June 14, 2025 — by Per Christensson

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It

https://pc.net/news/2025-06-14/the_end_of_the_web

Per Christensson explains how search monopolies have scraped and stolen website content without atrribution and crippled traffic to independently developed blogs, homepages and reference sites.

A.I. is the end.

“It was fun while it lasted, but the web we’ve known for the past 25 years is coming to an end”.

The decline of the world wide web began about ten years ago when Google introduced featured snippets — those prominent answers that appear above the search results. While helpful for searchers, they had the opposite effect on webmasters. Since users could often get the information they needed directly from the featured snippet, they didn’t click through to the corresponding web page. These “position zero” snippets also pushed down traditional results on the page, meaning fewer clicks to websites.

RELATED: GOOGLE SEARCH MONOPOLY AND A.I. DESTROYING INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS, SMALL BUSINESSES