The internet loses its human touch

The internet is undergoing a foundational shift as websites evolve from human destinations to information hubs for AI agents.

Why it matters: Human discretion served as a critical safeguard for establishing trust online. Now, it's rapidly disappearing.

The big picture: While AI platforms race to establish guardrails, bad actors are leveraging AI to build new information sources aimed at manipulating large language models.

Vetting those inputs requires time and resources that competitive pressure doesn't afford AI giants in the near term.

"There's a risk that you could lobotomize all the LLMs because there's just tons of synthetic data that no human is ever going to read," said Joe Marchese, an investor and author of "Human Dot AI," a forthcoming book about the AI attention arms race.

State of play: Premium publishers and brands are looking to get ahead of this problem in the short term by becoming reliable information warehouses for bots while serving premium experiences for humans.

At Time, a news publisher that has leaned heavily into agentic optimization, human visitors encounter articles with imagery and storytelling while AI agents receive structured information, COO Mark Howard told Axios.

Time's Agent Ads product extends that approach to advertising, providing machine-readable information about sponsors, including FAQs.

Reality check: Smaller companies may struggle to handle an influx of bot traffic or build the infrastructure needed to serve both humans and machines.

Anna Patterson, founder and CEO of AI infrastructure company Ceramic.ai, says AI crawlers are hitting websites at roughly 10 times the rate of traditional search engine crawlers, forcing publishers to shoulder higher costs.

That dynamic could accelerate consolidation as companies without distinctive intellectual property or loyal audiences get squeezed.

Zoom out: Even if quality publishers build the infrastructure needed to remain relevant in today's agentic web, their ability to survive depends on a critical economics shift that isn't guaranteed.

Human discretion was essential to making the internet useful. Advertising was sold against attention metrics. Websites with spammy experiences were down-ranked in search results.

The agentic web has removed those incentives, and it's unlikely a licensing model will emerge to support most of the current ad-supported web.

The bottom line: Few consumer websites will survive as direct destinations in the agentic era.

Some will become information warehouses for large language models, but many others will erode.

Without a trust layer created to vet information retrieved and analyzed by machines, the internet risks becoming a breeding ground for content that ultimately becomes useless to humans.