If You're Reading This, You're Probably an AI Bot

AI is a threat to all websites. Internet users Googling for information historically had to click links and read webpages. Webpages have ads, and ad money allows writers to live in houses and feed our—I mean their—children. As the New York Times points out in a fresh report, Google results are directing more and more people to…Google, and that’s it. Generally, there’s an AI Overview at the top of a results page for any given informational search, and perhaps that’s enough for many queries. But a study from Growth Memo referenced by the Times says 75% of people who find themselves using AI Mode, stay in AI mode rather than switching to the web. And if you’re in AI Mode, that means you’re just hanging out chatting with the bot while Google’s AI agents flit around trying to answer your question. But the point is that whether users tend to stop at the AI Overview, or engage with it and end up in AI Mode, “more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human,” a Cloudflare report from earlier this month says. As less and less human traffic comes from Google Search, and more and more ads are being shown to bots, the danger is that the business model of a free and open web will becom