Crossed Wires: The end of browsing and the last website at the end of the universe

Last week, columnist and editor Tim Cohen penned a post in his excellent newsletter Loose Canon that included a startling set of statistics related to the state of online browsing, starting with news.

You can scan his sorry tables in his newsletter, but here is the short story – online readership of reputable branded outlets has collapsed spectacularly over the past few years. News consumers seem to have disappeared without a trace. Almost every major global online news outlet has reported flattening or even cratering readership (there is no point in covering print newspapers any more; their distribution numbers are too dispiriting).

It gets worse. Tim also presents the hollowing out of other website viewership. The disappearing numbers stretch far wider than news, into cooking, finance, travel, health, real estate, even Google Translate – the wounds are deep and painful.

Where in the world has everyone gone? Have they rediscovered the joy of the real world? You know – gardening, hiking, painting, meeting for coffee? Reading books between two covers, perhaps?

No. I’m afraid not. They have discovered AI. They have discovered that you can find out everything you need to know without browsing or searching, and more importantly, without ever seeing or reading an advertisement. Just by typing into the little ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini box in the middle of the screen.

I am one of the disappeared. I haven’t used Google for about two years (although I do use their chatbot Gemini). I occasionally do go to websites, but only when I want to actually buy something such as an airplane ticket, and now that activity is also about to disappear, a matter which I will come to presently.

I recently wanted to find out detailed information about a medical matter – cause, symptoms, cures, prognoses, scenarios and scientific studies. I normally would have gone to a site like WebMD, one of the big names in this genre. But instead, I just went to ChatGPT. I asked some questions, got some answers, asked other related questions, got more answers, and went down some interesting rabbit holes recommended by the AI. I even uploaded lab results and asked it to explain their implications in simple English, which it duly did.

None of this is particularly remarkable; anyone who uses AI even superficially probably has similar stories. But in defaulting to ChatGPT, I am complicit in the sudden massive restructuring of 30 years of internet business models. I pay nothing and whatever ads my chosen AI happens upon during its sweep through the internet to answer my question will be totally ignored. AIs are not distracted by advertising.

What about subscriptions, that other river of money flowing through the internet? I subscribe to the New York Times. But anyone can glance at its headlines and, if their interest is piqued by a particular story, they can ask a chatbot to assemble the main story from a massive variety of sources, at any level of detail, written in any style they choose, coloured by any political slant that strikes their fancy. They can also ask for the “true” story, insisting that the AI use only reputable, accredited and sourced references for its facts.

The internet was built on ads and subscriptions. Those were the dollars that paid for the entire enchilada. Now they are drying up. The venerable old internet of searching and browsing is disintegrating quickly. The business model that produced innumerable successful companies and multimillionaire founders is being replaced by AI agents, and we don’t really have to pay, at least not yet, for most of the stuff we want to do.

I return here to my comment about browsing only when I actually want to conclude a transaction. On 29 September, OpenAI and payment provider Stripe announced a protocol called ACP (agentic commercial protocol). In short, it allows anyone using ChatGPT to make payments to online retailers at their discretion.

How does this work? Consider the following prompt:

“My family (four people) and I want to fly from Amsterdam to Rome in July for any two weeks within that window. Please find the cheapest return ticket with carry-on luggage that leaves and arrives during daylight hours. Please make sure you also check the discount airlines. And then pay for the ticket.”

You see what is happening here. The entire transaction can be concluded without your ever having to see a travel website. Of course, you may ask for more options before paying, or request clarification, but the chatbot is doing all the browsing and transacting on your behalf – in a fraction of the time (and stress) that it would take you to do it.

It may take a while before people trust this, but it was the same with entering credit card numbers on the internet in the early days. This new paradigm is going to take root quickly; I predict it will become the dominant way we use the internet within a few years.

Which leads to the question of which websites are growing (aside, obviously, from the websites of GenAI companies such as ChatGPT). The answer is the well-known social media and community sites – TikTok and Reddit and Instagram. Advertising spend will flee from the websites currently under attack from AI agents to a few mega eyeball aggregators such as TikTok, making the very rich even richer.

(I should note that global discount merchandising platforms such as Temu have also grown, but I am betting that their website visitors will also soon get swept aside by AI agents.)

It is not clear what this means for your favourite websites. Some of them will not survive the paradigm shift, because reliable revenue models will disappear. Perhaps the end of this movement is a kind of reductio-ad-absurdum where only one website remains, which has everything you need to browse and more – and it is (drumroll)… TikTokOpenAI.

Therein lies an idea for a great dystopian novel. DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick. His new book, It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.