It should be clear to anyone who is observing the tech industry that the fundamental way of how the internet works from a business perspective is changing, and changing fast. But what will replace it?

Before diving into that, let’s take a step back. Here is how, broadly speaking, the internet has worked for decades: Content is published on the internet, ads are shown to people consuming that content, money exchanges hands. Now in the AI era, it looks something like this: Content is published on the internet, LLM providers “train” (aka steal) that content, users use chatbots to consume the content.

… See the problem?

No one has found a way to replace the existing internet business model (yet), but if we don’t find one, then the outcome could be really bad. Think about it: if there is no money involved, what will be the motivation to release high quality content on the internet? When the content produced is of low quality (because we don’t have a functioning business model), the next wave of LLMs will train on bad data, which will lower their quality.

We can see that this is a problem by observing how Google is panicking right now. Their main business is ads, so they need to figure out how to survive this change. We also see it in how Microsoft talks about NLWeb playing a critical role in the “emerging agentic web”. Once LLMs, instead of humans, are the target audience of websites, what does that mean for the whole ecosystem?

It will be fascinating to watch this unfold, but one thing is clear: The internet as we know it will change in fundamental ways in the very near future.