made an excellent
and funny video a few weeks ago called Vibe Physics where she
explains how tech entrepreneurs like the guys on the All In
podcast mistake chatbot fluency for intelligence, especially
when the bot starts talking about subjects outside their
expertise, like her field Physics.
I'll go down this thread with GBT or Grok and I'll start to
get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics.
They're quick to spot errors when the chatbot discusses
something that they know, but once it shifts to unfamiliar
territory, they're suddenly amazed by its brilliance.
The illusion of super intelligence kicks in precisely
when the user lacks the tools to evaluate the answer.
Meta, which really ought to go back to calling itself Facebook,
soon says that it's AI powered. Nerd Glasses will give users a
cognitive edge, and who knows, they might even be right.
Maybe trying to ignore the adverts being served to you all
day long while you're trying to focus on more important things
will boost your cognitive abilities.
When users stop reading news outlets where they understand
the editorial standards, reputations and biases of both
the journalist and the publisher and start asking chat bots for
answers, assuming neutrality where bias may exist.
They're not just changing platforms, they're changing who
they trust to explain the world. And that trust may be misplaced.
AI systems are not neutral. They reflect the data they're
trained on, the assumptions of their coders, and the incentives
of the companies that deploy them.
Bias can creep in through training data, algorithmic
design, and moderation choices. Sometimes it's accidental, but
sometimes it's deliberate. Grok is a case study in what
happens when those filters fail. After a July update designed to
make it sound more raw, Grok began referring to itself as
Mecca Hitler. Turkey banned the chat bot not
because of the Nazi stuff, but because it also insulted
President Erdogan. Other bots have had breakdowns,
too, fabricating sources, hallucinating facts, and
misattributing quotes. The myth of super intelligence
encourages users to place their trust in machines that sound
authoritative, even when they lack transparency or
accountability. As chat bots become the default
source of information, users may begin to rely on them more than
qualified experts, especially in areas where expertise is hard
earned and context matters. This shift is happening at a
time when public confidence in expert communities is already
under pressure. According to Pew Research, trust
in scientists has declined steadily over the last five
years, with fewer than half of Americans now expressing strong
confidence in scientific leaders.
As AI systems take on the role of explainer in chief, the
institutions that once anchored public understanding risk being
sidelined. It's quite worried that in that
economist chart I showed earlier that health information is most
heavily impacted by the move to AI tools for information.
The open web was built on a simple exchange.
Publishers create content, users visit websites, and their
attention is then monetized, funding the next round of
reporting. AI tools are already breaking
that loop. If no one pays for the news, the
news stops being reported. Investigations don't happen.
Deep dives into complex issues are replaced by AI summaries of
press releases and hallucinations.
Well, some argued that citizen journalism can fill the gap.
Professional journalism can't be replaced by individuals posting
on social media. Eyewitness accounts and grass
roots reporting can be powerful, but they don't come with
editors, legal teams, or the resources to spend months
verifying leads and protecting sources.
The BB CS investigation into the Wagner Group in Libya, NB CS
expose on forced adoptions in Christian boarding homes, and
Pro Publica's reporting on US Supreme Court ethic scandals all
required institutional backing and sustained access to data and
sources. These aren't stories that could
have been broken by someone with a smartphone and a Twitter
account. Journalism isn't just about
being there. It's about knowing what to do
with what you find and having the infrastructure to do it
responsibly. The disruption unfolding reaches
beyond journalism and could reshape the entire information
ecosystem if the source material dries up due to lack of funding.
The bots will still generate answers, but those answers will
be stitched together from outdated articles, corporate
peor, and propaganda. The web could begin to resemble
a television camera pointed at a television recycling recycled
content. I've talked in the past on this
channel about the strategy of blitz scaling, where well funded
tech disruptors prioritize growth over profitability.
The idea is that rapid expansion attracts high market valuations,
allowing venture capitalists to flip unprofitable or barely
profitable companies to the public before before they ever
find a sustainable source of profit.
Blitzschaled firms often lose money, deliberately undercutting
incumbents with the goal of eliminating competition and
raising prices later. Uber didn't need to be
profitable to reshape urban transport.
It just needed to be fast, cheap and relentless.
AI is now following the same playbook.
Vast sums are being spent to build tools that have yet to
find a viable business model. But even without a path to
profitability, they could still destroy the economic scaffolding
that supports journalism, education, and public knowledge.
Technology eventually comes for everything.
But when it comes for the institutions that help us
understand the world, the stakes are higher than most people
realize. Now it has always been as long
as man has been around, everything that can be replaced
will be replaced. But there are things that are
irreplaceable. Business models evolve.
When the Internet first appeared, it looked like
newspapers were doomed. But the industry adapted,
reinventing itself for the digital age.
Napster made it seem like music would be free forever,
threatening that industry. Yet musicians found new ways to
earn through touring, streaming and direct fan engagement.
The information economy is facing a similar moment, but
having access to high quality information is essential to the
functioning of the modern world. And while today's disruption
feels existential, it's more likely the journalism and
knowledge institutions will adapt to the new environment
rather than vanishing from it. The business models may change,
the platforms may shift, but the demand for truth, context, and
accountability isn't going away. Thanks for tuning into this
week's podcast, with particular thanks to my supporters on
Patreon whose contributions make this work.
If you want to support the podcast, I'll leave a link in
the show notes. Have a great week and talk to
you again soon. Bye.