Source: Steven Levy, WIRED
The shift from link-based discovery to AI-powered answers has starved publishers of traffic and ad revenue. Google no longer needs to send users elsewhere when it can synthesize answers directly. For creators and small publishers who built audiences through search visibility, the distribution mechanism that made the open web economically viable has collapsed. Generative AI companies training on human-created content are now cutting off oxygen to the people producing it, forcing a reckoning over who captures value in a post-search internet.