After reading through Cloudflare’s blog post about the agentic internet, I’ve begun asking myself what the future of the internet might be. An existing idea called the “dead internet theory" has already suggested that in the near future, the internet would mostly consist of bots rather than real human interaction.

Today, that seems to be mostly true. The vast majority of internet traffic no longer originates from active human users browsing pages, but from automated scrapers, crawlers, and agents. These automated systems continuously traverse the web, harvesting and cannibalizing every piece of content they encounter to serve as raw training material.

The Negative Feedback Loop

How the internet was supposed to work in theory was that creators would produce content. Search engines would then catalog that information. When a user searches for something on Google, it would direct you to the creator’s website. In return for driving traffic, this symbiotic exchange offered websites a clear incentive to remain indexed.

Google’s AI summaries nullified that relationship. Today, when you search for something, you are increasingly met with an AI-generated summary at the very top of the page. The AI scrapes the information from the original human creator and spoon feeds it to you so you never have to click a link.

For you, the end user, it feels incredibly convenient. But for the internet ecosystem, it’s highly toxic. It creates a brutal negative feedback loop where:

1. Scrapers aggressively crawl human created websites to generate answers.
2. Because users get their answers instantly, they stop clicking through to the actual websites (Also known as "zero-click searches").
3. Deprived of traffic and revenue, independent creators no longer have an incentive to produce organic content.

Simply put, this current relationship is profiting off the hard work of others, effectively penalizing human creators for producing content.

Google’s responsibility

At the absolute center of this is Google. It cannot be overstated how crucial this moment is, and Google is sitting in the driver's seat. They are simultaneously the world’s biggest search engine, the creator of the world's most popular web browser, and one of the leading frontier labs.

Google needs to look at the bigger picture. If their next steps continue to prioritize zero-click summaries over sending traffic to external websites, they will successfully kill the existing internet ecosystem and it's unclear at what the aftermath might be.

To be clear, I could be entirely incorrect. The internet has already converged to only a few key platforms, but what scares me the most is that in the future quite literally everything could just belong to Google if they execute it correctly.