Matthew Prince

And what's changed is like if you just look at Google, like if you type something into Google, like when did Bankless start as a podcast?

In the past, Google would show you 10 blue links and you'd have to click on one of them in order to go find the answer to your question.

What happens now is Google presents an AI overview at the top of that page.

And it's going to give you that answer.

And what's increasingly happening is those answers are getting better and better.

And the way Google gets them, they go out and they spider the web.

They effectively strip mine the internet.

They pull it back.

And then they give you the answer.

Now, from a user's perspective, from an end user's perspective, that's great.

Because I don't want to have to go spelunking through the web like a search engine does.

The search isn't over when I get the 10 blue links.

That's just the beginning of the search.

That's a treasure map that I have to go click through in order to find what I'm looking for.

What Google is turning into and what ChatGPT and Cloud and XAI, all of these companies are, they're not search engines, they're answer engines.

And again, from a customer's perspective, we've all had that experience of like, wow, this is saving me a huge amount of time and giving me answers to things that maybe didn't even exist out there before in a way that a search engine never could.

But if you're a publisher, if you're a content creator, if people aren't clicking on the links, if they're not going to the sites, then no one is seeing the ads and there's nothing which is compensating you.

And so all of these different companies, all of these answer engines are taking content, but they're not sending traffic back anymore.

And what that then means is that because they're not sending human traffic, eyeball traffic back,

that there's no one to show an ad to.