AI Quick Tips 376: Decline of the open web

Cloudflare had an interesting blog post a few months ago about a significant shift in how the internet is used. Yes, this is a blog post about a blog post.

The section of their post that I want to highlight talks about how little people are using the open web. To clarify and define terms, the open web, in this context, means the parts of the internet that you can freely navigate to, without having to login, or pay. Think Wikipedia, personal websites, any site where you can type in the address and consume the content without taking extra steps.

The recent AI agent explosion has made it so people don’t feel the need to go to sites like they used to. It makes sense if you think about it. People used to go to search engines with a question in mind. The search engine returned a list of sites that might have had the answer. This was much better than going to the library or bookstore so people happily looked through multiple sites.

Now, a browser’s built-in AI agent will comb through the sites and put together an answer that is probably correct (at least as correct as the sites are). Since people have the information that they need, there is no reason to go to the sites.

While this can save the individual time, the businesses that rely on open web traffic going to their site are being affected by this. In a lot of cases, they don’t even realize it. If nobody is visiting your site then they aren’t reaching the top of your marketing funnel.

The estimates from the article are that open web traffic is down 75% from pre-2024 traffic.

If you are interested in the full Cloudflare article, here is the link - https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/

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