Matthew Prince

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.

The first thing is that the answer isn't to fight progress.

Answer engines are a better experience for users.

If you think about sci-fi films, which predict a lot of our future, when you ask the helpful robot, what's the temperature outside?

It didn't say, well, here are 10 links that you could follow to figure out what the temperature is outside.

It told you what the temperature was, right?

If you ask it for what's the recipe, it told you what the recipe was.

That's the interface that makes the most sense for the future.