The open web

AI is changing how content gets found and consumed. Answers travel through chat now, but content was never only answers. Stories, the things that shape how we see what’s around us, are being reshaped by the same conversational format. And chatbots are becoming gatekeepers themselves: someone decides what you get to see and how, and that someone usually isn’t you.

Underneath it sits a quieter question: an open internet where information is roughly free, or a closed one where only the lucky few curate their own view? I don’t think the closed version is better. A narrower view tends to be a more biased one.

Open access is worth fighting for, in AI as much as on the web. Paywalls put a price on who gets to be informed, and the people priced out are rarely a random sample. For a long time, ads were what let the web scale without that filter.

That model is wearing thin. Search used to send readers to a page, and the ads on that page paid for it. Now more of the answers arrive in the chat, and more of the reading is done by crawlers that never see an ad. Subscriptions have hit a ceiling, and affiliate and influencer deals are filling the gap on their own murky terms. Ads alone are struggling to carry the web, so if we want to keep it open, the way it’s paid for has to evolve.

It’s a scary time for anyone who publishes, and also an opening to move away from an economy of clicks and attention toward something a bit more qualitative. Models are good at what’s been said many times and weak on what’s new, which makes original reporting and expertise look like something worth paying for. People also still get attached to brands for a voice or an experience they can’t find elsewhere. Those audiences are smaller, but they chose to be there, and advertisers value that.

I don’t think publishers can lead that shift. Years of abuse and monopoly have tied their hands. AdTech spent two decades building for advertisers and treated publishers as an afterthought, and last year a US court found its biggest player had illegally monopolized key parts of the market. The change probably has to come from the top, from the AI companies reading the web and the platforms selling ads against it. Some infrastructure companies now let sites charge AI crawlers, and are starting to charge when content shows up in an answer. It’s early, but it’s a start.

That’s what keeps me in this industry: the chance to help make it more honest, instead of giving up on it for a tidier paywall or a closed ecosystem.