AI is changing the Internet — people are increasingly turning to ChatGPT with questions, while traffic to search engines and large forums is declining. What consequences could this have?

This is stated in the material of The Economist, which notes that because AI-based search engines save people from having to search the Internet for sites with answers, they stop the flow of traffic to these pages, and therefore reduce their profits. The danger is that by taking away readers, search engines deprive authors of the incentive to create content.

Internet usage is hard to measure, but one estimate suggests that monthly search traffic has fallen by 15% over the past year. The media has been the biggest complainer, but the problem is more global. Science and education sites have lost a tenth of their visitors over the past year. Reference sites have lost 15%, and health sites have lost 31%. Some big players are suffering significant losses: Tripadvisor.com, which recommends the best hotels and beaches, has lost a third of its visitors; WebMD has lost half of its visitors.

Traffic, monetized through advertising, drives much of the internet. A steady stream of traffic is also essential for building online communities. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year, warns that AI-generated summaries without attribution could deter people from participating.

Stack Overflow, a programming community whose traffic has more than halved, reports fewer questions being asked on its forums. Reddit, another giant forum, saw its stock price fall by half earlier this year amid concerns about unstable search traffic.

This is already changing web content, making it less open and hidden from bots behind paid subscriptions. Content companies are reaching people through channels other than search, from email to social media to events. They are moving into audio and video, which are harder for AI to generalize than text. Big brands are signing content licensing deals with AI companies. But hundreds of millions of smaller sites don’t have the leverage to do so.

The lack of incentives to create content is a fundamental problem. If human traffic dries up, the web will need a new currency. There are proposals to introduce a pay-for-scan system, in which AI bots are paid to read content on websites. Others are working on systems that analyze chatbot responses to determine where their information comes from so that the sources can be compensated. The tech companies that develop AI are not thrilled with these proposals, which will force them to spend even more money on supporting the technology.

Implementing a new business model on the internet is a difficult task; it may require a push from regulators. However, everyone has a vested interest in making content creation profitable, otherwise AI will have nowhere to draw new answers to users’ questions.

Recall that a study in early June showed that the use of Google AI for news search and summaries is causing a significant drop in traffic to news publishers' websites. This threatens their financial situation and the quality of journalism.

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