"(...) For more than two decades, search engines were the front door of the Web. You wanted something. You searched. You...

"(...) For more than two decades, search engines were the front door of the Web. You wanted something. You searched. You clicked. You visited a website. That website received traffic, attention, analytics, ad impressions, newsletter signups, brand recognition, or maybe just the satisfaction of being read by another human being. That model is weakening. AI assistants and AI-powered search summaries increasingly answer the question before the user clicks. Google’s AI Overviews are a good example. The answer appears at the top. The sources may be cited, but the user often gets enough information without visiting them. From a user perspective, this is convenient. From a publisher perspective, this is terrifying. If the answer is extracted, summarized, reformatted, and presented inside someone else’s interface, what happens to the original website? What happens to the writer? The blog? The documentation page? The independent expert? The small publisher? The person who spent 12 hours writing...