Matthew Prince
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Yeah, I think that actually it's been amazing how well that has worked for the last 25 years.
The basic interface of the web
for the last 25 years has been search.
And Google obviously is the dominant search engine out there.
And the way that Google works that you all know is if you type something into Google, especially this sort of Google of 10 years ago, you got back what was effectively a treasure map, a bunch of links pointing you to search.
The search wasn't the act of Google returning the links.
You then had to continue the search to find what it was that you were looking for.
And in the process of doing that, you generated traffic
to a bunch of sites on the web.
And Google actually, and some other companies, provided the tools that then allowed those content creators, those site owners, turn that traffic into revenue or turn that traffic into ego, just knowing that someone was reading it.
What's happened, and it really started about eight to 10 years ago, it's picked up speed over the course of the last year, is that we're switching from a web where the primary interface is search and search engines to one where the primary interface is AI and what I would call answer engines.
go to ChatGPT and you type a question, it doesn't give you a list of links to go to.
It gives you the answer.
And in fact, even Google today, if you go to it and ask a question, increasingly it's putting on the top of the page what they call AI overviews.
And those AI overviews are essentially
answers to whatever question you have.
And the problem with that is you're not sending traffic then to the rest of the web.
And so if the currency that the web was built on, the currency that funded the web was traffic, the problem is that as we switch from search engines to answer engines, that currency is going away.
And so we've got to figure out some other way to compensate those content creators to make the content, which is what fuels fundamentally the web and even what fuels these AI engines.
It's a pretty significant warning signal.