The internet used to be a place where someone published something useful, and someone else visited their website to find it.
AI is changing all of that.
In March 2025, a Pew Research Center study analysed 68,879 Google searches made by 900 US adults. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a standard search result just 8% of the time. And only 1% clicked a source cited in the AI answer.
People still want information. But AI is making it so that there is no need to visit the people who created it.
The web is starting to feed itself
Cloudflare found that crawling by AI bots rose 32% year on year in April 2025. By July, Anthropic’s crawler was reading roughly 38,000 pages for every visitor it sent back. OpenAI’s share of crawler traffic had more than doubled in a year.
The future is dystopian: bots reading human work, using it to produce new material, then reading that material to produce more.
And research found that models trained repeatedly on model-generated material begin to lose parts of the original information. Researchers call it “model collapse.”
Original thought being buried beneath cheap copies of cheap copies.
But you should keep the website
Your website is still relevant. But its role has changed.
It’s now a reference point for machines. Act accordingly. State clearly:
what you do
who you serve, and
why someone should choose you.
Review it regularly. Remove old claims. Update products and prices. Make sure every description of the business is accurate.
Build what AI can’t crawl
Your long-term growth still depends on people who know you, trust you, talk about and bring others with them when they visit you.
That requires conversation, shared experiences and repeated contact. It means bringing those people together, physically, introducing them to one another, listening to them and giving them a reason to come back.
The internet will produce more content than any of us could consume. Your advantage will not come from adding more to the pile.
It will come from creating a place where people want to belong.