AI Is Eating the Internet, And Your Traffic
I know I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: If your business relies heavily on Google search traffic, you need to prepare for a reality where that hose turns from a stream to a drip.
Search traffic is declining. AI is accelerating the shift. And more evidence keeps piling up.
Cloudflare, a company best known for keeping websites fast, secure, and online, also offers tools to block AI bots from scraping public web content. If you’ve ever hit a “verify you’re not a robot” check before reading an article, that’s Cloudflare or similar services doing their job to protect publishers’ content from being quietly hoovered up.
In a recent interview, Cloudflare’s CEO laid it out clearly: publisher traffic is down hard. Worse, the new wave of AI search, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, doesn’t send readers back to your site the way old-school Google blue links did.
Some say this signals the death of the open web. Maybe they’re right.
But I think we’re witnessing a transition.
The open web, once the front door to everything, is fading. Today, most people experience the internet through closed ecosystems: YouTube, Amazon, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Each of these platforms has sticky sandboxes designed to keep users (and their content) locked inside.
If you’re not building brand gravity outside of SEO, if your whole model depends on inbound clicks from Google, things are going to get difficult quickly.
