00:00Google is killing the internet to benefit its own AI product. For the first time ever,
00:05AI bots generated more web traffic than humans this year. So it turns out the dead internet
00:11theory was kind of right on the takeover of machines. But to understand what's going on,
00:15we have to go back to how Google fundamentally works. Google became the king of internet search
00:20by striking a very clever bargain with anyone who made a website. Let it crawl or download
00:26and collect your pages, and it would send readers back to you. But that trade looks very different
00:32now that Google is putting AI answers directly into its search results. Google's crawler,
00:38which collects content for both its AI answers and traditional search results, also sees way more
00:44content than the likes of ChatGPT. That gives it an unfair advantage in powering its AI search features.
00:50The CEO of Cloudflare, which is a traffic gatekeeper for about a fifth of the web,
00:55has criticized Google for grouping these systems together. He says that makes it difficult for
01:00publishers to block their content from being used in Google's AI answers, the very feature that's
01:05drawing people away from those websites. But there are also broader consequences. If AI increasingly
01:11reads, summarizes, and rewrites the web without sending readers back to the pages that were originally
01:17created by humans, then the economic incentive to make that original information starts to fade.
01:23Google confirmed to me that it is testing a way to let websites opt out of AI answers
01:28without hurting their search rankings. That way, people might actually click on their links.
01:33But a better remedy would be to fully separate Google's crawler into two. One for AI answers,
01:39and one for traditional search results. There's nothing wrong with having lots of bots doing lots
01:43of useful things across the web. But if humans aren't properly rewarded for their contribution,
01:48then the internet will become a less useful, less original, and ultimately vapid place to browse.
01:54And nobody wants that.
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