all your clicks are belong to us: why the zero click web is almost here
A eulogy for the wild, free, messy, organic, human internet.
At the turn of the millennium, it felt like tech companies were working hard to give us more and more tools to make life more convenient and fun. Today, it feels like we keep trying to stop them from doing the equivalent of setting everyone in the vicinity on fire as we tell them that we’re flammable and it’s going to cause tremendous damage, but our screams keep falling on deaf ears of the now out of their minds tech oligarchs, so high on their own supply, they need therapy and a cult deprogrammer.
With that in mind, everyone who knew anything about how the web worked was up in arms when Google announced that they’re going to summarize search results with an AI on top of already stolen answers and only then show links to web pages. Even ten years ago, people seldom clicked past the first page of results. It was obvious that an LLM-powered summary, whether it was right or wrong — usually notably more wrong than right — was going to discourage users from actually following the links.
Fast forward a year and a new study shows that this is exactly what happened. Users presented with an AI summary were half as likely to click on any links than those who weren’t, and looked through traditional search results. As far as they were concerned, they got their answers and are happy to move on, which is consistent with publishers reporting between 20% and 40% plunges in traffic and revenue. Even worse, Google is still going further, training its AI on YouTube videos for… reasons.
Now, if you ask Google’s PR arm, this is not at all what’s happening and everyone has been either overreacting or using flawed methodologies to track traffic and clicks. But then again, Google has been using the trendiest trick in public discourse called “lying openly and shamelessly, then refusing to back down from said lies,” and the research and publisher stats pretty much speak for themselves. Hell, even the AI summary by its Gemini LLM admits that it’s killing traffic to publishers.
In short, Google is violating the fundamental social contract of the web. We allowed it to scrape and index our data, and in return, it would send us users who wanted what we were offering, along with a share of revenue from this traffic. If it’s only taking the data but not sending traffic anymore, then what is the point of running any site?
unmaking what made the web so great
Unfortunately, this is all part of a strategy called the Zero Click Internet. Instead of the old bargain, search engines and massive social platforms continue to deprioritize links leading away from their properties until you basically have no choice but to post most, if not all, of your content directly on the platforms so for billions of people, the internet is no longer a zoo of websites but Facebook. Or Google. Or TikTok. Or Substack.
A handful of places where everyone is welcome, but only in a way that allows a giant company to monetize the conversation and dictate the rules of engagement. They’re not interested in sending you to an external site because what if you don’t come back and continue to give them attention and engagement? And if we consider how many of us use the web, to a disturbing degree, we’re farther along that pipeline than we’d probably like to admit.
Just ask any blogger trying to maintain an independent site or newsletter. Not only are they being hit hard by curation algorithms which no longer care about who you follow, prioritizing rage bait and similarity of content over your stated preferences, having far too many of their promotional posts deprioritized, and platforms showing warnings to users clicking on links with verbiage which makes them sound dangerous, they’ll now also have to deal with AI scraping and regurgitating their content, nearly halving views in the worst case scenario.
Unless they’re already an almost household name or have millions of followers with at least a solid percentage of those being die hard fans, they have no choice but to join a platform and play by its rules, which can be very frustrating because you’re making an iffy bargain with a giant organization that very seldom cares if you even exist and how its decisions will impact you for the chance to actually get your work noticed.
You are no longer creating for people. You’re creating to game algorithms and for the short attention span of digital passers by who aren’t seeking your work but are being offered it and obviously don’t stuck around or care because it’s not relevant to them, or their interests. You’re less of an artist, and even less of a — blech! I absolutely hate this soulless corporate term — content creator. You’re a content farmer, making and distributing wholesale content to the masses in hopes of a cash crop paying off.
If you think I’m on Substack because I’m huge fan and desperately need them to run a newsletter, no, that’s absolutely not the case. It would be pretty trivial for me to build a newsletter or blogging engine. I’ve been slinging code since my freshman year in high school, so I could make a design that’s completely custom, with a cleaner nav bar and useful icon sets linking to my socials and videos instead of having to tuck them at the end of the about page with a frustrated scoff.
But as we just saw, the links to it would go nowhere and I wouldn’t be able to leverage a recommendation algorithm by which modern online content lives and dies. Add the platform’s Notes feature to create their own little social network, and you can see why letting anyone promote themselves on other spaces is never going to be a priority for Substack. They want your articles, your videos, your podcasts, any content you make, anything you’ll spin off, and to rely on them for growth.
how we ended up with digital gentrification
Now, ask any of the platforms why they’re doing this and they’ll tell you that it’s about money and meeting shareholders’ expectations, no matter how unrealistic. But they’ll also have another argument for doing what they’re doing, one that’s actually difficult to counter, centered around a problem you’ve probably complained about. I know that I certainly have in the recent past.
There are currently just over a billion websites on the internet. How many of them are useful, frequently visited, regularly updated, and aren’t just parking spots for click, ad, and bot scams and fraud? Probably a pretty small percentage. So, in a way, aren’t all of these platforms doing you a service by whittling all that down to stuff that you want to see and might be interested in pursuing further? To them, Zero Click Internet is just a logical next step from curating content, to just hosting it themselves.
You could think of it as corporate landlords building luxury high rises in an area full of artists’ lofts, playgrounds, experimental galleries, and hole in the wall cafes, bars, and diners. The concierges at the front desk helpfully point you to what seem to be some of the best places to visit, and it all sort of works. The neighborhood grows and gets a lot of fresh business, artists get new fans, and things seem great.
Except the corporations are now building more towers, demolishing older buildings in the process, getting more and more people to move in, and starting to play lucrative and somewhat shady games with what local spots they recommend. The game is no longer fair and some businesses and artists are getting rich by playing by the rules of the high rise owners and concierges, or outright bribing them while others struggle to adapt to this new order.
No one cares though, because a lot of bad artists and businesses are also packing up as and no one is going to miss them since they weren’t all that good in the first place. The assumption is that if you couldn’t cut it, oh well, sucks to suck. Except the luxury condos decided that for their next expansion, why recommend local businesses when they could just build a bunch of retail space on their first three floors or so and make a lot of money renting to those businesses? Which is exactly what they did.
Oh, and since those businesses are now renting space to get the best access to the neighborhood’s foot traffic, they’re going to have to fit the aesthetic of the building in which they’re setting up shop. And follow the rules. And they can’t stand out all that much as not to ruin the vibe the owners want. And they can be evicted at any time or for any reason. And because too few people want the hassle of exploring too far out of the building complexes now joined together by walkways, your odds of sustaining yourself without at least a good relationship with these lux complexes keep falling.
the creative cost of passive convenience
In the end, the residents of the condos have their convenience and choice, but that choice is curated by market research and is in keeping with corporate policies. Much of that fun messiness, creativity, and spontaneity that made the neighborhood such a popular destination in the first place has been squeezed out for safe, bland, flat, and simplified grids of top-down, quarterly report-driven planning. The people are there, but the soul? The best you can hope for is the occasional spark that escapes, usually through sheer luck.
Humans are creatures of habit, and if you make certain things easy for them, they will keep doing those things until they find something they’re willing to go out of their way to get, even if they no longer enjoy this routine. It’s more difficult to change our path than most of us tend to assume. At the same time, the real question is whether it may be worth it to try and teach people how to fight back.
So what if there are a billion websites on the web and 990 million of them are bad? It still gives us 10 million good websites, each their own experience, and each ready to entertain, engage, and challenge us. That was the web so many of us liked in the first place, and I struggle to believe that sitting in a fog of digital yes men that exist to give your a boutique, custom reality in which you seldom hear a contradictory word really is better and we as a society enjoy this state of affairs.
Well, that’s all that we’ll have to look forward to with Zero Click Internet, plus a not so remote chance of repressive censorship dressed up as “safety” by corporate PR. It’s the endgame for every terrible trend you see today and there’s not a single benefit to anyone but the owners of the platforms. Who, by the way, are the same people whose next big idea is imposing techno-feudalism on the masses to achieve their dreams of digital godhood and turning the rest of us into self-replicating indentured servants.
Until there are rules that give independent outlets a fair shot, which is going to be an extremely tall order anytime in the foreseeable future, the best we can hope to do is disrupt the recommendation algorithms, push ourselves and each other out of those cozy comfort zones, relentlessly report and block scammers, spammers, and all the rage bait and influencers we come across.
If they insist on keeping us in the condo and shopping complex as long as possible by making it harder and harder to find the exits, we can at least rebel and force them to close the worst stores they keep telling us to visit, and ignore their recommendations as much as possible in favor of not just entertaining, but stimulating, challenging, and engaging ourselves instead of passively consuming until those exits are fully sealed and we’re all trapped for good.