by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It seems like we are hurdling towards a moment in time when there will be no organic search traffic to any of the major online publishers. This is happening mostly because Google is pivoting towards being an “AI first” company.
But there is an even bigger issue at hand — soon, we will all be using our AI agents like “Phil” from the 1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator demo or “Sam” from the movie Her instead of interacting directly with content at all.
That is kind of deep.
It’s deep because it raises a lot of questions. What will the UX of such a new world be? How will publishers make *any* money? It’s all very curious.
The answer to the first question, I think, is you’ll pay a basic fee for your main AI Agent and then an additional fee for a Agent “correspondent.” This secondary Agent will give you more specific information about this or that topic it’s devoted to.
As for the second question, I don’t know. What do you think? I think maybe some sort of licensing agreement might happen whereby Google, etc, get to scrape content on publisher’s Websites in exchange for access?
But one thing I think is for sure — the Web as we know it is probably going to implode into an API Singularity. There won’t be any Websites for humans to read, everything will be handled via APIs.
