functioned as a marketplace of attention. Now it is becoming a marketplace of intent. Large language models understand what users mean, not just what they type. They can answer intent directly. Sending people to websites to find answers is no longer required.
For more than 20 years, the web ran on an unwritten trade. Creators produced content. Search engines distributed traffic as payment. You shared knowledge with the web. The web repaid you with visibility.
That trade built the digital economy, funded journalism and fueled brands. Each article, review and tutorial acted as a small handshake in a system built on reciprocity. That handshake is slipping.
AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity now generate answers on their own. They draw from the world’s content but rarely return audiences to the source. Google’s AI Overviews summarize entire pages directly in search results. Chatbots respond without clicks, often without citations.
A relationship that once felt balanced now tilts in one direction. The impact depends on the business model. Some companies earn money through content. Others earn money because of content. In simple terms, content is either the product or the 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 — shifting from finding answers on websites to getting them directly on the search page. A zero-click search occurs when a user enters a prompt and receives the result without having to click on 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 every primary source reveals the same pattern. Zero-click searches dominate. SparkToro estimates 59% in 2024. Early 2025 data from Similarweb indicate a figure of 69%. A May 2025 analysis, also from Similarweb, reports it has reached 83%. Together, these figures trace a clear shift.
The exchange rate behind this change tells the real story. It was once healthy. According to Cloudflare, it 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 far wider:
- OpenAI: About 1,500 pages scraped to send 1 visitor.
- Anthropic: About 60,000 pages scraped to send 1 visitor.
For AI companies, like OpenAI, Claude and Perplexity, it creates pressure. Their most valuable resource, human-curated/created content, becomes harder to sustain. AI is eating its sources. But for brands, publishers and creators, the pressure is bigger and existential. Traffic no longer follows effort.
Publishers: Content is the product
Organic traffic to news sites is falling fast. Creators and publishers, such as Business Insider, have seen drops of more than 50% between April 2022 and April 2025. The pattern repeats across the industry. The Similarweb chart below shows how zero-click answers rise while organic traffic declines. 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 promotion. It is their expertise sold as a product. When platforms extract value without sending users back, the product loses its market.
Publishers are responding with new revenue models. The goal is the same. If platforms take value without returning traffic, publishers want compensation for the content that powers those platforms.
One model is paid crawling. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince calls it pay-per-crawl. Bots that scrape a site would pay for every visit. Cloudflare already sits in the path of a large share of web traffic, allowing it to enforce this rule at the infrastructure level.
This signals 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 early steps toward a new exchange rate for publishers and creators on the web.
Dig deeper: What happens when no one clicks anymore
Brands: Content is promotion
In the old world, brands wrote to be found. SEO rewarded visibility. Expertise meant ranking high on Google. That model is changing fast. Brands now write for both people and machines, including language models.
This changes content’s job. Keywords matter less. Contextual expertise and authority matter more. Brands must write in a way that models understand their intent and context. Quality content becomes infrastructure for machine understanding, not just fuel for marketing campaigns.
Marketing teams now optimize for summarization, not search. This transforms the field of SEO. Our own MartechMap.com data from May 2025 shows how quickly this is moving. Instead of declining, SEO tools now grow faster than any other category across 49 subsegments.
The stats are clear: the SEO category is exploding. The spike is due to existing and new SEO companies starting to provide capabilities for the new craft. This craft is appearing 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 decides which ideas thrive and which fade away.
Brands have entered a new web economy. One where they write for both people and machines. One where the value of content depends on how well AI can absorb it. The exchange rate is intent-driven expertise.
Dig deeper: The brands winning with AI know when to use it — and when not to
The way forward: Act 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 keep the interaction. Writing to be found gives way to writing to 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 shape 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 will not wait for new rules. Publishers must decide what access is worth. Brands must influence how models interpret their expertise. Platforms must define how they compensate the sources they rely on.
The exchange rate of the next web is being written now. Those who set their terms early will control their value. Those who do not will have it assigned to them.
Dig deeper: As data and content proliferate, context is poised to become the new king
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