AI Search will be the Death of the Internet
AI Search will lead to the death of the Internet as we know it (despite what AI itself, and its Creators, may say when asked).
The primary driver of the world wide web is search, and to a lesser extent, social media. Search 'links' everything together. It is the Internet's 'hub' where everything coalesces or is collated for the Users perusal.
No longer do netizens have lists of bookmarks or preferring destinations. They instead largely prefer to 'search' for the website they visit every day - as counter-intuitive as it seems, many appear to find it easier, far easier and simpler, to just open up a browser, type a site name into search and click the result at the top of the page that comes back ("what is a browser address bar" for $100, Alex!).
To search providers this idiosyncrasy of human behaviour is a gold mine, each website, page, blog, social media post, video, image, everything and anything published to the wilds of the Internet, are simply resources to collate and a means to generate heavily monetised referential lists, or Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
And there's a lot of money to be made off the back of this habituated necessity, ne convenience.
For SERPs, this monetisation of other people's content is a cash-cow win-win.
Except...
If it weren't for those same pesky off-site references, the third-party content creators, to which some of that sweet, sweet SERP generate income has to be apportioned (darn those Ad or royalty sharing programs content authors have to be signed up to receive payments).
In other words, Google, Microsoft, and all the rest, are essentially paying third-party content creators for the privilege of collating their material together into the generative SERP's they heavily monetise, to the tune of trillions annually depending on who that is.
The spider web that we know as the Internet is literally a direct consequence of this collation-for-monetisation.
And here-in lies their problem, that's an expense they don't want; Search Providers would obviously rather not be sharing revenue with content creators, but they have to (again assuming authors/creators are signed to the aforementioned royalty programs).
If only SERP providers had the manpower to generate those same assets and resources, content they would then own outright and that could be pulled into SERPs without question or consequence. No copyright issues. No royalty payments. No nothing to third-parties. No need to employ content farms and non-native speakers, who live under the constraints of a devalued currency, as that too is time consuming and costly.
If only there was a way to dynamically generate it. Even better, minus the need to store it.
Once that content is written, published (but not necessarily permanently available or archived), there would be absolutely no need to (re)direct traffic off-service, obligating a pay-out - AI SERP generates the content dynamically, serves it to the user with a few paid advertisements, minus offsite links or resources.
In the meantime, users still use SERP and browsers of choice largely non-the-wiser of the different between the human, manually generated content they used to be served versus the authoritative auto-generated material they then get. It will be unlikely in fact that users will be aware this is happening, and even less likely to query it if they are, especially if the information returned is seen as 'authoritative', everything being internally checked by 'fact-checking AI' and/or teams of unbiased content screeners who just parse the content through a different AI that weights its merits against a few 'signals', that way if anyone complains, the SERP provider simply refers to the scorecards they keep for just that purpose.
Yes. AI Search will definitely be the Death of the Internet.
