For more than twenty years, the Internet ran on an unwritten profession. Creators produced content. Search engines distributed traffic as payment. You shared knowledge with the internet. The Internet has given you visibility.
That trade built the digital economy, funded journalism and fueled brands. Every article, review and tutorial acted as a small handshake in a system based on reciprocity. That handshake slips away.
AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity now generate answers themselves. They draw on the content of the world, but rarely bring the audience back to the source. Google’s AI summaries summarize entire pages directly in search results. Chatbots respond without clicks, often without quotes.
A relationship that once felt balanced is now tilting in one direction. The impact depends on the business model. Some companies make money from content. Others make money because of the content. Simply put, content is the product or promotion – familiar territory from Kotler’s 4Ps.
- For publishers, content is the product.
- For brands, content is promotion.
Zero-click search: from finding answers to getting answers
We’ve entered the zero-click era: we’ve shifted from finding answers on websites to getting them straight to the search page. A zero-click search occurs when a user enters a prompt and receives the result without having to click anything. AI assistants and search engines now rely on snippets, knowledge panels, answer boxes, calculators, maps, definitions, and AI-generated summaries. In practice, users get what they need without clicking through to an external site.
Exact numbers are difficult to determine, yet each primary source reveals the same pattern. Zero-click searches dominate. SparkToro estimates 59% by 2024. Early 2025 data from SimilarWeb suggests a figure of 69%. An analysis from May 2025, also from Andereweb, reports that this has been achieved 83%. Together, these figures indicate a clear shift.
The exchange rate behind this change tells the real story. It was once healthy. According to Cloudflareit is now at a breaking point.
For search engines:
- 10 years ago: 2 pages scraped to send 1 visitor.
- Six months ago: 6 pages scraped to send 1 visitor.
- Today: 18 pages scraped to send 1 visitor.
For AI engines, the gap is much wider:
- OpenAI: About 1,500 pages scraped to send 1 visitor.
- Anthropic: About 60,000 pages scraped to send 1 visitor.
It creates pressure for AI companies like OpenAI, Claude and Perplexity. Their most valuable resource, human curated/created content, becomes more difficult to maintain. AI is eating its resources. But for brands, publishers and creators, the pressure is greater and existential. Traffic no longer follows the effort.
Publishers: content is the product
Organic traffic to news sites is declining rapidly. Creators and publishers, like Business Insider, have seen a decline of more than 50% between April 2022 and April 2025. The pattern is repeating itself across the sector. The Similar web graphs Below you can see how zero-click replies are increasing while organic traffic is decreasing. AI eats the source material. It consumes the content, but does not return to the audience.
This puts publishers in a new position. Their content is not just about promotion. It is their expertise that is sold as a product. When platforms extract value without returning users, the product loses its market.
Publishers are responding to this with new revenue models. The goal is the same. If platforms gain value without returning traffic, publishers want compensation for the content that powers these platforms.
One model gets paid for crawling. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince calls it pay-per-crawl. Bots scraping a site would pay for each visit. Cloudflare is already in the path of a large portion of web traffic, allowing it to enforce this rule at the infrastructure level.
This indicates a shift. Publishers want a direct exchange. If AI systems rely on human-created content, they must contribute to its creation and maintenance costs. These are the first steps towards a new exchange rate for publishers and creators on the internet.
Dig deeper: what happens when no one clicks anymore
Brands: Content is promotion
In the ancient world, brands wrote to be found. SEO rewarded visibility. Expertise meant a high ranking in Google. That model is changing quickly. Brands now write for both humans and machines, including language models.
This changes the task of the content. Keywords are less important. Contextual expertise and authority are more important. Brands must write in a way that models understand their intent and context. Quality content becomes an infrastructure for machine insight, not just fuel for marketing campaigns.
Marketing teams now optimize for summaries, not search. This transforms the field of SEO. Our own MartechMap.com data from May 2025 shows how quickly this is happening. Instead of declining, SEO tools are now growing faster than any other category across 49 sub-segments.
The statistics are clear: the SEO category is exploding. The spike is due to existing and new SEO companies starting to offer opportunities for the new trade. This craft appears under names like generative engine optimization (GEO), AI optimization (AIO), and language engine optimization (LEO). The idea is simple. Content must be easy for AI to interpret and quote. The algorithm becomes the new editor. It determines which ideas thrive and which disappear.
Brands have entered a new web economy. One in which they write for both people and machines. One in which the value of content depends on how well AI can absorb it. The exchange rate is an intention-driven expertise.
Dig deeper: The brands that win with AI know when to use it – and when not
The way forward: Trade before the market sets your price
Two new models are now shaping the web economy.
- Content as product (publishers and creators): The shift is structural. Traffic once flowed from search engines to websites. AI systems now maintain interaction. The writing that must be found gives way to the writing that must be summarized. Emerging models aim to compensate creators when their expertise is used.
- Content as promotion (brands and companies): Exposure can no longer serve as payment. Brands must determine how models interpret their domain authority. SEO is evolving into new practices such as GEO, AIO and LEO, where the algorithm replaces the editor.
AI doesn’t wait for new rules. Publishers must decide what is worth access. Brands must influence how models interpret their expertise. Platforms must define how they compensate the resources they depend on.
The exchange rate of the next web is now being written. Those who set their terms early will control their value. Those who don’t will be assigned it.
Dig deeper: As data and content proliferate, context is poised to become the new king
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