The End Of The Human Web?

One of the more fascinating statistics to emerge recently is that automated traffic now accounts for more than half of all web activity.

Meditate on that for a moment… more than half. For decades, the basic assumption behind the internet was simple: A visitor shows up to a website… maybe they want to read an article… maybe they want to buy something… maybe they were doing some research or comparison shopping… or falling down some rando rabbit hole at two o’clock in the morning (we’ve all been there)… but we all, collectively, knew that the internet was built for humans.

That assumption is breaking.

The headline is not that bots exist. Bots have always existed… long before this AI hype-cycle. Search crawlers, spam bots, fraud bots, ticket scalper bots, scrapers and every other flavor of automated nuisance have been part of the web for years. What’s changing is the role they play. Increasingly, these aren’t just machines pretending to be people to scrape and drag content… they’re machines acting on behalf of people (hello, agentic AI). That’s a very different story… and a very different cultural shift. Today, AI agents can compare prices, retrieve information, summarize content, fill out forms, book services and actually do the transaction on our behalf. They don’t simply visit websites… they visit websites for us… and do “the things.”

What kind of Internet do we want?

Are we still using the internet… or are AI systems using it on our behalf? At first glance, this feels like real progress. After all, we built these tools to save time. If an AI can compare twenty products faster than I can, great. If it can summarize research, book a flight or answer a question without forcing me to open fifteen browser tabs, even better. If nothing else, who amongst us isn’t a sucker for a great productivity hack? But there is another side to this story.

The internet was never just about efficiency… it was about discovery.

You searched for one thing and found something else. You clicked a link and ended up somewhere unexpected. You discovered a new writer, a new business, a new community, a new idea (and this happens to me multiple times a week… still). The friction was often the feature. Wandering through the web was how many of us learned, explored and connected. Machines don’t wander… machines optimize. And when more of the web becomes machine-to-machine, the experience starts to change. Publishers increasingly find their content being crawled, summarized and repackaged without visitors ever “arriving.” Retailers serve AI systems that compare inventory and pricing without creating meaningful customer relationships. Businesses pay infrastructure costs for traffic that never becomes a customer. The old bargain of the web is starting to wobble. Search engines used to crawl your content and send people back. Increasingly, AI crawls your content and keeps the people elsewhere.

When that happens things swing from a technology shift to an economic and cultural shift.

As a reminder: bot-on-bot action is not hot. The value of the internet was people finding people. Ideas finding audiences… businesses finding customers… communities finding each other. And to be clear, this isn’t an anti-AI argument. Many of these agents will create enormous value. But the data is the data. We are now in a world where websites increasingly need to think about how they appear to agents as their primary audience. The new generation of optimization is not search engine optimization… it is agent optimization. Which sounds efficient… and also a little sad. And, it’s not lost on me that we built AI to save humans time online, and to accomplish this goal, we’re flooding the internet with non-human activity. The web becomes more “automated.” But it’s worth thinking about what we lose when the visible Internet that we know becomes, primarily, a backend system for AI agents. The future of the internet may not be human versus machine… it may quickly become machine versus machine. Which is fine… maybe even beneficial. Maybe this is a strange moment where AI helps us become more human because we’re spending less time staring at screens and more time with each other.

But it does beg the question: who is the Internet for?

This (and some other topics) is what Robyn Flynn and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

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