How AI is Reshaping the Internet

In 1989, the World Wide Web was born with a simple bargain users could freely explore the vast library of online information, and in return, websites could fund themselves through ads, subscriptions, or services powered largely by the traffic that search engines sent their way.

For decades, this arrangement kept the internet’s economic heartbeat alive. But in 2025, a new force is disrupting that balance and it's artificial intelligence.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare a company that safeguards about a fifth of the internet remembers when executives from major media firms began calling him in early 2024. Their fear wasn’t cyberattacks from rogue nations. It was AI. Specifically, chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, which have begun replacing traditional search engines for millions of users.

Instead of typing a question into Google and clicking through a list of links, people now ask AI chatbots and get direct, neatly packaged answers. No extra clicks. No scrolling through web pages. No ads to for users to see, it's faster, easier, and more conversational.

But without clicks, traffic plummets, taking advertising revenue and subscription prospects with it.

The problem is structural. AI models train on the very content those publishers create, then serve it back to users in a summarized form often without attribution or compensation. This means the sources of online knowledge are being drained of the resources needed to create new knowledge.

Some industry leaders are calling for new economic models perhaps licensing deals between AI firms and content creators, similar to how streaming services pay record labels. Others envision AI acting less like a final destination and more like a gateway, nudging users toward full articles instead of replacing them entirely.