Generative AI and the Web: Is the Traditional Model in Danger?

For more than two decades, the web was built on an implicit but effective pact: internet users accessed a variety of content for free – articles, tutorials, videos, forums – in exchange for a little of their attention, monetized through advertising. This model, inherited from the press and adapted to the digital age, rested on a relatively stable value chain: content creators (publishers, bloggers, collaborative platforms…) published pages optimized for search ranking, search engines such as Google played the role of technical intermediaries, and users, by clicking on the displayed links, kept audience flowing and revenue being generated. This organic traffic, often described as “free,” was in reality the lifeblood: it determined visibility, profitability and, ultimately, the viability of the outlet.

Yet this mechanism is now threatened by a technological paradigm shift: the emergence of conversational agents and automated answer engines, capable of summarizing, rephrasing or rewriting existing content without sending the user to the source. The web becomes a deposit of raw material for artificial intelligences that extract information with nothing in return. In this new landscape, value no longer lies in the click, but in the immediate answer – often generated without the internet user ever seeing the original page.

This upheaval calls into question one of the economic pillars of the web.

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That is what we will examine in our July series.

The Advertising/SEO Model Running Out of Steam

Historically, search engines – Google foremost among them – were the central infrastructure for distributing traffic on the web. They acted as a transmission belt between internet users and content producers, channelling a so-called “qualified” flow of audience to the sites that matched search intent. This model rested on a relatively stable dynamic: for every two pages indexed, one click was generated. In other words, publishers could reasonably expect one internet user in two to end up visiting their site after a search.

Yet this equation has been thrown deeply out of balance by the arrival of generative artificial intelligence in the user journey. In 2025, this ratio fell to one in six: it now takes six indexed pages to get a single click, according to data reported by Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare¹. The majority of queries now find their answer without the internet user needing to visit a single external site.

The consequence is direct: original content – still produced in huge quantities – no longer attracts enough visitors to justify its cost of creation. This weakens the entire ecosystem that kept the open web alive: ad networks, freemium models, affiliate partnerships, even digital subscriptions based on visibility.

Chatbots, Generative AI and Answer Engines: Intermediaries or Content Thieves?

The arrival of artificial intelligences such as ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity has profoundly changed how internet users access information. Where traditional search engines (such as Google) displayed a list of links to sites, these tools give complete answers directly, without sending the user to the original page.

These AIs work by absorbing billions of web pages to produce “new” texts, often well written and easy to read. The problem is that they make massive use of content created by others (articles, forums, tutorials…), but without crediting or bringing visitors to the source sites.

Matthew Prince (Cloudflare) gives telling figures: for every click OpenAI sends to a site, it consumes about 250 pages. At Anthropic (creator of Claude), it would be up to 6,000 pages for a single click. This means that the vast majority of content is used, but that almost no one goes to read it on its original site.

It is a major break: publishers still create content, but visitors no longer arrive. AI becomes an intermediary that cuts the link between reader and author. This destroys the very logic of the open web, where the click made it possible to fund the production of information.

Zero-Click and the Mutation of the User Journey

Today, 80% of users resolve 40% of their queries without clicking on a result (Bain & Co, cited by the WSJ). Built-in answers (AI summaries, featured snippets) minimize the need to visit sites, undermining classic SEO.

Google AI Mode and Generated Summaries

Google has begun rolling out a new search format called AI Mode. In place of its classic results (the famous “SERPs” – Search Engine Results Pages), the engine now offers answers automatically generated by artificial intelligence. These answers summarize several sources… with no direct link to the original sites.

In practice, the user gets an instant summary, written by Google's AI, at the top of the page. In most cases, they no longer need to click a link to find what they are looking for. The result: organic traffic – the natural visits coming from searches – is collapsing, especially for small sites and blogs.

In this new landscape, only the large established players (institutional sites, major brands, Wikipedia) still sometimes appear as references in the summaries. For everyone else, visibility drops.

Faced with this change, a new discipline is trying to emerge: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The idea: optimize your content no longer to appear in search links, but to be picked up in the answer generated by the AI. This implies a very direct, structured style, with clear data and well-defined questions and answers. But even with these efforts, nothing guarantees that a site will be cited or that the internet user will click.

Without Traffic, Content Disappears

When visitors stop coming, revenue evaporates. Yet the vast majority of content creators – whether journalists, bloggers, comparison sites, product testers or review sites – depend on traffic to exist. Fewer clicks means less revenue, and therefore less incentive to produce.

The model rests on a simple chain: creator → content → visit → monetization. If the link with the public is cut, the whole equation collapses. Matthew Prince (Cloudflare) says plainly that if content creators can't get value from it, they will simply stop creating.

The pillars of web monetization are directly threatened:

• Programmatic advertising: it requires volume and precise targeting, impossible without traffic.
• Google AdSense: based on page views and clicks on ads.
• Affiliate marketing: works only if the user goes through a link to buy or sign up.

When an AI provides the answer directly, no one clicks anymore, and the publisher becomes invisible in digital exchanges. The risk is systemic: a web without traffic is a web without new content, and therefore a rapid impoverishment of the very material the AIs exploit.

Industry Reactions and Ongoing Change

• Business Insider cut 21% of its workforce to move away from the pure SEO model and invest in audio formats generated by AI
• HubSpot and other pioneers are diversifying their presence: podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and analyzing customer inputs via LLMs to anticipate better .

Ethical and Societal Consequences

The consequences of the rise of generative AI go far beyond the question of revenue alone. On one side, these technologies rely on a very costly infrastructure: AIs must query thousands of pages to produce an answer, which makes server, bandwidth and energy needs explode. Sites such as Wikipedia or StackOverflow complain about massive use of their resources… without compensation. The result: they pay more to feed AIs than they receive in support.

On the other, we are seeing a proliferation of content created solely for AIs, and not for humans. Thousands of automatically generated texts — unreliable, poorly written, often empty — are flooding the web. These are what are called “content farms” or “AI-generated garbage.” This favours disinformation, sensational headlines (“clickbait”) and, over time, weakens users' trust in the results they find online.

Join us in mid-July for the second part of this article, in which we will see whether it is possible to reinvent audience flows and financial models. In the meantime, if you have a film, a series, software or an ebook to protect, don't hesitate to call on our services by contacting one of our account managers; PDN has been a pioneer in cybersecurity and anti-piracy for more than ten years, and we surely have a solution to help you. Happy reading, and see you soon!

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