I couple of posts ago I talked about the end of the open web–basically how it’s difficult for small players to provide a free-tier web service to the public due to all the bots and abuse traffic.
Recently I’ve heard a buzzword called “Agentic Web.” It sort of reminds me of a similar thing. In this future vision, humans don’t browse the web anymore–AI agents do, and they feed the information to the humans.
I remember in the earlier days of the web, you would have personal web sites with hit counters, guest books (where you could post a message to the author before the web got flooded with spam bots), and link pages (where the author would provide recommendations to related websites). It all had a human touch and was intended for humans to interact with.
In these earlier days, the canonical example was a website like snopes, where you could look up if something was true or false. You could go to Yahoo to see an index of the web or look at stock data. If you wanted to know if a movie was good you could go to imdb. Technically, you could still go to all of those websites, but practically speaking, you get their content now through a web search. Sites like snopes were killed 10 years ago when you could start getting an answer on the search results page.
With the recent generation of LLMs/AI apps, you don’t even need to hit a search results page with links anymore. Everything can be summarized by the AI agent. The user doesn’t need to go to any websites anymore. Heck, you could even take away the web browser and have the chat experience rendered with a different technology. It is interesting to think about whether it could be a good thing to reduce the reliance on the (super complex) web browser itself, but that’s a topic for another day.
The sad part about all of this is that most websites will just become a database to be scraped by bots written by AI providers. They won’t be for humans anymore. But is it all bad? I won’t miss all the ad spam in video game wikis. Speaking of video game wikis, I think that’s an interesting scenario–too small to cut deals with search companies like reddit, but possibly big enough that the hosting bill without ad revenue would hurt?