AI Is Killing the Web. Can Anything Save It?

The rise of ChatGPT and its rivals is undermining the economic bargain of the internet.

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Around the beginning of 2024, Mr Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the chief executives of large media companies. They told Mr Prince, whose company, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a quarter of the web, that their businesses faced a grave new online threat. "I said, 'What, is it the North Koreans?'" he recalls. "And they said, 'No. It's AI.'"

Those executives had spotted the early signs of a trend that has since become clear: Artificial intelligence is transforming the way that people navigate the web.

As users pose their queries to chatbots rather than conventional search engines, they are given answers, rather than links to follow. The result is that "content" publishers, from news providers and online forums to reference sites such as Wikipedia, are seeing alarming drops in their traffic.

As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetized using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, people have embraced a new way to seek information online. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, says that around 800 million people use the chatbot. It is the most popular download on the iPhone app store. Apple said conventional searches in its Safari web browser had fallen for the first time in April, as people posed their questions to AI instead. OpenAI is soon expected to launch a browser of its own. Its rise is so dramatic that a Hollywood adaptation is in the works.